How would YOU reinvent the adventure game genre?

Really?

Adventure sales have never been as low as since the leading studios switched to 3D. Coincidence?

Whether the market kept shrinking despite the switch to 3D or because of may be in question, but for '3D being in' we sure don't see many succesful 3D advantures....

Lucasarts, the long-term ruler of the Adventure genre, discontinued the long-awaited sequel to 'Sam & Max' last year, and issued a press release explaining that this was not the day & age to release an adventure game. They simply didn't see the market there anymore.

I'm sad to see that happen, given that these type of games are by far my favorite genre. I'll pick an adventure game over an FPS or MMORPG any day.



You are right about static 2D -- but you don't have to settle for static. There are a lot of things you can do to create a dynamic 2D environment as well: movement of clouds, bugs, some wind, flags, neon signs, other small background items occasionally changing, can beat a 3D adventure hands down.

They keyword here really isn't '2D', it's 'static': a static 3D environment would look just as boring, if not more so.

In my personaly experience, the older 2D adventure games such as Monkey Island 1, 2 and 3 beat the 'latest and greatest' Monkey Island 4 hands down -- 3D plain and simple makes for a worse experience in those kinds of games.

I've played pretty much every 2D adventure known to man, and half a dozen 3D ones or so.
In general, 3D has a couple of problems over 2D:

- The controls tend to be awkward, and make you feel like the character is drunk half the time
- Due to changing camera viewpoints, it is easy to unintentionally have things obscured when they shouldn't be.
- 2D can look a lot better graphically than a 3D adventure, since you can do pixel-perfect graphics and are not bound by polygon limits. so far all the 3D ones I've seen just look too 'boxy'. Another problem with 3D graphically, is that it tends to look a lot more repetitive due to recycled textures and such to work around memory limitations. Especially the very appealing looking cartoony, distorted geometry commonly found in 2D graphical adventures is near impossible to represent in a 3D environment. It no longer looks 'cute' in 3D, it just looks like crap. so you have to tone down those kind of things, making the 3D version look more 'boxy' again, and also come across a lot more sterile and less organic.

Because of this (and more), the 3D adventures don't feel half as immersive as the 2D ones ever did... Which is rather ironic, when you think about it.



Of course you need to keep things in check and within reason. We've all seen adventure games where certain of the puzzles and item combinations were just too far fetched... But you need to find a middle ground. The whole inventory deal is part of the charm of adventure games, in my opinion. Without it, you end up with something like The 7th Guest -- a bunch of unrelated stand-alone puzzles thrown together in a pack, that while looking good, don't make for a very immersive total package.

If you have a problem with the 'bottomless pocket' principle itself, it's really just a matter of convenience: Having to juggle items around and keep going back and forth between locations simply because you can't carry the ladder and a chair at the same time gets really tiresome, really quick. Imposing a limit like that takes away from the immersiveness of a game.

In the Discworld game they used the 'luggage' as a way of addressing the pocket issue: The main character could carry only a few items on himself at any time, but you have a secondary character following you around: the luggage. The luggage is a wooden chest with little feet, that follows the main character around wherever he goes. Kinda like a pet. He contains the rest of your inventory. There are a couple of places where he can't follow (e.g. can't climb ladders), so on a few occasions you have to be creative and make sure that you have the correct items in your own pockets because you won't be able to reach the rest of your full inventory since the luggage can't come with you.

In other games you may (temporarily) lose (part of) your inventory along the story line: you may get mugged, captured, put things away for safe-keeping, can't carry everything with you, or simply 'lose' it somewhere. (e.g. the carnival ride in Sam & Max, where your entire inventory gets thrown out of your pockets)



'Highly compelling' is very subjective. Some people love the 'pirate' environment of Monkey Island, and hate the Space Quest universe -- and vice versa.

Tightly structured stories sound good, but you need to make sure that there is plenty of room for 'freedom' as well. Good adventures allow you to do a bunch of the puzzles simultaneously, provider a richer environment to the user. You can have a bigger overall story line, with certain objectives that need to be met before advancing to the next part of the story, unlocking new locations, etc... But to remain immersive, you need to make sure that the player isn't steered towards just a single possible line, but can do some things out of order.

Have multiple little sub-adventures that need to be completed in order to complete a 'main' event, e.g. obtaining transportation to the next location. It shouldn't matter in what order to stole item -x-, discovered information -y- and got information you needed from person -z-.... That way you give people a chance to clear their mind by focusing on another mini-mission if they get stuck trying to accomplish one particular task.
Of course, ther ewill be a bunch of 'main' tasks that will be carefully scripted, but a lot of the smaller stuff can easily done out-of-order. You need to make sure that possibility is there, or you will quickly frustrate players when they get 'stuck' and have nothing else to do to distract them for a while.



Be careful... I'm currently playing 'Discworld Noir', which is kind of a 'film noir' style detective game located on the Discworld. 'character interaction' quickly succombs to 'talk as much as you can to every person on the planet until they bore you to tears. Then go back to every single other person you already talked to to make sure that they don't have anything else to say on the subject either. Repeat ad nausum'. The first two discworld adventures were vastly superior to the 3rd one. In my opinion, the background characters should provide you with needed information, give you clues that help to solve your puzzles, or just provide general ambience... But they are all just supporting characters.

Maybe it's just me, but I like the 2D-with-weird-puzzles-and-bottomless-inventory stuff.