@Nomen luni
Well, the original Sam&Max also wasn't the best adventure if you compare it to the other ones around those days. It was funny (Mount Rushmore) but it wasn't a really good adventure in respect of puzzles and so on.
I don't know if people are sometimes tempted mixing things up here a little bit and gloryfying the old adventures too much. No question the best ones still come from the past and out of this golden LucasArts era and brought pearls like Monkey Island, The Dig, Indiana Jones, The Day of Tentacle, ... but there were also already not so good aventure games like the whole Sierra stuff and different ones from other developers.
What i do remember is that at some point the quality also at LucasAsrts constantly went down (too short and ugly Full Throttle, worse Monkey Island successors, ...) then there was a long time of silence were only a few mostly bad adventures were produced. Some years ago developers began making more adventures again and most of those were not good.
Part of the problem for sure are the budgets these projects had. And now adventures are more and more common again. Publishers are making money again with those games and so especially in 2007 i really see a further step in quality too. My hope is that if there is a significant market again, budgets and quality will increase more and more.
TTG doing Episodic is to a big degree a econommical thing and i also remember quite interesting questions about a vampyre story, if they should invest their budget more into game length or game intensity for instance. The Ankh games, deck13's first adventures, were short but now with Jack Keane they have done a much larger game in a good quality and i really would be suprised if they don't have further enhancements in Season2 of Sam&Max after they got through their reintroduction and made some money.
If you take such things into account then we have the best adventure days since quite some years and hopefully there is more to come and maybe if we're lucky we'll get a new adventure which range again in 9-10 spaces. At the moment i'm quite happy that we've a quality in some adventures in the range of of 7-8 instead of 5-6 like it has been years before.
Well, the original Sam&Max also wasn't the best adventure if you compare it to the other ones around those days. It was funny (Mount Rushmore) but it wasn't a really good adventure in respect of puzzles and so on.
I don't know if people are sometimes tempted mixing things up here a little bit and gloryfying the old adventures too much. No question the best ones still come from the past and out of this golden LucasArts era and brought pearls like Monkey Island, The Dig, Indiana Jones, The Day of Tentacle, ... but there were also already not so good aventure games like the whole Sierra stuff and different ones from other developers.
What i do remember is that at some point the quality also at LucasAsrts constantly went down (too short and ugly Full Throttle, worse Monkey Island successors, ...) then there was a long time of silence were only a few mostly bad adventures were produced. Some years ago developers began making more adventures again and most of those were not good.
Part of the problem for sure are the budgets these projects had. And now adventures are more and more common again. Publishers are making money again with those games and so especially in 2007 i really see a further step in quality too. My hope is that if there is a significant market again, budgets and quality will increase more and more.
TTG doing Episodic is to a big degree a econommical thing and i also remember quite interesting questions about a vampyre story, if they should invest their budget more into game length or game intensity for instance. The Ankh games, deck13's first adventures, were short but now with Jack Keane they have done a much larger game in a good quality and i really would be suprised if they don't have further enhancements in Season2 of Sam&Max after they got through their reintroduction and made some money.
If you take such things into account then we have the best adventure days since quite some years and hopefully there is more to come and maybe if we're lucky we'll get a new adventure which range again in 9-10 spaces. At the moment i'm quite happy that we've a quality in some adventures in the range of of 7-8 instead of 5-6 like it has been years before.