BananasFoster

Old school adventure games were NOT puzzle games. They sometimes had puzzles in them, but they are not built entirely on puzzles (using this thing I just found on this other thing so I now have this new thing I can give to this dude isn't really a puzzle). They were open world games. You have a world you can explore around in (granted it's like ten screens, but that's how big games were then), and tools with which you can interact with it (Look, Pick Up, Open, etc.). Old school adventure games also pushed the envelope of graphics and sound hardware on PCs. We bought a CD Drive for our computer so we could run Full Throttle. They were also stories. Games didn't tell stories the way adventure games did back then, with "cutscenes" and extended sections of dialogue.

I think playing Lucasarts games around 2000 generally makes me have a more positive attitude towards adventure games because if i got stuck, i would have no qualms about going to GameFAQs to find out what i was missing. This made the games feel more like crossword puzzles, because there was always that answer for me to look up.

What are you even talking about? Do you mean the fishing bit in the first area? They hand you a fishing rod and say "hey, maybe you should fish or something?" and the cat steals your fish. It is pretty straightforward.

I've got no point of reference for Sierra besides Leisure Suit Larry which I never dabbled with. Adventure games are all saddled with the same anchors, really. LucasArt's old gear gets by on charm and nostalgia. Modern Telltale I'm mostly cool with because it focuses on telling a good yarn.

Slightly off topic, but ever do an escape room? Totally cool way to participate in real life adventure game.

@rongalaxy:

It's actually interesting what happened. Adventure games combined narrative driven stories with puzzles, with the puzzles usually getting short shrift. For awhile the genre died until Telltale helped revive it (I know there were others) and did so by basically eliminating the puzzles (or making very light puzzle elements) and focusing on the narrative elements.

In turn there is a new offshoot genre of puzzle focused narrative light games where the focus is on fun, often iterative, puzzle solving and not really the narrative. The best examples I can think of are The Witness and The Swapper. I haven't played the Witness yet, but I very much enjoyed the Swapper, because the focus was on the puzzles and the puzzles were good (and genuinely brain-teasing rather than just obtuse.)

So I would say the adventure genre sort of bifurcated into games for people who like story, and games for people who like puzzles, instead of combining both the way old school adventure games did.

Ron Gilbert took a couple cracks at solving the "How do you make an old school adventure game in modern times" puzzle a few years back. The results were the Deathspank series, which replaced bad puzzles with mediocre light action-RPG elements, and The Cave, which replaced bad puzzles with bad platforming. Both had their fans but neither took off. And of course there are still a few true old adventure games being made, like Broken Age (even has obtuse puzzles from what I read) and Gilbert's new project, Thimbleweed Park. So it's not fair to say that they aren't being made anymore, they're just not mainstream.

@bananasfoster: that music video analogy doesn't work as well as you think it does. Mostly because music videos still exist and are still popular. The whole reality show thing you brought up is more of a systemic issue to do with television and how, as a format, it is on the decline. The content itself is still sought after, just via different, more easily accessible means.

In other words. Music videos are still relevant, classic adventure games are not, and for good reason. That's all I'll say when it comes to this topic.

Telltale games are adventure games whether you like it or not. They aren't classic adventure games, but they are the modern evolution of the genre. Also, most point and click adventure games had really terrible puzzles. Not even the most well regarded games in the genre had well designed puzzles. They were bad then and they are worse now. Telltale cut that stuff out because most people hated that part of adventure games. They stopped getting made like that for a reason.

I am mostly agreeing with the GB guys because I had similar experiences to them?

Of course many games have had sticking points and obtuse puzzles, but the difference is that Zelda had fun gameplay based on combat and generally decent puzzle solving so that one puzzle stands out as a bad thing artificially gating off other good parts of the game that are fun to play. Adventure games, the puzzles generally WERE the entirety of the gameplay, so that when there were bad ones, and there were a fair number of bad ones, they constituted the main gameplay gone off the rails. It's more akin to there being a boss that you can't hurt except with a very specific weapon that's very hard to find, and there are no hints in the game as to where it is. That's terrible game design and was routine for adventure games.

My original post said that about 90% of the puzzles in most games were reasonable and could be solved just by thinking, so bringing up a clever puzzle with multiple solutions doesn't sway me because yes, those existed. But then in the King's Quest games there were often ways to make the game unwinnable by forgetting to pick up a specific item or using it in the wrong place or whatever, and there was often little reason to think to look for the item or to think it couldn't be used earlier. That's terrible game design, especially in an adventure game where going back through puzzles you've already solved is not fun (unlike, say, having to replay a section of Mario because you ran out of lives.)

This was compounded by the fact that traveling around adventure game environments often took a long time, so if you wanted to try a solution you thought of you might have to spend 10 minutes just walking through the environments to get to the place where whatever you wanted to try was. And traversal in adventure games was not fun, it was just clicking over and over.

Maybe you just have a higher frustration tolerance and enjoyment of trial and error than the GB guys (and me) and that's fine, but my experiences with adventure games frequently involved horribly annoying sticking points that took HOURS to get through, and when you found the solution you weren't like "Oh that's clever, I should have thought of that" you were like "Game designer X you are a real piece of work!"

To boil the criticism down...almost every adventure game at some point or another would involve searching for a needle in a haystack, revisiting environments and talking to people to find the one item you missed or conversation option you neglected. Those were never fun and while they didn't constitute a large percentage of the puzzles in the games they constituted a large percentage of the gameplay time, because the puzzles you could solve logically were quickly dispatched with. Maybe if I played the games in the age of Gamefaqs it would have been less of a problem. As for the games that didn't have obtuse puzzles like that? Those are the best in the genre and the ones that hold up.