What ever happened to point and click adventures

What ever happened to point and click adventures

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

Homeless People Are Sexy Shirt $21.68

Schizophrenic Conspiracy Theorist Shirt $21.68

  1. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    aint nobody tryna point and click.

  2. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    it was a cope genre for pcgays since they only had FPS and RTS as actual good games

  3. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    People got actual good games and decided to play them instead of bruteforcing item-action combinations or softlocking themselves mid-game.

  4. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It was impossible to improve on perfection

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Westwood
      One of the most based game devs of all time

  5. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    In terms of gameplay, the genre had kind of a limited mileage and as devs ran out of good ideas for puzzles shit got extremely moronic, so people gravitated towards more sustainable genres.

  6. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They evolved into "movie games"

  7. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    people want games with actual gameplay

  8. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      oh yeah, reading writings on the internet, that used to be a thing too.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Gamecenter blames Myst for killing adventure games. Or at least the Gamecenter employees who write the first paragraph of Gamecenter articles do. Again, this department may not be in direct contact with the team responsible for paragraph four, in which it is clearly stated that: "Now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories."

      >As far as I can tell, the Gamecenter "death of adventure" timeline goes something like this:
      >1. The action-packed Myst introduces casual gamers to the pleasures of Tomb Raider.
      >2. Genius adventure gamers come to the painful realization that the same equipment they use to explore the complex fantasy world of Leisure Suit Larry can also be utilized by stupid people to run Quake. Thanks to their television-atrophied attention spans, these casual gamers are mentally incapable of spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird's nest.
      >3. Horrified by the knowledge that somewhere someone is playing a game that is not an adventure, genius adventure gamers abandon the hobby in droves and resort to their backup source of entertainment: various combinations of Babylon 5 novels and jerking off.

      This will never not get me.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        Truly smart people enjoy both Larry AND Quake.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          True, and there's some good value in many of those games, but it's not a formula which lends itself well to continuation. Either you keep doing the same things as before and the puzzles and riddles never challenge, or you go past what makes any fricking sense and it's not fun anymore. There's also just the ever extant approach of trial and erroring yourself through various item combinations at random until something happens, which can be done even in some of the good ones.

          Something like Doom and Quake have extensive mileage because the challenge lies in the the fast action gameplay, and they have sets of monsters and weapons which can be used to construct a very wide variety of scenarios, which is why people continue making new levels for Doom as the game is soon becoming 30 years old.
          There's no simple way to do that with the base formula of any of these point and click or text prompt games.

          [...]
          That's a whole lot of words to say "boring time-consuming adventure games died out because other more entertaining game genres became more popular"

          That's a modest amount of words to refute the insipid claim and notion that point and click adventures were killed by the growth of fast action games, demonstrating the kind of shit which people weren't willing to put up with any more while also greatly ridiculing the people making the claim.

          The entire article is a five minute read as a whole, the text isn't drawn out or convoluted, it's easy to follow, does it really tax you somehow?

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Gamecenter blames Myst for killing adventure games. Or at least the Gamecenter employees who write the first paragraph of Gamecenter articles do. Again, this department may not be in direct contact with the team responsible for paragraph four, in which it is clearly stated that: "Now it seems people want more action than adventure. They would rather run around in short shorts raiding tombs than experience real stories."

      >As far as I can tell, the Gamecenter "death of adventure" timeline goes something like this:
      >1. The action-packed Myst introduces casual gamers to the pleasures of Tomb Raider.
      >2. Genius adventure gamers come to the painful realization that the same equipment they use to explore the complex fantasy world of Leisure Suit Larry can also be utilized by stupid people to run Quake. Thanks to their television-atrophied attention spans, these casual gamers are mentally incapable of spending six hours trying to randomly guess at the absurd dream logic Roberta Williams has applied to the problem of getting the dungeon key out of the bluebird's nest.
      >3. Horrified by the knowledge that somewhere someone is playing a game that is not an adventure, genius adventure gamers abandon the hobby in droves and resort to their backup source of entertainment: various combinations of Babylon 5 novels and jerking off.

      This will never not get me.

      That's a whole lot of words to say "boring time-consuming adventure games died out because other more entertaining game genres became more popular"

  9. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    one of the main draws was its neat graphics and animations. eventually other genres caught up

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      It's this. They were the best looking games available at the time. And when they weren't, they stopped being popular. The gameplay was never the appeal.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >The gameplay was never the appeal.
        it was the writing! fool!

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >never ever

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      Adventure games had a hard time adapting to 3D graphics too.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I wouldn't say so. There's a whole subgenre of Myst clones, and your fixed camera tank control games like Alone in the Dark and Little Big Adventure.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          >There's a whole subgenre of Myst clones
          Yeah they kept the genre on life support before the shift to real-time 3D. AitD and LBA were action adventure games. Sierra's last adventure game was Gabriel Knight 3 which had a lot of problems and delays because of the full 3D engine. Adventure games were already selling poorly since they weren't the hot new thing anymore, and the difficulty of making a good adventure game with the limitations of early 3D didn't help.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            I feel like the distinction between adventure and action/adventure can be a bit tenuous. As long as there's still a solid focus on puzzles, I think it's still an adventure game. As far as I'm concerned the adventure genre became "survival horror" for a while. Resident Evil is an adventure game with combat, not a combat focused game that also has some adventuring (which would be RE4).

  10. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They're still being made just not as much as before.

  11. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    they’re for girls

  12. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Pretty much the ease of breaking the game by trying everything on everything killed the sub-genre in the long run.
    You do still get narrative games with puzzles, but they shifted more in the direction of things like Professor Layton.

    If you want a really good modern adventure/detective game, give Hypnospace Outlaw a look.

  13. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They're still around, just in a different form. What we call "Visual Novels" in English descend from Japanese-style Adventure games like Portopia & Famicom Detective Club, which in turn decend both from games like Maniac Mansion and King's Quest as well as Text Adventure games like Zork & Colossal Cave Adventure. They've also partly been absorbed into RPG Maker games, which might as well just be Point-And-Click Adventure games without the pointing and clicking.

  14. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    In the main, they were replaced by 3D action adventures, both on the PC, but also PS1 and N64 and people stopped making them because they weren't the money spinners they used to be. If you can make a game that you could port to the PS1 (which was pretty awkward to play point and clicks on, and I there were some) and sell loads of units, why would you keep making single system games?

    I think also Grim Fandango probably marked the turning tide - though that was only a PC game; Lucasarts was (arguably) the top dog in terms of sales and storytelling when it came to these sorts of games, when they were no longer putting their resources into point and clicks, a lot of other studios maybe saw that as an omen.

    There is an interesting take in this (quite long) article as well about the spiralling costs of trying to make point and click adventures with FMV, and trying to convince an increasingly more star studded cadre of actors to star in them, turning games into cinema - using Toonstruck (which I also love) as a case study: https://www.filfre.net/2022/06/toonstruck-or-a-case-study-in-the-death-of-adventure-games/

    Ironically - I would say Grim Fandango (which is 3D characters on rendered backgrounds, and pre-rendered cutscenes) is a more cinematic game than most of what was put out with FMV. Some people still feel that it's the best Lucasarts adventure.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      There's a game called Fork in the Tale, which is a legitimately pretty well made, elaborate FMV game, but they inserted Rob Schneider into it, seemingly after the fact, and it bombed.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      The PS1 did have a mouse, which point and clicks generally supported.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        If you're thinking about selling games to the general demographic of PS1 owners though, most would have only had the gamepads supplied. I knew precisely 0 people who had a mouse for their PS1, even though - you're right - it was compatible with a lot of adventure and strategy games.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Lucasarts was (arguably) the top dog in terms of sales
      They never got close to Sierra's level of sales with the exception of Full Throttle

  15. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I'd at least partly blame 3D graphics.
    Adventure games at their worst were about pixel hunting for shit you didn't know you needed to do stuff that made no sense.
    With 3D graphics it becomes exceedingly difficult to hide stuff on the screen without making it impossible to find. Some games made it work but it was difficult.
    At first companies attempted to use FMVs as an alternative but that dried out as most FMV games were shit. As adventure games died most companies just gave up on fancy graphics and just stuck to 2D which works out great in games like Larry 7 and even newer titles like Gibbous.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      I would argue that a lot of those first person horror games are essentially just adventure games. What's the core difference between Clock Tower and Penumbra?
      Adventure games didn't really go anywhere, people are just weirdly specific about what they define as an adventure game.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >I would argue that a lot of those first person horror games are essentially just adventure games. What's the core difference between Clock Tower and Penumbra?
        I would go further. Tomb Raider and Zelda are not, fundamentally, any different in concept than point-and-click adventures. They're not fundamentally different than text adventures, for that matter. Adventure games just evolved away from read-and-type, and then evolved away from point-and-click.

        • 1 year ago
          Anonymous

          Depends the degree to which a game is focused on puzzles rather than combat. I think an adventure game can have combat and still be an adventure game, since even Monkey Island technically has combat.

          • 1 year ago
            Anonymous

            Even ZORK had combat.

  16. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Point and click games evolved into survival horror games. You cannot change my mind.

  17. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    They went out of style.
    Even when Telltale tried bringing the genre back they eventually changed into narrative-focused titles which all flopped except for Walking Dead and Minecraft Story Mode

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >narrative-focused titles
      they're called decision-tree 'em ups.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I prefer multiple choicvanias

  18. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    they become a niche genre, new ones come out every year but you have to look for them

  19. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    The puzzles, the gameplay of the things, were not why most people played them, even if that's why I personally liked them. The appeal of them was that they had good presentation and writing paired with a game that was not rendered nonfunctional by mechanical skill.

    The successor to the point and click adventure isn't even visual novels, it's stuff like the last of us and god of war. High presentation values, emphasis on writing over player agency, and designed for the lowest imaginable skill level.

  20. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Greed. Sierra adventure games never stopped being profitable, but Ken Williams horribly mismanaged the company and games like Final Fantasy VII and Metal Gear Solid proved that there was much more money to be made on consoles.

  21. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    TellTale games was one of the last big point and click adventure developers. Point and Click adventure games never really died. They are still being made, but seem to be a bit regulated to the indy developers.

  22. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    It's kinda funny that both point and click adventures and VN's stem as a simplification of RPG's, but just the east and west versions of doing it

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >stem as a simplification of RPG's
      In what way was Colossal Cave Adventure a simplification of RPGs? Or do you mean pen-and-paper RPGs?

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        >Or do you mean pen-and-paper RPGs?
        That's what they were trying to mimic, yes. They were trying to maintain the story telling aspects of RPG's while other games cared more about the gameplay aspects

  23. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    I dunno

  24. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    the game play never really advanced after awhile so there really isn't a reason to play any newer versions
    Plus they are pretty slow going all things considered

  25. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    Same as what happened with most genres. Either they got killed off or they just merged into the bigger genres.

  26. 1 year ago
    Anonymous

    What do you mean? The dark ages was in the 2k's. Adventure games are thriving compared to that age. Aside from Heavy rain walking simulators you won't find aaa production games, but indie and independent scene is in a very good place.

    • 1 year ago
      Anonymous

      >Heavy rain walking simulators
      Even those are better than point and clicks.

      • 1 year ago
        Anonymous

        I don't agree, Indigo Prophecy, Heavy Rain, Beyond Two Souls, those games are all fricking moronic and only good for making fun of.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *