New King's Quest

[Owain Taggart]

[yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4aACEy-9rSU[/yt]

What to think? Personally, I'm feeling conflicted. I'm not as excited as I should be, given how long we've had to wait. Maybe it's because the trailer makes it seem like it's going to be a platformer, something which I'm less enthusiastic about in general. I do love the art style though.

I was far more excited seeing Ken and Roberta Williams accepting their award, which can be seen in the link below.

http://kotaku.com/the-new-kings-quest-makes-an-impressive-debut-1667601171

 

[USS Triumphant]

I can take it being a platformer - if it is - as long as the interface provides a wide-enough variety of things your character can do. Including, of course, things that yield no productive result but do yield some funny, just like in the old Sierra and Infocom games.

If you're like me at all, perhaps your lack of enthusiasm is stemming from memories of how technically abysmal the last couple of games in the series were. 7 was practically unplayable. And that was back BEFORE "go ahead and release it broken, we can patch it over the 'net" became the standard it seems to be now.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Heh, well maybe. Though come to think of it, I don't think I've ever played 7. Wasn't that the one that mostly used disney-style animation? I think I had skipped on it as I didn't like the look, and it seemed to take more of a step sideways than a step forward, if you know what I mean.

And yeah, I think i'd be far less disappointed if maybe it had puzzles to solve among other things, but it seemed like a lot of running and jumping. And of course, I'd love to see him make a fool out of himself during idle animations. I also wish it were closer in genre to the adventure games.

 

[O'Dib]

I thought Telltale was doing the revival.. Oh well, I'd much rather they get back to licensing LA franchises anyway.

 

[Owain Taggart]

They had the license at one point, but from what we know, there wasn't much progress and eventually it reverted back to Actvision. Then Activision, earlier this year, announced they were reviving Sierra as a label. There was a lot of speculation about what that meant exactly, but now we see it was to release a new King's Quest game, among other things likely as well.

 

[Lance]

It'll never be a true King's Quest without the voice talent of Josh Mandel.

 

[Owain Taggart]

That is true. Josh Mandel WAS King Graham. Consequently, he's also done a good job in some of the unofficial remakes.

 

[USS Triumphant]

BTW: If you're interested in this, I thought you might also be interested to know about Spaceventure, the new-Space-Quest-but-not-because-we-don't-have-rights coming from the Two Guys From Andromeda, creators of the original games. Current scuttlebutt from them is that it will be out Q1 2015.

 

[Owain Taggart]

Good to hear. It will be nice to see something new from them.

Consequently, I never felt that the adventure genre had ever died. Maybe not as prolific as it had been in their golden age, but it never truly disappeared. The first-person style like Myst had somewhat taken over for awhile, but those I never felt were quite as imaginative as what came before them. You could now say that we're getting back to what it was like in the beginning of the genre, with them being more of an art form.

 

[USS Triumphant]

I don't feel like it died, so much as that it evolved. Probably starting with Star Wars: Dark Forces, if I'm recalling correctly, it became possible to have a game that had real time interaction for combat and other similar "arcade" elements, while still having some (rudimentary, in the case of Dark Forces, but still present) adventure-genre-type puzzle solving elements. That's only gotten more true, but it still feels like a lot of games are kind of weak even when they have that (like Myst - I agree). I would LOVE to see Steve Meretzky or the Two Guys or the Williams' or new talent in the same vein completely map out an honest, good old school Zork or King's Quest style game... and THEN have a company like Bethesda come in and "finish" a game *around* those elements without removing anything. Random combat encounters. Achievement quests. And so on.

 

[dub]

Sweet!

King's Quest IV was the first in the series I played growing up. I remember getting nervous whenever the game asked for disk 3. That seemed to have the most deadly scenes based on my experience.

I very much enjoyed the ADG Interactive remakes of I, II and III. Supposedly a remake of IV is still in the works by a different team of developers.

I tried the fan made "The Silver Lining" and couldn't really get into it.

 

[Aldo]

My introduction to the series was Kings Quest III. As a kid (I think I was around 8 or 9) I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing, so I just wandered around the few screens I was capable of until I kept dying.

 

[Owain Taggart]

I don't feel like it died, so much as that it evolved. Probably starting with Star Wars: Dark Forces, if I'm recalling correctly, it became possible to have a game that had real time interaction for combat and other similar "arcade" elements, while still having some (rudimentary, in the case of Dark Forces, but still present) adventure-genre-type puzzle solving elements.

Eh? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but Dark Forces was more in line with Wolfenstein gameplay, only in a SW setting. The Jedi Knight games on the other hand, which were sequels, had more puzzles like you mention.

I would LOVE to see Steve Meretzky or the Two Guys or the Williams' or new talent in the same vein completely map out an honest, good old school Zork or King's Quest style game... and THEN have a company like Bethesda come in and "finish" a game *around* those elements without removing anything. Random combat encounters. Achievement quests. And so on.

