Character interaction - an integral part of the adventure game genre - is currently dead.
Everything else got more realistic, but character interaction is still limited to watching the playback of prerecorded animation sequences and prerecorded dialog. Contrasted against beautifully rendered models, it feels awful. Humans in games look more like real humans now, and our brains expect them to move and react more like real humans too. They don't, so we dislike interacting with them.
In yesteryear, our imagination fleshed out social interactions in games; while you talked with someone, the static or poorly-animating sprite served only as a prop to remind you what the actor typically looked like - the majority of the experience came from reading the onscreen text narrative which would collaborate with your imagination to paint a vivid mental image of the interaction.
To top it off, text entry has all but disappeared. How much can you really "interact" with someone who acts as a pushbutton?
How would I reinvent adventure games?
First, text entry. Provide a tutorial stage to help uninitiated players learn to use their dusty old keyboards. 3d graphics, but not 1st or 3rd person perspective - fixed or panning cameras a la Resident Evil. The scenery graphics would need to be beautiful. Simultaneously voice-acted and onscreen narration, especially for character interaction, to keep players from focusing on the pretty pictures. Of course, I wouldn't be zooming up on characters when they talk. Pretty much I'd just be putting a new suit on the old Sierra games, such as Quest For Glory (or Hero's Quest, as it was called when I first got ahold of it) - which is my favourite game from that genre.
EDIT: Actually, maybe I'd kill the voice-acting to force people to pay visual attention to the words of the narration.
Everything else got more realistic, but character interaction is still limited to watching the playback of prerecorded animation sequences and prerecorded dialog. Contrasted against beautifully rendered models, it feels awful. Humans in games look more like real humans now, and our brains expect them to move and react more like real humans too. They don't, so we dislike interacting with them.
In yesteryear, our imagination fleshed out social interactions in games; while you talked with someone, the static or poorly-animating sprite served only as a prop to remind you what the actor typically looked like - the majority of the experience came from reading the onscreen text narrative which would collaborate with your imagination to paint a vivid mental image of the interaction.
To top it off, text entry has all but disappeared. How much can you really "interact" with someone who acts as a pushbutton?
How would I reinvent adventure games?
First, text entry. Provide a tutorial stage to help uninitiated players learn to use their dusty old keyboards. 3d graphics, but not 1st or 3rd person perspective - fixed or panning cameras a la Resident Evil. The scenery graphics would need to be beautiful. Simultaneously voice-acted and onscreen narration, especially for character interaction, to keep players from focusing on the pretty pictures. Of course, I wouldn't be zooming up on characters when they talk. Pretty much I'd just be putting a new suit on the old Sierra games, such as Quest For Glory (or Hero's Quest, as it was called when I first got ahold of it) - which is my favourite game from that genre.
EDIT: Actually, maybe I'd kill the voice-acting to force people to pay visual attention to the words of the narration.