Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? (The Death of the Adventure Game)
February 21, 2018 1 min read
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38 thoughts on “Who Shot Guybrush Threepwood? (The Death of the Adventure Game)”
I kind of wanted to post something about Portal and how it takes advantage of the changes to 3D – First Person games and applies them to a puzzle environment by mixing both but instead I am just gonna look in astonishment at the comment section as I see some of my favorite YouTubers just casually commenting on here. How did I only see this video now and why didn't it go viral?
But, who killed Guybrush Threepwood?
I'm so glad you brought up the IF community, because that's been seeing some awesome iteration lately too. I'm a total sucker for the classics in Inform, but seeing what people are doing with newer stuff like Twine is super interesting.
I'm a little confused why the captions just have the titles of the games, and don't, you know, actually caption what you're saying. That makes the caption feature for this video absolutely useless for this video.
"…they scoped up their budgets and their dev time trying to compete with the Dooms and the Half-Lifes and the Calls of Duty in the world." Interestingly, Sierra published Half-Life around the same time as the release/development of their own 3D adventure games, like KQ Mask of Eternity, Gabriel Knight III, and Quest for Glory V. It's a shame that Sierra had no creative involvement with Half-Life, because Half-Life feels very much like an FPS successor to Sierra's own adventure titles. It's ironic, because no one expected Half-Life to be as successful as it was, and its success probably made things much harder for Sierra. I'm surprised that Sierra didn't try to develop adventure games with Half-Life's engine: it would've interesting to see a spin-off of King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Leisure Suit Larry, or Police Quest in Half-Life's vein. Some Half-Life mods like Heart of Evil proved that adventure game mechanics could work in Half-Life. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for an adventure game to use an FPS's engine as a base, since Grim Fandango's own engine was based off the Sith Engine, which was used for the awesome FPS Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight.
In speaking of adventure games competing with Doom, it's a shame that no adventure games were made with Doom's engine. I mean, the closest to Doom adventure games were Hexen and Strife, and they were more like fusions of FPS/RPG/adventure. If a Doom adventure game had been made, it would just need to focus on art and explorable levels, no weaponry (except for rare occasions), a focus on item gathering and puzzles, and a borrowing from Strife's dialogue system. Considering what modders could do with Doom's engine nowadays, such an adventure game could be possible.
Back to Half-Life, there are times when I wished that Half-Life incorporated more adventure game mechanics in its narrative. Considering what Half-Life 2 and its various Source engine successors are capable of, I'm surprised that there haven't been an Source-based adventure games made.
Great video! Just found your channel by way of your equally great alt-right playbook. I just got one thing I must say: I LOVE Gabriel Knight 3, it's honestly one of my favorite games of all time (and it's way past my time, I was just six when it came out), I think people harp just way too much on the cat puzzle (which is also pretty much the only goofy dated puzzle in the game) and don't even care what a great game and story it is (beating Dan Brown at his own game five years earlier). I'm just being pissy, gonna binge all your channel now, mate 😀
great video, but the jumpscare clip at the end was unpleasant.
I don't think that grim fandango is in any way beautifull. I think it is one of the ugliest Lucas Arts game. Even the older Myst is looking better than Grim Fandango, because Myst was a render adventure and not 3D. 1998 was a way to soon for a 3D-adventures. It looked terrible and the controls were clunky. I think the biggest problem with adventure games these days is the attention span. Games like Myst or Maniac Mansion are requiring long time of combination, trying and puzzling per puzzle. Getting stuck and finally find the answer by yourself is a big part of the experience. You need patience for the game, and a lot of modern gamers aren't patient with games. Back in the "golden ages" of gaming just a few nerds played games, people that were already passionate about their hobby, that knew a bit about hardware and software to solve problems (and there were a lot) by themselfs. They were motivated to invest a lot of time in little progress.
Today the gaming community is a lot bigger, gaming is a part of mainstream culture and a big part of gamers aren't that invested like the strange nerds of the past. There is a trend in modern games to appeal to the biggest possible crowd, getting more "casual". And that is a good thing for games, because gaming is no strange thing for a few, strange people, but a big part of our society enjoys gaming today. But this makes it harder for good adventure games. If they got to dumbed down, the original fans didn't like them anymore, because the one big thing that made them fun in the past is gone. But if they are hard, just a little part of the gaming community would buy and play them, becaue they got frustrated with them, and didn't enjoy the puzzles at all. In adventure games you can't just make changable difficulities, like in shooters and RPGs.
