What is an 'Adventure' game anymore?

[Kaihaku]

Way back when I remember typing my way from room to room, examining the goldfish bowl and just about everything else, on a mission to solve a murder. A few years later, I was a Persian Prince locked in an Arabian dungeon and pulling out my hair as I tried to escape. Then there was that crazy mansion where I microwaved the hamster and that insanely fun series of piratical misadventures.

I noticed that someone called the Legend of Zelda an RPG/Action/Adventure game and it got me to wondering... What, really, is an adventure game anymore? It seems to me that the genre has completely collapsed and been reborn quite a few times since I first played it. Now a days, is there really such a thing as a 'true' Adventure game or is it just a flavor that developers toss into other genres?

[Volug]

Go buy Okami.

Now.


It's Action/Adventure. Like Zelda, they ARE NOT RPGS.

[Kaihaku]

I've played it, it's a good game. For some reason that makes me want to mention Landstalker. I'm not exactly certain why.

I concur, I wouldn't call either an RPG but I don't want to get into the mess that is defining that genre......because, well, technically, almost all video games are RPGs.

Still, you just said that Okami is an Action/Adventure game, which touches on one of my questions... Are there any just plain old Adventure games anymore?

[Oregano]

Video game genres are very hard to define in the modern day because of the amount of line blurring a lot of games do. But I think Masato is right(I wanted to buy Okami during the summer but there was no copies), Okami is a typical adventure game, as are the Legacy of Kain series(very puzzle orientated).

I think it's any game with combat, but it can be avoided, where you travel across areas and do puzzles, explore, that kind of stuff.

EDIT: I think it's more that Action is just tacked on to Adventure games for the sake of it, because I haven't really seen it applied to anything.

[Kaihaku]

So then, the King's Quest style of adventure game is still floating around.

[Volug]

Still, you just said that Okami is an Action/Adventure game, which touches on one of my questions... Are there any just plain old Adventure games anymore?

More like Adventure/Action. It's an Adventure game TO THE CORE. The Action part of it is just battling Monsters (which applies to pretty much EVERY adventure game).

Again, the Action part is only cause, well, it has battles. It focuses more so on puzzles and exploration, and they are better then battles (both are good though). Puzzles and exploration are key to an Adventure game, no? More so explore-able then Zelda I might add.

[Oregano]

That was kind of the point I was making Masato, the action is just battles or chase scenes, which are in nearly everything so Action is very vague.

An Adventure game usually entails a game where you can go more or less where you want(you can be at a story point and just run off in the other direction if you want).

[Kaihaku]

I believe you but I don't know that Okami is in any way, shape, or form a typical game. It seems remarkable.

So, what about something like Ninja Gaiden. The original trilogy (NES) was action. Straightforward fight your way to the end. I played the X-box version and there's exploration but it's still all about slaughtering enemies. That seems more the typical Action/Adventure game of today. Now, the core Mario games use to be what we called platformers but since 64 they seem to have incorporated elements of Adventure games rather heavily. Final Fantasy 7 had some Adventure style puzzle solving and exploration.

Maybe they are more Adventure or more whatever the other genre is, but has Adventure survived as an independent genre at all?

[Oregano]

I don't think there's many games that are a single genre any more, but I believe that Adventure is still a primary genre, like RPG and FPS, with other subgenres that are paired with them. My thought on it anyway.

[Cubey]

Maybe they are more Adventure or more whatever the other genre is, but has Adventure survived as an independent genre at all?

If by Adventure you mean Monkey Island type "gather items, use items at items, talk with people" which I could call point'n'click but a fair number of these games wasn't really point'n'click then yes. The genre still exists, and new games of its type are developed. There are few productions of this kind, but they tend to be decent at least.

[Volug]

Okami had no "chase" scenes. It DID have events where you had to quickly get to places, but no "chase" scenes (Not counting races with Ida).
And the Action in Okami isn't terribly vague, it's there, just not full-blown nor just... There.

Even if you didn't mean Okami, I have to say that >.>

Another note: The only reason I can see people calling Okami an RPG is because of the Praise system, doing certain TASKS get you praise and you can upgrade your money limit, health, ink pots ('Magic'), and Astral Pouches.
Though you get no praise by simply battling, there are some praise to be gotten after certain kinds of battles in certain places, but it's mostly doing side quests and searching around (Exploration, and I didn't mention them all but that's most of it).
And also, the fact that enemies are "scroll-like" monsters on the field, if you run into one, a barrier appears and you fight them.

