Unofficial Tex Murphy

Welllllll, it's been a long time since I have made a pretentious post about how to save the gaming world! A discussion with peers about the nature of interaction and active narrative in shooters and RPG got me to think about adventure and puzzle games in general.

And I really don't know why I've never thought of this before!

Over the years, the sin of inventory puzzles, other kind of puzzles and adventure games in general became painfully obvious. It lacked true interactivity. The scripted nature of the environment required that you found the ONE specific solution with the ONE specific approach to sometimes complex problems, using ONE unique tool, despite having a ton of tools in your inventory.

When you think about it, no other genre of games are like this. Even the most linear shooters will allow you to use your tools in your own way to approach the battlefield with your own tactics.

Games like Incredible Machine always had one obvious scripted solution, but gave you a creative and flexible environment allowing you to come up with your own weird solutions, as long as it yielded the desired result. The strategy game Commandos, by Eidos, gave you four characters with four different abilities, and let you loose in a sandbox to carry out your mission, using your four "tools" in your own creative way. Yes there was an optimal script for each mission, but, again, the sandbox was flexible enough to find your own custom approach.

Mathematics work like this too. You can use different formulas and paths to solve one problem.

How many times, in adventure games, especially the wacky ones like Monkey Island, have you tried to use some inventory item to solve a problem and be frustrated by a failure, when the scripted solution was so much more far fetched?

And so I'm thinking, adventure games of the future should strive to create a flexible environment where creative solutions, sometimes not even thought of by the devs, could actually work out. Like that one scene from Apollo 13, where they try to fit a circle into a square, or vice versa, I always forget! Think of how rewarding it would be, to come up with your own solution to a problem, with the tools and abilities at your disposal!

Food for thoughts!

The puzzles we see in video games are an extension of the kinds of puzzles and thought exercises that existed on paper and in book long before video games. Just because they're old doesn't mean they're bad. But it does mean it's awkward to apply them to an interactive environment without literally putting them in the game as something you encounter, rather than something you live through using game mechanics.

But puzzles are something which need to be designed with a beginning and an end. Otherwise you'd go nuts trying to figure out what to do because everything is an option.

The illogical item pairing problem is an issue which has long been with adventure games. I think Tesla Effect kept that to a minimum, but no one has the patience to sit through something like Myst anymore. Or ever-- I needed a guide even in the 90s.

joliet_jane wrote:but no one has the patience to sit through something like Myst anymore. Or ever-- I needed a guide even in the 90s.

LOL, we did Myst without any guides, hints, etc. Took us 2 weeks to finish the game. You should have seen the paper we had, with notes, diagrams, codes, keys, etc., scattered all over the room: floor, bed, desktop, drawers, walls; especially for the rain forest where you had to turn all those valves to redirect where the water goes, so it could power the elevators and other stuff.

It was a bit nuts, but we did it, and my wife learned to love adventure games

I tried to play Myst, I truly did. But then I found the parody game, Pyst, and really liked that. Not only was it shorter, but it had John Goodman in it as the Pyst king I think. Crude humor? Absolutely. A 13 year old adolescent's game. But if I'm going to pass time wasting it on gaming, I figured it was better to laugh out loud than get irritated at my lack of genius.

Frank wrote:And so I'm thinking, adventure games of the future should strive to create a flexible environment where creative solutions, sometimes not even thought of by the devs, could actually work out.

I think the only real way such a thing could exist if the puzzle revolves around physics and the players ability to navigate the environment. Otherwise, the Stanley Parable covers this pretty well, in one of its paths. Your choices and destinations are entirely limited to what is designed into the game.

That said, if there were multiple solutions to a problem, much like the game Stacking, then it would be easier for the player to progress on the idea that at least one of the solutions is likely going to be apparent to the player, as opposed to having to find the one solution, or the one item, required to progress. The problem with that is creating multiple solutions and routes requires development time and money on things most players will not see, unless they play the game again.

Vracar wrote:

Frank wrote:And so I'm thinking, adventure games of the future should strive to create a flexible environment where creative solutions, sometimes not even thought of by the devs, could actually work out.

The problem with that is creating multiple solutions and routes requires development time and money on things most players will not see, unless they play the game again.

It's a problem, but it's not uncommon to other genres. Granted it is a mentality of the late 90's, early 2000s, the idea of creating content most people will miss is still out there. The very nature of interactivity requires it, in fact. Psychonauts has hours of dialogues most players will never hear, because they'd never think to try some thing or another. The magic of games, over books or movies, is precisely when that one guy tries this outrageously ridiculous action and finds an appropriate reaction and answer to it. That's priceless. That's gaming.

That's the ONE aspect no other medium can ever provide. The ability to explore a world and discover a story at your own pace, through your own action. It was the basic mentality behind Deus Ex, easily the most complex and developed game out there. More than half of the content can't possibly bee seen on the first playthrough, and fans still discover new things to this day.