Adventures like Portal and The Witness used the 3D-World in their puzzle designes, but adventures hadn't a comeback in the mainstream gaming. The adventure genre is a niche genre, albeith it is diverse as fuck today. You have plattforming adventures like limbo, dumbed down adventures like the telltale epidemic, mystlikes like obduction, 3D-puzzlers like Witness and Portal, adventures that trying to break the 3rd wall and use a very different approach to solve puzzles, like The Temporal Invasion, and you have the legacies of the old lucasarts adventures, the daedalic games, and a whole bunch of oldschool 2d-pixel-pnc-adventures. There was even an adventure MMO that is still alive and running, after 14 years, and over the last decades there were a lot of crime solving adventure games. Adventure was never dead, it was just niche, and with the higher appreciation of little games in the media, the sudden love for indy games and platforms as steam that made it easier for little games to sell they become more visible today.
Was about to ask for a game title but then I read the description. Kudos to you man for naming the games you find worth showing.
Weren't the obnoxious puzzles in those adventure games one of the things that killed them in the first place? Like, I don't know that much of Gabriel Knights 3's Cat Puzzle, but sometimes… puzzles back in the 90's were between hallucinogenic or "what the hell where they on when they thought of this"', no ?
Resident Evil 4.
So I know this statement makes it appear like I've missed the point of the video, but I think I want to see a 2d rendition of Grim Fandango. Just to see if it could be done without the use of 3d (which I found a pain to navigate with when I first played it). You mention in the video that there is a puzzle that requires the use of 3d, could you go into detail why that puzzle needs 3d?
Hello! This was very enjoyable. An additional factor, surely, is that other game genres started being able to amalgamate elements of adventure games into themselves. So in the 90s, adventure games were pretty much the only place you could go for complex stories, dialogue, humour etc. As technology and manpower on other game genres rapidly accelerated, you could package up all these elements as cut scenes or voice-overs in 3D shooters and other genres. At the same time, games like Tomb Raider were combining action with puzzle-solving. Suddenly you find yourself wondering why you're having to click to move a character around and or use a rubber chicken on a zipwire when you could be leaping about around a fully realised 3D world while watching an epic tale unfold.
I JUST REALIZED THAT THE TALOS PRINCIPLE IS AN ADVENTURE GAME TOO!!
What do you think about Telltale games? They are still adventure games, but rather primarily focused on the story telling and character development compared to puzzle solving. Would you consider the Telltale games spiritual successors to the old puzzle adventure ones? (Btw, I also grew up with Monkey Island, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango 😀 )
This was the most detailed and thoughtful discussion on this topic I've seen, thank you 🙂
awesome, thanks mate!
Fighting games, stealth games, adventure games… and dark souls.
It's funny you mention RTS games since they're basically died to the same rampant stagnation and adherence to old design rules that killed adventure games. Homeworld and Myth tried to do something interesting with 3D spaces but even modern RTS games don't really give a shit about it.
I love you too innuendo studios
I'm really surprised you didn't mention Portal or the Talos Principle in this. Anyway, one of the big reasons that adventure games died out for awhile like they did was that as you said, they failed to innovate. But I think you missed why. In fps games there was always someone who had an idea then that idea was copied but the copiers never were able to top that idea. The genre made enough money for people to want the next big thing and eventually someone would come up with an idea, they would try it, it would be a huge hit and that idea would be copied.
Wasn't Half-Life the first to use WASD and mouse look by default? A pro Quake player was the one who introduced it to many but I was convinced that I played Quake with only arrow keys or used the mouse to walk.
Yes, this video is almost 2 years old. Yes, I am watching this for serious gaming discussion. But also yes, I smiled at the part where you go "I love everyone, most of all you!"
this was before undertale, gotta say, that really put adventure games back on the map
Going through your videos, probably after seeing you recommended in Dan Recommends, and I'm liking your stuff a lot. Only thing that bugs me on this one – did you really have to end on a jump scare? :/
Some people need the captions. Can you put game titles in the annotations so we can get the auto-generated subtitles?
Goddamn that scare jump at the end!!!
You jerk, I remembered that Walking Dead scene and I still jumped! XD
it's very weird listening to this discussion from germany, where point&click adventure games are still pretty strong with daedelic as the spearhead
FUCK YO EUCLIDIAN GEOMETRY. IF I DONT HAVE AT LEAST 4 ANEURYSMS AFTER WALKING 10 FEEY FORWARD, YOU'RE DOIN IT WRONG
adventure games: what do they know? do they know things? let's find out!
WTF ? no quantic dream games in this video? want a modern adventure game ?, play heavy rain, beyond tow souls and Fahrenheit
While I don't think all adventure games should take this route, there is something to be said for Professor Layton's approach to it. Basically, separate the puzzles from the environment completely and make them self-contained brainteasers. It's certainly an effective way of solving the "adventure game logic" issue, if nothing else.
what game's map is shown in 5:44?
I kind of wanted to post something about Portal and how it takes advantage of the changes to 3D – First Person games and applies them to a puzzle environment by mixing both but instead I am just gonna look in astonishment at the comment section as I see some of my favorite YouTubers just casually commenting on here. How did I only see this video now and why didn't it go viral?
But, who killed Guybrush Threepwood?
I'm so glad you brought up the IF community, because that's been seeing some awesome iteration lately too. I'm a total sucker for the classics in Inform, but seeing what people are doing with newer stuff like Twine is super interesting.
I'm a little confused why the captions just have the titles of the games, and don't, you know, actually caption what you're saying. That makes the caption feature for this video absolutely useless for this video.
"…they scoped up their budgets and their dev time trying to compete with the Dooms and the Half-Lifes and the Calls of Duty in the world." Interestingly, Sierra published Half-Life around the same time as the release/development of their own 3D adventure games, like KQ Mask of Eternity, Gabriel Knight III, and Quest for Glory V. It's a shame that Sierra had no creative involvement with Half-Life, because Half-Life feels very much like an FPS successor to Sierra's own adventure titles. It's ironic, because no one expected Half-Life to be as successful as it was, and its success probably made things much harder for Sierra. I'm surprised that Sierra didn't try to develop adventure games with Half-Life's engine: it would've interesting to see a spin-off of King's Quest, Quest for Glory, Leisure Suit Larry, or Police Quest in Half-Life's vein. Some Half-Life mods like Heart of Evil proved that adventure game mechanics could work in Half-Life. It wouldn't be out of the ordinary for an adventure game to use an FPS's engine as a base, since Grim Fandango's own engine was based off the Sith Engine, which was used for the awesome FPS Dark Forces II: Jedi Knight.
In speaking of adventure games competing with Doom, it's a shame that no adventure games were made with Doom's engine. I mean, the closest to Doom adventure games were Hexen and Strife, and they were more like fusions of FPS/RPG/adventure. If a Doom adventure game had been made, it would just need to focus on art and explorable levels, no weaponry (except for rare occasions), a focus on item gathering and puzzles, and a borrowing from Strife's dialogue system. Considering what modders could do with Doom's engine nowadays, such an adventure game could be possible.
Back to Half-Life, there are times when I wished that Half-Life incorporated more adventure game mechanics in its narrative. Considering what Half-Life 2 and its various Source engine successors are capable of, I'm surprised that there haven't been an Source-based adventure games made.
Great video! Just found your channel by way of your equally great alt-right playbook. I just got one thing I must say: I LOVE Gabriel Knight 3, it's honestly one of my favorite games of all time (and it's way past my time, I was just six when it came out), I think people harp just way too much on the cat puzzle (which is also pretty much the only goofy dated puzzle in the game) and don't even care what a great game and story it is (beating Dan Brown at his own game five years earlier).
I'm just being pissy, gonna binge all your channel now, mate 😀
great video, but the jumpscare clip at the end was unpleasant.
I don't think that grim fandango is in any way beautifull. I think it is one of the ugliest Lucas Arts game. Even the older Myst is looking better than Grim Fandango, because Myst was a render adventure and not 3D.
1998 was a way to soon for a 3D-adventures. It looked terrible and the controls were clunky.
I think the biggest problem with adventure games these days is the attention span. Games like Myst or Maniac Mansion are requiring long time of combination, trying and puzzling per puzzle. Getting stuck and finally find the answer by yourself is a big part of the experience. You need patience for the game, and a lot of modern gamers aren't patient with games.
Back in the "golden ages" of gaming just a few nerds played games, people that were already passionate about their hobby, that knew a bit about hardware and software to solve problems (and there were a lot) by themselfs.
They were motivated to invest a lot of time in little progress.
Today the gaming community is a lot bigger, gaming is a part of mainstream culture and a big part of gamers aren't that invested like the strange nerds of the past. There is a trend in modern games to appeal to the biggest possible crowd, getting more "casual". And that is a good thing for games, because gaming is no strange thing for a few, strange people, but a big part of our society enjoys gaming today.
But this makes it harder for good adventure games.
If they got to dumbed down, the original fans didn't like them anymore, because the one big thing that made them fun in the past is gone. But if they are hard, just a little part of the gaming community would buy and play them, becaue they got frustrated with them, and didn't enjoy the puzzles at all.
In adventure games you can't just make changable difficulities, like in shooters and RPGs.
Adventures like Portal and The Witness used the 3D-World in their puzzle designes, but adventures hadn't a comeback in the mainstream gaming. The adventure genre is a niche genre, albeith it is diverse as fuck today. You have plattforming adventures like limbo, dumbed down adventures like the telltale epidemic, mystlikes like obduction, 3D-puzzlers like Witness and Portal, adventures that trying to break the 3rd wall and use a very different approach to solve puzzles, like The Temporal Invasion, and you have the legacies of the old lucasarts adventures, the daedalic games, and a whole bunch of oldschool 2d-pixel-pnc-adventures. There was even an adventure MMO that is still alive and running, after 14 years, and over the last decades there were a lot of crime solving adventure games.
Adventure was never dead, it was just niche, and with the higher appreciation of little games in the media, the sudden love for indy games and platforms as steam that made it easier for little games to sell they become more visible today.
Was about to ask for a game title but then I read the description. Kudos to you man for naming the games you find worth showing.
Weren't the obnoxious puzzles in those adventure games one of the things that killed them in the first place? Like, I don't know that much of Gabriel Knights 3's Cat Puzzle, but sometimes… puzzles back in the 90's were between hallucinogenic or "what the hell where they on when they thought of this"', no ?
Resident Evil 4.
So I know this statement makes it appear like I've missed the point of the video, but I think I want to see a 2d rendition of Grim Fandango. Just to see if it could be done without the use of 3d (which I found a pain to navigate with when I first played it).
You mention in the video that there is a puzzle that requires the use of 3d, could you go into detail why that puzzle needs 3d?
Hello! This was very enjoyable. An additional factor, surely, is that other game genres started being able to amalgamate elements of adventure games into themselves. So in the 90s, adventure games were pretty much the only place you could go for complex stories, dialogue, humour etc. As technology and manpower on other game genres rapidly accelerated, you could package up all these elements as cut scenes or voice-overs in 3D shooters and other genres. At the same time, games like Tomb Raider were combining action with puzzle-solving. Suddenly you find yourself wondering why you're having to click to move a character around and or use a rubber chicken on a zipwire when you could be leaping about around a fully realised 3D world while watching an epic tale unfold.
I JUST REALIZED THAT THE TALOS PRINCIPLE IS AN ADVENTURE GAME TOO!!
What do you think about Telltale games? They are still adventure games, but rather primarily focused on the story telling and character development compared to puzzle solving. Would you consider the Telltale games spiritual successors to the old puzzle adventure ones? (Btw, I also grew up with Monkey Island, Full Throttle and Grim Fandango 😀 )
This was the most detailed and thoughtful discussion on this topic I've seen, thank you 🙂
awesome, thanks mate!
Fighting games, stealth games, adventure games… and dark souls.
It's funny you mention RTS games since they're basically died to the same rampant stagnation and adherence to old design rules that killed adventure games. Homeworld and Myth tried to do something interesting with 3D spaces but even modern RTS games don't really give a shit about it.
I love you too innuendo studios
I'm really surprised you didn't mention Portal or the Talos Principle in this. Anyway, one of the big reasons that adventure games died out for awhile like they did was that as you said, they failed to innovate. But I think you missed why. In fps games there was always someone who had an idea then that idea was copied but the copiers never were able to top that idea. The genre made enough money for people to want the next big thing and eventually someone would come up with an idea, they would try it, it would be a huge hit and that idea would be copied.
Wasn't Half-Life the first to use WASD and mouse look by default? A pro Quake player was the one who introduced it to many but I was convinced that I played Quake with only arrow keys or used the mouse to walk.
Yes, this video is almost 2 years old. Yes, I am watching this for serious gaming discussion. But also yes, I smiled at the part where you go "I love everyone, most of all you!"
9:38 me irl
this was before undertale, gotta say, that really put adventure games back on the map
Going through your videos, probably after seeing you recommended in Dan Recommends, and I'm liking your stuff a lot. Only thing that bugs me on this one – did you really have to end on a jump scare? :/
Some people need the captions. Can you put game titles in the annotations so we can get the auto-generated subtitles?
Goddamn that scare jump at the end!!!
You jerk, I remembered that Walking Dead scene and I still jumped! XD
it's very weird listening to this discussion from germany, where point&click adventure games are still pretty strong with daedelic as the spearhead
What's the game at 0:54?
FUCK YO EUCLIDIAN GEOMETRY. IF I DONT HAVE AT LEAST 4 ANEURYSMS AFTER WALKING 10 FEEY FORWARD, YOU'RE DOIN IT WRONG
adventure games: what do they know? do they know things? let's find out!
WTF ? no quantic dream games in this video? want a modern adventure game ?, play heavy rain, beyond tow souls and Fahrenheit
While I don't think all adventure games should take this route, there is something to be said for Professor Layton's approach to it. Basically, separate the puzzles from the environment completely and make them self-contained brainteasers. It's certainly an effective way of solving the "adventure game logic" issue, if nothing else.
sounds like thehiveleader high pitched
Game at 1:00?