The first one is a "no way" on the RPG thing, it encourages the adventure and exploration part. The second is iffy, but I find it alright, since the only thing battles give you is money and can pretty much just be skipped (But you run low big time on money).

Conclusion: Adventure game, just with some action "stuff" to keep things interesting besides just puzzles and exploration.
It's also the best game ever created and ever will be created and nothing can de-throne it, NOTHING. NOTHING!!!! HAHAHAHAHAAA!!!

._.

Yes, yes, I know, I'm an Okami fan-boy. Just look at my location >.>
((Nippon is the place where Okami takes place, it's also known as Japan))


And as for games that are JUST adventure... Bleh, I don't know. All the adventure games I like have some action in it or it's just boring for me, though not too much action. Just something to spice up the adventure part of it, but not too much. That's me though >.> I'd think JUST adventure styled games may be a tad boring, unless you are thinking exploration survival kind of stuff, I've heard of those games yet never played them.

[Dihan]

Adventure games are defined by what comes before it, i.e. action, graphic, visual-novel, etc.

Zelda, Okami, Phoenix Wright, Myst, Escape From Monkey Island. They're all Adventure games.

[Oregano]

It wasn't about Okami specifically Masato, but by Chase I meant things like escaping places and stuff.

Point and Click games can be fun, although I didn't think they were the original adventure games?:smallconfused:

[Kaihaku]

If by Adventure you mean Monkey Island type "gather items, use items at items, talk with people" which I could call point'n'click but a fair number of these games wasn't really point'n'click then yes. The genre still exists, and new games of its type are developed. There are few productions of this kind, but they tend to be decent at least.

I tried to reference the evolution of the genre in my first post but I think of "point'n'click" as a style or phase of Adventure game. First there were the text games, then text games with pictures... It gets blurry then with a combination of "point'n'click", first person deals, platformers like Prince of Persia, etc. Then there was the 3D with every game and it's brother picking up Adventure elements. Now...I'm not so sure.


Adventure games are defined by what comes before it, i.e. action, graphic, visual-novel, etc.

Zelda, Okami, Phoenix Wright, Myst, Escape From Monkey Island. They're all Adventure games.

So, basically, Adventure actually is a genre while Graphic, Text, Visual-Novel, etc is more style? Like a Mystery Novel verses a Mystery Short Story? I'm sure if Action falls neatly into that though.

[Cubey]

I really don't think Prince of Persia belongs to the same genre. It's action-oriented while adventure games as I describe them are about solving problems by using tools at your disposal. Colossal Cave and other "get ye flask" games count though.

[Kaihaku]

So, you'd have Prince of Persia and, say, Another World as platformers with some puzzles while something like Flashback - The Quest for Identity would be a hybrid? That is, a key element of Adventure games is collecting items?

[Om]

So then, the King's Quest style of adventure game is still floating around.Nope. Or at least not outside the fringes of the industry

Honestly I'm not sure how to feel about this. I grew up during the LucasArts golden age and these games had a huge influence on me but I can't ignore the fact that the genre died out for very good reasons. LucasArts games were redeemed by their fantastic humour, writing, and user-friendly philosophy but 90% of the other games on the market were ridiculously obtuse. Games were liberally padded out with arbitrary puzzles that (for example) revolved around using two completely unrelated items on each other at a certain place and at a certain time in order to complete an ordinary mundane task. If I'm being perfectly honest then most of the games were terrible

As other genres matured (thinking particularly of FPS and RPG here) this sort of gameplay became increasingly unacceptable. I'd take the opposite view to Oregano in that I believe that the adventure genre no longer exists (unless you redefine it to fit the hybrid 3D platformers a la Tomb Raider) but that its core strengths, storytelling and plot, have been disseminated amongst other successor genres. I can see a lot of the influence of the point and click genre amongst the Infinity Engine generation of RPGs for example

[Oregano]

I'd take the opposite view to Oregano

Then we must fight to the death!:smalltongue:

I see what you mean though, Elder Scrolls have some of the point and click adventure elements in them and one good example of a 3D adventure game would be Jedi Academy(I don't want to put the full name:smalleek:), has a few point and click style puzzles, usually involving force push. I simply think the genre has evolved.

[Trazoi]

I still refer to graphical interactive fiction as "adventure game", as I grew up on the old Sierra and Lucasfilm games. That's why I hoard everything in case it comes in handy some day, and try to solve hard problems by just randomly trying things until something works. :smallsmile:

The genre still exists but it's very niche. It's still got some appeal in Europe. The problem is that most of the adventure games weren't actually that great. Too many designers thought that adventure games were all about crazy moon logic and not cleverly designed puzzles with superb writing. Apart from the Lucasfilm/arts games and a few of the Sierra ones they were fairly awful.