Yes, I'd love that too. Jane Jensen got back into making adventure games, including a remake of the original Gabriel Knight. Telltale in a way, gave the genre a resurgence with the success of Sam & Max, which has opened the door for smaller teams to work on adventure games. It's kind of come full-circle, in a way, and I think it's a good thing as bigger companies will feel too constrained.

I tried the fan made "The Silver Lining" and couldn't really get into it.

Yeah, it lacked heart and soul. I did like what they attempted to do, though, just that the execution could have been better.

 

[dub]

I tried the fan made "The Silver Lining" and couldn't really get into it.

Yeah, it lacked heart and soul. I did like what they attempted to do, though, just that the execution could have been better.

Agreed. I definitely appreciate it and I'm glad they did it. I enjoyed the development stages and the excitement building up to the release. I had fun walking through, but I just lost interest in the game rather quickly.

 

[Lance]

It isn't so much that adventure games 'died', more that they became a niche product because the thinking in the industry changed. You can see it in some of the last few adventure games published by the big two -- things like King's Quest: Mask Of Eternity, or the console-friendly control systems favored by Grim Fandango and Escape From Monkey Island, not to mention many adventure games suddenly having more and more arcade sequences haphazardly shoehorned into them, heralded the death of the genre. It was executive meddling which done them in at the end, trying to turn them into something that could be play more easily by (the perceived) PlayStation and Xbox gamers. The fallacy of this line of thinking has been utterly proven wrong by the fact that things like the Monkey Island special editions have sold well on console formats with nothing more than a graphical polish. The idea that they needed to adapt the gameplay for action gamers was a complete dead end road, but it's that kind of thinking that put graphic adventures on the terminal list for the longest time.

It isn't that gamers themselves stopped liking them, necessarily. It's that the people who bank-rolled the games companies (the paymasters, not the programmers themselves) had this bizarre notion that it wasn't what gamers wanted anymore. So adventure games as a genre got euthanized.

I still find it a strange state of affairs, but I guess when things like the Tomb Raider series were selling in the millions, it was almost inevitable that the modest profits of the traditional adventure game genre looked somewhat lacking by comparison. It's not like adventures were making a loss, they just weren't selling in a high a number as other games of the time, and the guys-in-suits, above all else, will always follow the formula that makes the most money.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Eh? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but Dark Forces was more in line with Wolfenstein gameplay, only in a SW setting. The Jedi Knight games on the other hand, which were sequels, had more puzzles like you mention.

You're mostly right. But Dark Forces was the first action game that I can remember playing that had a sequence where you had to locate and acquire items and place them in the correct order to proceed. Certainly not the sort of puzzle that one looks back on with fondness from the Sierra/Infocom/Scott Adams type games, but certainly on par with some of the dumber puzzles they used on occasion - and enough for me to think at the time, hey, if they expanded on this sort of thing....

 

[Lance]

The original Dark Forces definitely had shades of the Lucasarts' adventures about it. The gameplay was *all* FPS, but the presentation was rich in the storytelling they'd made their landmark. Kind of like X-Wing, the makers of the game carried through what they'd learned in the half-decade of making adventure games, and simply adapted those teachings to a different genre.

The adaptation of The Phantom Menace went even further. It was basically an adventure game that has combat, rather than being an action game with occasional puzzles. I've always thought that one was under-rated.

 

[Owain Taggart]

or the console-friendly control systems favored by Grim Fandango...

Interestingly enough Grim Fandango was never on consoles. The remake however is getting a release on consoles. Weird, huh?

 

[Owain Taggart]

Eh? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but Dark Forces was more in line with Wolfenstein gameplay, only in a SW setting. The Jedi Knight games on the other hand, which were sequels, had more puzzles like you mention.

You're mostly right. But Dark Forces was the first action game that I can remember playing that had a sequence where you had to locate and acquire items and place them in the correct order to proceed. Certainly not the sort of puzzle that one looks back on with fondness from the Sierra/Infocom/Scott Adams type games, but certainly on par with some of the dumber puzzles they used on occasion - and enough for me to think at the time, hey, if they expanded on this sort of thing....

I see what you mean, but I see that more as the common 'keycard' type puzzles from early FPS games that you see less of today. They just varied it with different items to make it seem different. But other than that, yeah, there were some more complicated puzzles. I distinctly remember a valve puzzle that was quite complicated.

I never could get into Myst-style first-person adventures, as they always amplified the feeling of being alone with no characters to interact with, being puzzles, story later, if there was any story. And I'd always feel so obtuse with those awkward abstract puzzles.

One game I've been impressed with recently is Sherlock Holmes: Nemesis. No idea if their latest one is like this as well, but they managed to seamlessly combine the two types by letting you switch to a first-person mode if that's what you wish, and you had plenty of characters to interact with.

 

[Lance]

or the console-friendly control systems favored by Grim Fandango...

Interestingly enough Grim Fandango was never on consoles. The remake however is getting a release on consoles. Weird, huh?

Aye, it's weird isn't it? The game designer later went on to admit that he designed the game for a joypad-style control system, even though Grim was never intended for a console. Escape From Monkey Island (which used the same game engine) did end up getting a PlayStation 2 port though.