Non violent games

#1 Im missing those games too. I hope you will to make a good one in the genre. ;) Just let me know if its in development im really courious about it , and good luck with its development...

#2 The market for adventure games was perceived to die as replayability and networking came into vogue. Then hybrids of adventure and action became more prominent. There's still a market, albeit small. I love adventure games. I loved the fan games for KQ1/2 and Space Quest Zero.

#3 Problem with those games is if you can't get past a certain "puzzle" (which most of the time only has only one static solution) then you're stuck with nothing else to do. At least in games like Zelda (which is chock full of puzzles) when you're stuck on one you can still wander around killing baddies. I was never crazy about those games because if you couldn't think exactly like the game designer was thinking, you couldn't get past the puzzle. (Remember in the movie Big when he was stuck on that ice level puzzle?)

#4 "Perceived" is the key here, I've still to find anyone to actually give a good explaination for these reasonings. (Only people bitching about there not being enough good ol' adventure games =).

I'm a big fan too and I really wish there were more of these games around. I don't even buy the arguement that 3d killed adventure games, Grim Fandango is 3d(-ish) and it's one of the best games ever made.

So, please. Go ahead and make one.

#5 @Joshua:
That's true unfortunately. But it's quite sad that it's true. I remember a game I started playing sometimes in the late 80s-early 90s, I got stuck somewhere and I was stuck at the same place for nearly 10 years! Goddammit it felt wonderful when I figured out that last piece of the puzzle. These days you're probably right though, if I got stuck I would probably ruin the whole thing for myself by looking up the solution with the almighty google. =(

#6 The Space Quest series had its share of guns and some pretty violent (albeit funny) ways to die... :) I do, however, miss the adventure games of old where the focus was on using your brain to progress the story in stead of the total violent destruction of whatever demonic alien enemy crosses your poorly lit path. I think the adventure game genre may also have died down due to a creativity drought in the major game studios. It take some serious thought to create a game as cerebral as the old school adventure games. It is much easier (from a design perspective) to throw your player into a dark room with a BFG and let them kill things until their fingers bleed.

#7 I think the emergence of 3D did have something to do with it, although I don't think it *has* to. Adventure games rely on more than just simple actions, more than just run-jump-shoot and an "action" key that does pretty much everything else. But couldn't you argue that 3D makes the implementation of more complex actions significantly more difficult? Games like Grim Fandango and Full Throttle were awesome, but I think you could argue that it's perhaps easier to create (and limit) the necessary animations for different actions in that genre (2D).

I think third-person games, along the lines of some RPGs like Neverwinter Nights, come closer, but it's still not the same.

#8 I think the real problem is the costs of development for adventure games skyrocketed. In a typical adventure game, every location is unique and every puzzle requires unique content. There's still a market for these types of games, but that market has found their niche buying games like Prince of Persia, which has repeatable, puzzle-based gameplay (or Neverwinter Nights as Mike said above).

I miss them too, and there's actually a retro movement of these types of games coming back using very low-cost environments like Flash (see The Blue Room, all the escape-the-room games, etc). But in a lot of ways, one has to admire the elegance of a Prince of Persia style game where the developers came up with a few tight game mechanics and then stretched in out into a full game.

Also of note, I worked for Presto Studios, which put out Myst III way back when. Presto, despite being shut down, is still making money off of Myst III, despite the fact that its been 5 years since the original version came out and they've already had 2 other games in the series ship. Adventure games aren't dead, but perhaps they just aren't in the limelight.

#9 Torque 2D would be a great low cost environment to make some simple (but fun) adventure games

#10 I don't think that 3D maimed the adventure genre. I think popularization of 3D as a vehicle for the action genre maimed the adventure genre. The Echo Nights are awesome.

#11 Prince of Persia Sands of Time is one of my top 5 games despite the fighting. I love both the mental and agility puzzles. I still haven't bought Prince of Persia Warrior Within because I heard that POP has just become a fighting game. I like fighting games, but, I have never really cared for the fighting in POP. It is beautifully animated, but, for once I will just on the ai complaint bandwagon and say that the enemies are pretty stupid and it makes the fights more of a test of patience than a test of combat skills.

Have you guys seen Myst 5 yet? It's completely 3d and it has a FPS camera(finally, after that nightmare URU camera) and it looks amazing. The Myst series is way to hard for me to play, but I can appreciate the quality of gameplay and the absolute beauty of the art design. Looking at Myst 5, done by Cyan this time, I see the MASSIVE potential of a TSE adventure game.

TSE is so amazingly perfect for adventure games. Just onsider how the absolute scripting control makes dynamic content in TSE games a breeze to implement. TSE's new water and terrain and shaders and soon to be implemented dynamic lighting allow the creation of environments that can look as good as is possible. And the kicker for me is this: indies could use the TSE to do what Cyan was unable to do with URU, make the first multiplayer adventure game.

I have a soft spot for Cyan too, they are from my home town and I am still inspired by the fact that they were family and friends who made a game in their garage. Gives me hope.

I do have to say one thing about adventure game 'logic' puzzles. You guys are right, most 'logic' puzzles are about trying to figure out what the game dev wants you to do rather than what is logical. This has been said a million times by a million people before, but, it is still true. I don't play adventure games because of this. I have played very few and my favorite is, sadly, Prince of Persia Sands of Time. But I won't complain too much, because, damn, it's a lot of work to make logic puzzles.

#12 Its not that quests are incompatible with 3D (Grim Fandango, anyone?) but the market HAS changed. Static nature of quests was their downfall, I personally hate the "the-one-and-only-way-of-opening-beer-bottle" quests and I hate to seek solutions even more. Its not exactly a mass market appeal quality today. However, for a niche market its not actually in that bad a shape. For an indie company, not aiming for bazillions of copies and keeping budget tight, it could work fairly well.

The problem, I think, is that its helluva hard to make a good quest. Its a very subtle art. Incorporating story with logical quests, balancing them out.. its right to the voodoo alley, not everyone can do that right.

#13 Check out an engine called AGS, Adventure Game Studio. Its free, has its own support community, and is made specifically to emulate any of the old adventure games from sierra or lucasarts.

The only real challenge here is the art work. The story and GUI design go pretty fast, but then you are up against a TON of art to finnish it in the old style. That's actually why i think T2D would give you an advantage. Any characters could be made in segments (Hands, arms, torso, head, etc.) and then linked together and animated, instead of drawing out every single frame of every animation.

Is it feasable to make a set of tools that would streamline the creation of adventure games in T2D? If someone familiar with Torque engine was to take a look at AGS and see if some of its features could be emulated in T2D, please let me know. With simple enough tools and a powerful 2D engine for dynamicly creating sprites adventure games may just have a fighting chance at making a comeback!

#14 I had thought about developing something like AGS in T2D so that it would have cross-platform potential for people to create adventure games. Then I got busy, sadly. That's on my back-burner, much like everything else right now.

#15 Unfortunately the only adventure games i've ever played were when i was little and i didn't have much patience for them. I might be willing to take a swing at one now, as long as it's designed good (no pixel hunting!). The market has changed, most likely because most of the gamers are in their teens like me and are only familiar with the fast cars and exploding guns types of games. But i don't think that's were the problem is, i think the main problem is with the game studios. How many generic knock-off fps's wuth incredible bumpmapping are we gonna get next year? No one out there has the guts to try something different, and with this incredibly small diversity in video games coming up alot of gamers are probably gonna give up playing games altogether. There needs to be a group (ahem) that can make a different kind of game that is going to catch gamer's attention because, well it's fun. That is really what this is all supposed to be about, making things that are fun, not something that you know is going ot be sold because you've seen it before. I was just thinking about music, all current genres of music are really just two old genres combined. I'm not talking about retro games here, we need to mix things up more, or throw a brand new idea in their. But not like, here's a fps shooter you played last year, except now you can dual wield. I'm surprised no one here mentioned making an adventure game with plain old torque? It just seems ripe for it now that i think about it.

Now that school's over for me i might work on something like that. However the project i'm currently working on is sort-of a generic run and gun type game. The main point of it is actually kinda the story. But i'm pretty attached to it now to give up or drastically change it. Anyway those are just my quick thoughts.

#16 The last adventure games that I played were Syberia 1 and 2 by microids. They were amazing games because of the story (The story in #2 is a continuation of the first one). www.microids.com/

I was a long time player of adventure games (My first real game on my 286 back in '86 was Kings Quest 3). Sierra games are how I learned to type. Expecially the medussa scene in one of the kings quests (I didn't realize at the time that F3 or was it F2 would pause the thing while I typed). I spent what seemed like hours trying to type "hold up mirror" before I got turned to stone.

What I really didn't like is in Kings Quest 5 when they not only switched to VGA from EGA (The reason I bought an ATI VGA Wonder) but they also switched to a mouse interface that just required you to click instead of thinking of what to write. The problem with the VGA graphics was that all the backgrounds were nice scans of paintings, meanwhile all the objects that you had to eventually use were hand drawn in deluxe paint and stood out like a sore thumb.

The better and better 3D graphics get, the more they can fix that problem. In Syberia the objects that you click/conrol really looked like they were part of the background. (The second one more so)

That being said, I'm still on the lookout for an interesting adventure game. Dreamfall looks like it has potential.
www.3dgamers.com/screenshots/games/dreamfall/
www.dreamfall.com/


Hey, what ever happened to Roberta Williams? I know what happened to Al Lowe and all the Dynamix guys *cough* :)

#17 The Longest Journey was awesome! My wife and I can't wait for the sequel Dreamfall. We are playing that one the day it hits the shelves, especially since it is on the XBOX. I love my computer, but these games are so long that I would so rather play on the couch or in bed.

#18 Just want to point out that 50% of the featured games on Garagegames.com are non-violent. I own an Orbz license and it's one of the funnest games ever. And stupidly simple game concept. Kind of frisbee-golf almost.

#19 @Alex: not clearly stated, but I think what the author intended was non-violent games with deep story. aka, adventure games.

#20 I am interested in hearing from any of you who may still be interested in working on NEW non-violent games...