I thought of the original Prince of Persia as a platformer - which is was. Zelda is more of an exploration game, and while I can see it as an action/adventure I usually call the whole genre as Zelda-like games. If you just call a game "adventure" then I think of it containing very little to no action. Strangely though I'm uncomfortable about calling games like Myst or 7th Guest "adventure" since they didn't involve much inventory wrangling or verb based interaction, and I'm not entirely sure why. It's probably because I was such a fan of the Sierra and Lucasfilm model.

But genres in computer games are a messy business. Try coming up with a definitive set of rules for what defines an RPG in the computer game world - it's nigh impossible.

[Tirian]

Myst and T7G are more traditionally called "puzzle" games, the distinction being that it's about figuring out a mostly whole machine in front of you rather than finding innovative ways to juggle your inventory. And for the most part, that mostly accounts for the flood of $20 games that have been coming out of Europe for the past ten years although they have also churned out some traditional graphic adventures like The Watchmaker and The Black Mirror.

Nowadays, I don't think that you can depend on the word "adventure" in a genre description to mean "Zork-like". I think that the Zelda marketers are saying that Link goes on an adventure (i.e. exploration and discovery and moving every zig for great justice) rather than that they are using ADVENT.COM as a development model. Of course, it's all shades of gray and you can perhaps argue that deciding whether you need to use your grappling hook or your boomerang in a specific place to get further into a dungeon is an adventure-style challenge. As a purist, I go against this; to me, a classic adventure game puzzle is one that is as often solved away from the computer because your brain has enough data to work on it without being right there. For instance, lots of people found themselves drifting off to sleep and suddenly realizing that if they put the mail on top of the knapsack BEFORE pressing the vending machine button, that both robots would be distracted at the same time. That's much harder to apply to Zelda.

Anyway, yes, people still are making pure graphic adventures. The Insanity Prawn Boy series was not awful, and Peasant's Quest was sublime. There are a host of volunteers still writing text adventures that run on the standard Infocom parser. I've never had the chance to look into Sam and Max, but that seems to be well-regarded.

[Kaihaku]

...and Peasant's Quest was sublime.

Ahhhh... It reminded me just how frustrated King's Quest use to make me. :smalltongue: That's one thing I'm not quite sure if I miss or not, walking away and thinking about it for days until I finally figured the current problem. The difficulty was terrible but the feeling when one you finally figured it out...ah...

[Tengu_temp]

Nope. Or at least not outside the fringes of the industry


Two words - Phoenix Wright. One of the most popular and best franchises for Nintendo DS is a series of adventure games.



Zelda, Okami, Phoenix Wright, Myst, Escape From Monkey Island. They're all Adventure games.

I think adventure and action/adventure are two separate genres, just like sim games and flight sim games are.

[Geno9999]

Here's how I define Adventure games.
You walk around talking to people, searching things, sometimes giving you an item (let's call it "A") which you have to use on a person/object to progress in the game. Sometimes you have to have another item ("B") and use it with "A".
LoZ and Okami does this and has combat added to it (e.g. Using a hookshot to get farther in the dungeon, use fire when everything else fails).
What truly makes it an Adventure game for me, is if the character talks about the object that you're looking at such as "This is a computer, I use it to write essays, posts, comments and why my school should be named after Abraham Lincoln." or "It's a... Know what? I'm going to stop talking now, or people will think that I'm crazy" (other person;) "Don't you mean crazier?" "SHUDDUP!"

[Mando Knight]

and Peasant's Quest was sublime.

If you liked Peasant's Quest, then how about that Cool Game for Attractive People? (http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbcg4ap.html) It's an episodic, point-'n-click adventure by Videlectrix and Telltale games, available at the WiiWare near YouWare... or on the PC...

[Tirian]

Ahhhh... It reminded me just how frustrated King's Quest use to make me. :smalltongue: That's one thing I'm not quite sure if I miss or not, walking away and thinking about it for days until I finally figured the current problem. The difficulty was terrible but the feeling when one you finally figured it out...ah...

Heh. My main problem with Roberta Williams is that so many of her games contained hunt-the-pixel puzzles and PQ avoided that IIRC. It definitely isn't LucasArts quality, but I don't know that anyone is (or can) model their style.

And, no, I haven't checked out SBCG4AP yet. I guess I'm waiting for a thousand people to tell me that it's a must-play game.

[Demented]

Penumbra would count.

It's partly "horror", but it's got the whole grab unrelated items and manipulate them in counter-intuitive ways thing down pat.

I don't like adventure games.

"The door is locked."
"I seem to have forgotten where I put my keys."
"I don't know where I usually put my keys."
"I cannot 'use brain'."
"Kick down the door? Why would I do that?"
"The phone is not functional. 'Call landlord' is not a viable option."
"Yes, I live in a dump. What is your point?"
"There is insufficient cause for alarm to break the window."
"...Even if I have been in this same room for 8 hours without eating, drinking, or using a toilet."
"Congratulations on finding the key to the apartment inside the locked drawer that you had to pick using wire you got from the window curtains. This all seems like a perfectly logical day to me!"

[Kaihaku]

Yeah, many of those primitive text ones were...counter-intuitive at best.

[Knaight]

I don't like adventure games.

"The door is locked."
"I seem to have forgotten where I put my keys."
"I don't know where I usually put my keys."
"I cannot 'use brain'."
"Kick down the door? Why would I do that?"
"The phone is not functional. 'Call landlord' is not a viable option."
"Yes, I live in a dump. What is your point?"
"There is insufficient cause for alarm to break the window."
"...Even if I have been in this same room for 8 hours without eating, drinking, or using a toilet."
"Congratulations on finding the key to the apartment inside the locked drawer that you had to pick using wire you got from the window curtains. This all seems like a perfectly logical day to me!"

This happens to a lot of people who play tabletop RPGs, to the point where options missing gets really grating (what do you mean you can't bribe the guards? What about threatening them, why can't I threaten them?)

[Kaihaku]

This happens to a lot of people who play tabletop RPGs, to the point where options missing gets really grating (what do you mean you can't bribe the guards? What about threatening them, why can't I threaten them?)

That's true and it's one of the greatest of tragedies. :smallfrown: There are few things more disappointing than playing in a truly adaptive system when the person running won't adapt it.

[Ryusacerdos]

The Longest Journey is a good one to get off of Steam. Pretty cheap and a nice story. Some of the puzzles really spin your head.

[DeathQuaker]

That's true and it's one of the greatest of tragedies. :smallfrown: There are few things more disappointing than playing in a truly adaptive system when the person running won't adapt it.

I'm sorry, you can't go that way.

[busterswd]

Personally I'd define it as any game where the emphasis is on exploration and discovery, as opposed to twitch based combat (action) or character building and development (RPG's).

[Wardog]

I don't like adventure games.

"The door is locked."
"I seem to have forgotten where I put my keys."
"I don't know where I usually put my keys."
"I cannot 'use brain'."
"Kick down the door? Why would I do that?"
"The phone is not functional. 'Call landlord' is not a viable option."
"Yes, I live in a dump. What is your point?"
"There is insufficient cause for alarm to break the window."
"...Even if I have been in this same room for 8 hours without eating, drinking, or using a toilet."
"Congratulations on finding the key to the apartment inside the locked drawer that you had to pick using wire you got from the window curtains. This all seems like a perfectly logical day to me!"

Don't forget the likes of:
"You are standing at the top of a cliff. There are several trees and shrubs here. Below you, at the bottom of the cliff, you can see an object glinting."
>down
"You cannot go down"
>climb
"Climb what?"
>climb cliff
"You cannot do that."
>inventory
"You are carrying: a lantern, a sack of flour, a long rope, and a set of keys."
>tie rope to tree
"That is not possible."
>attack rope to tree
"Why would you want to do that?"
>fasten rope to tree
"Nothing would be achieved by that act."
>jump
"You jump up and down."
>jump off cliff
"That would not be advisable."

(After consulting a cheat guide)

>descend cliff
"You descend the cliff."



Personally I'd define it as any game where the emphasis is on exploration and discovery, as opposed to twitch based combat (action) or character building and development (RPG's).

I'd also suggest that puzzles and especially combat should be things that you can either succede compleley, or fail completely, depending on what instructions you give and equipment you have. E.g.

"You are standing at the entrance to the castle. A burly guard blocks your way."
>attack guard
[if you don't have a weapon] "The guard easily blocks your puny attacks, before decapitating you with a single blow from his sword."
[if you do have a weapon] "You cleave the guard in two with your sword."

This is in contrast to CRPGs and the like where success or failure is a probability, depending on relative skills, stats, equipment quality, and HP remaining.


Note: That scenario came from an advanture game on my Amstrad CPC with exactly that scenario. The really stupid thing? How to get the sword in the first place.
>look guard
"The burly guard is six foot tall and well muscled. He is holding a sharp sword.
>tell guard give me sword
"The burly guard gives you the sharp sword." :smallamused: