Oh, to be a LucasArts veteran. To have lived through the days of Monkey Island and Full Throttle, and slipped away when it became about bad Star Wars games. To live as some sort of renegade idealist, criss-crossing the country on a Harley, rounding up a posse of old friends and starting your own development studio to produce a completely original adventure game. It's been done - a few times now in fact,
(just look at Psychonauts) - so could we be about to see it happen again?
A Vampyre Story is the brain-baby of game-art guru Bill Tiller. It stars Mona de Laffite ("after the loading dock in the Pirates Of The Caribbean ride at Disneyland," explains Tiller), an unwilling vampiress who finds herself sharing an adventure with Froderick, her friendly bat companion. Expect pointing-and-clicking on a classic LucasArts level, with vampiric abilities such as shape-shifting playing a part in the game's puzzles.
So, can we expect funny? Monkey Island-funny? "Sure," says Tiller, "after all, it's a comic adventure! Many people seem to think it's like The Curse Of Monkey Island and The Secret Of Monkey Island, just in the horror genre instead of the pirate genre. So, while the game has a darker subject matter and art style than a pirates-in-the-Caribbean setting, and definitely has its own style, we're striving to produce a game that's both very funny and unique. Our writer, Dave Harris, is one of the most talented and most funny persons ever to walk the face of the earth, and also a LucasArts veteran, so Monkey Island-funny is probably a good way to put it."
Just as we found with Psychonauts and the recent batch of Sam & Max games, the spirit of the old Lucasarts classics is seemingly alive and well in A Vampyre Story - not just in the writing, but in Bill Tiller's own art style too.
"There are a lot of influences on my work," Tiller tells us. "One of my favourite artists is Edward Gorey. He might be not that famous in England - he did these great black-and-white ink drawings of Victorian aristocrats in macabre and funny situations. He's the main inspiration, along with Dr Seuss and Tim Burton. Originally we were planning on making the game in black-and-white, using the Edward Gorey pen-and-ink style.
But we abandoned it when it became clear the colour version looked better. I still want to do a short pen-and-ink-looking mini-adventure game, maybe some day."
And, as some sort of litmus test of point-and-click heritage, how many tree stump gags can we expect in the new game? "That tree stump joke never gets old," laughs Tiller. "There'll be a lot of references and homages to 'the old days' - but what exactly, you'll have to wait and see!"
Hmmm, not too sure about this. Perhaps the latest Broken Sword game is just a really bad game (the last adventure game I played), but the whole point & click gameplay mechanic just felt like it had no place in today's world.
Much like RPGs sticking to right clicking on an enemy then a series of dice rolls and turn-based nonsense ensuing, with +7 frost attack and other such b******s & tiresome levelling up systems...where was I..ah yes, much like those old conventions drastically need modernising if not downright scrapping, so too does pointing & clicking being the extent of interaction in an adventure game.
Randomly waving the cursor around everything in a room until you find something to interact with, then trying every combination of 'use' or 'combine with' until something happens to work = NO!
Don't let nostalgia get in the way of progress. I'm all for more adventure games, but the interaction with the world really needs to be brought up to scratch.
ahhh, the old classics, even MI3 was a good 'un, although I never really liked the 3D ones (apart from the one with the dead guy).
I still remember one of the puzzles; there was this snake surrounded by golf clubs, sticks, broken bottles etc... As soon as you took any action though, you got eaten by the snake. Whenever you put the cursor over any of the items, their names had changed to snake whacking club, snake battering stick, snake clubbing broken bottle etc....
I'd like to see a university produce an incredibly intelligent text pbottomr and get text adventures back. Imaging literally being able to type anything and get a reasonable answer?
You're not happy with being able to pick up a bottle in full three-dee rather than having to type 'get bottle'? Show any adventure game to a gamer who's seen nothing but exits to the north, east, south and west, and he'd s**t his pants.
Either way, Facade is a great example of excellent parsing, if you haven't tried it out already.
I'd like to see a university produce an incredibly intelligent text pbottomr and get text adventures back. Imaging literally being able to type anything and get a reasonable answer?
You're not happy with being able to pick up a bottle in full three-dee rather than having to type 'get bottle'? Show any adventure game to a gamer who's seen nothing but exits to the north, east, south and west, and he'd s**t his pants.
Either way, Facade is a great example of excellent parsing, if you haven't tried it out already.
Thats the whole point. It wouldn't be 'do you want to go N,S,E or W' it would be much more natural than that, and there is no reason why you couldn't just say 'go to the kitchen' to go to the kitchen rather than type N, but more importantly you would have much more natural conversations with NPC's and therefore much more fully rounded characters allowing for more sophisticated stories than you would ever get in a 3D 'Action/Adventure', which let's face it, are mostly just slightly more detailed FPS and rarely have much 'adventure' in them!
If nobody is going to think outside of the ever shrinking PC games ideas box, we will end up with a box so small it will only contain the Sims and Half Life series and no other PC title release at all!
I agree with humorguy. I think the PC needs to try new and old ideas so as not to limit itself and consign it to a small niche pidgeon hole of a games machine. It has the potential to be the best all round platform. Inovative, exciting and different, but not going all out radical and losing sight of what makes things good or bad.
Why can't a really good adventure be like reading a good book, only interactive. I know people that always said graphic adventures were not as good as text only as there imagination could picture a scene far better than a graphic display could. They also said that the imagination tended to 'run a bit' with ideas and 'flower things up' into a more detailed and interesting world, whereas graphics blocked that and just put too much of a definition on everything and they could not 'fit it' into the way they were seeing things and so it was limiting their enjoyment.
Whether this is how people see things or not, I believe there is room for really good story driven adventures whether they have graphics or not. I remember in years past that Magnetic Scrolls made some glorius adventure graphics (especially for their time) but they never appealed to me as much as the likes of Infocom or Level 9 text adventures.
It is good to move on, but only if you are going forward, and forward for the right reasons!
We all have computers and websites to read but books are still 'best sellers'. People still like and enjoy old things done in the old way. Why? because they 'just work'.
Without putting words into the man's mouth, Steve wasn't saying "will it be funny?" because all point and clicks have to be funny to be acceptable. It's because it's being touted as a funny game. A less ambiguous, but more tortured way of putting it would have been "will it be as funny as we're being led to believe, given the development team and the Monkey-esque graphics"? My own opinion, such as it is, is that a genre that's all too associated with bad acting, sub-par scripting and uninspired puzzles has to be very careful about taking itself too seriously.
*thinkthinkthink*
The idea of "interactive books" sounds interesting in theory, but the second you try to put it into practice, you come up with the problem of trying to describe a vaguely appealing concept. Just look at our FMV feature for how "interactive movies" turned out, and that was a path filled with good, blind intention.
I'm genuinely interested in what you're saying, but I'm not sure what it is that you mean. This could well be the same failure of imagination you're both talking about, but if you were pitching your idea to me, I'd link fingers, put them under my chin, and say "do go on". Meanwhile, I'd be secretly getting off on the power imbalance, and rubbing my nuts between my legs.
I think the same goes for intelligent parsing; "go to the kitchen" was available in Little Computer People, as was "play the piano please" and "feed the dog, Terry". In my case - and I imagine, the case of everyone else who played Little Computer People - this encouraged an aggressive form of experimentation, and inevitable disillusionment, as the stubborn bastard refused to s**t upside the lampshade. Which is best? Being dealt with by a chatbot algorithm, or a huge amount of scripted responses to every possible situation? As a player, I'll plump for the latter, because computers rarely write with flair, humour, style or poetry.
(As a writer, I'd opt for the algorithm, because the amount of scripting that goes into games like Jade Empire scares the grundies off of me)
Facade was excellent, but I ALWAYS got asked to leave. I'd love it if this thread came up with the solution to all PC Gaming! That would be way cool.
It's just a sad consequence of game development becoming an evermore corporate enterprise. Games costs are always rising, publishers are less inclined to deviate from what they perceive to be 'safe'. Hence a gazillion WWII games and clichéd fantasy RPGs.
Make no mistake, if there was an outcry from the gaming public for these things, they'd be made. But there isn't.
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