You still find this philosophy in some modern titles, such as Fallout New Vegas or Dishonored. But multiple approaches to cerebral problems are rarely tackled on. While I agree there is probably no room for a polished strictly puzzle games, I think the idea of rethinking the approach to problems can still give birth to an updated version of story-driven adventures.

I think the trouble with adventure games at the moment is that there's a perception that their ability to be creative has come to a standstill. I somewhat agree with this and, begrudgingly, I have to offer The Tesla Effect as an example. It's a terrific game which I played and re-played in full for all the endings and paths. But I also payed close attention to the reviews and they all said the same; despite its many strengths, Tesla Effect was too invested in its past to have a place in modern gaming. This is perfectly applicable to the adventure genre.

The trouble with adventure games is that the style of play is too segmented. Walk, talk and puzzle. It's perfectly apparent when each of these modes of gameplay are activated. Irrespective of excellent story telling, the stop-start-stop style of puzzling and conversation can lack flow. This was one of my criticisms of both Tesla and Broken Sword 5; the gameplay was formulaic for the most part because of the static nature of each moment. When you're solving a puzzle, you're solving a puzzle. That's it. Effectively the puzzles get to a point where the exploration elements just feel like a gallery or arcade you explore just to get to the puzzles and progress to the next stage of the game.

To this day I still think Deus Ex is worthy inspiration for how the gaming genre can evolve through alternate pathing and giving the player more of a say in how they resolve a plot point. Don't want to negotiate, hack or sneak? Fine, use force but there are consequences for this too. In fact, I'd even go as far as saying that this idea alone was pre-dated by The Pandora Directive. Sure, you can "buy" your way through parts of the game but the manner in which you obtain the cash is questionable which can lead to some darker paths. Perhaps the most recent example of this is the first Bioshock game where the decision to act selfishly leads to adverse consequences in the end. As a result, I needed to play the whole game again to see why my decisions were so wrong.

So, the evolution of puzzles and adventure rests somewhere within their ability to feel like an organic part of the gaming environment that reflects a choice of the player rather than merely being a chore to accomplish. The ultimate irony to all of this is that it has been done before, it's just the style of gameplay was quickly abandoned. Did players feel too overcome with the choice to want to continue? Did the games not hold their hands enough? Are gamers not adventurous enough to go down a metaphorical (or perhaps literal) rabbits hole where the results are uncertain?

Well, I have an issue that I hate FPS. I haven't played Deus Ex, but Wikipedia says it combines FPS, stealth, and role playing. I would be cringing all the way through any FPS parts. Don't want 'em, can't stand 'em, hate 'em. They would spoil the game for me.

But the game is only as close to an FPS as you enable it to be. The point is, have a gameplay mechanic whereby you have the choice to play as an adventurer/sleuth/spy, action hero or an intellectual - for me I'd go a combination of all three, like James Bond. It can be done, but no developer wants to take the risk because they know it would call upon the players to actually think about what they're doing. That doesn't sell.

So, just to be clear, you're saying it's possible to play Deus Ex with zero FPS?

Apparently it is, yes. I personally haven't done it because it would involve a lot of stealth and planning throughout the game but there are also very clear moments where you have the option to negotiate or shoot your way through. Someone went as far as telling me they finished the game without drawing a weapon. This apparently includes the showdowns with the augments where they just used the kill switches.

Interesting. Sounds like quite a bit of work.....

A somewhat belated reply but I now have proof that it can be done. I don't expect you to sit through all two-hours, but here's a play video made for the specific purposes of proving the game can be played gun-free. This is from the latest instalment, Human Revolution:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8GKhbAEdYI

I'm not sure we're on the same page here. You're saying it can be done. I'm more about how easy it is to do. Many things can be done; it doesn't mean I want to. It's also about the feel of the game.

So I watched about 5 minutes of it. What's the first thing I see? The player holding a rifle. Granted, he puts it away, but......

Not my type of game. It's really an FPS. Playing without shooting doesn't really change that.

I'm glad you enjoy it though.

I too enjoy games like Deus Ex, Dishonored and won both without killing anyone. I also enjoyed LA Noire and would have liked it even more if they left out the GTA-style mechanics and just made it more focused on detective work. Games like those and even Mass Effect have major adventure-style game components even though they aren't adventure games themselves

I think games like the Talos Principle and Portal are steps in the right direction to innovate the genre. As opposed to static inventory, logic puzzles, or conversation trees, they rely more on a sandbox-style approach to allow players to figure out the solution to get ahead.

The balance between story progression and puzzle solving was dead-on too. I thought that Tesla Effect found a good balance too up until Sesan. After that the puzzle solving got too monotonous, and it felt like some of them didn't have anything to do with the story and that I was just solving them for the sake of solving them.