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King’s Quest announced (Re-imagined by The Odd Gentlemen)
Does anybody actually read this thread?
no! , not since it became odd.
Does anybody actually read this thread?
no! , not since it became odd.
What I’m hearing is that people basically want Skyrim with adventure game puzzles. Sigh…
...how would that not be incredible? no adventure game has ever come close to its ambition.
I think it would cause more problems than you realize—a giant open-ended world would mean that puzzle solutions would have to be EXTREMELY easy or so blatantly telegraphed that it made it impossible not to immediately know what you had to do and where to go. Any kind of obscurity with the puzzles would lead to endless wandering. I’m not saying it COULDN’T be done, but the bigger the world, the harder time players have not getting lost and sidetracked. We found this out with QFI, which has a much larger gameworld than most comparable adventure games (of course it doesn’t even come close to something like Skyrim,) but it was still problematic for some players who didn’t carefully keep track of what they were supposed to be doing. We made a direct design decision early on not to include a quest log, because we felt that it, combined with the fast-travel system, would make it too easy to simply plow right through all of the game’s plot points and activities.
I don’t know—it could be done, I suppose, but it would take absolutely masterful puzzle design to create puzzles and situations that actually WORKED in an open world, not to mention a story that felt urgent enough to keep the player pushing consistently forward with the plot.
I’ll sign up for masterful puzzle design and a good story, thanks.
I think imagining it as somehow directly Skyrim w/o combat is lacking imagination. I could easily picture huge scale huge budget adventure games working brilliantly given a good dev team. They don’t have to follow some familiar format to be more “open world”. First off, I WANT to be on my own in a game. I want to not know exactly where to go sometimes. If there is one thing I’m begging of AG makers, it’s to leave me the F alone to figure out the puzzles myself. I love the idea of a big open world full of secrets to discover. To me, that’s exactly what old games were like. There’s nothing about KQ1 that felt “closed” to me. If there’s an item you need somewhere out in the wilderness, there are plenty of ways to clue the player. Red Dead Redemption did that pretty well with the treasure hunting challenge.
Having played P.B Winterbottom, I certainly hope they’re better at designing adventure games than they are at designing puzzle games.
Having played P.B Winterbottom, I certainly hope they’re better at designing adventure games than they are at designing puzzle games.
What was wrong with it? I thought it was pretty good in the puzzles, nice balance of difficulty.
Might just be me, I think if in a puzzle game you know what you want to do and it takes several attempts to succeed due to tight timing or difficulty of jumps, then the game is problematic.
Might just be me, I think if in a puzzle game you know what you want to do and it takes several attempts to succeed due to tight timing or difficulty of jumps, then the game is problematic.
I see what you mean, sometimes it could be a bit frustrating lining up the clones one in top of the other, even after figuring out the solution.
First off, I WANT to be on my own in a game. I want to not know exactly where to go sometimes. If there is one thing I’m begging of AG makers, it’s to leave me the F alone to figure out the puzzles myself. I love the idea of a big open world full of secrets to discover. To me, that’s exactly what old games were like. There’s nothing about KQ1 that felt “closed” to me. If there’s an item you need somewhere out in the wilderness, there are plenty of ways to clue the player. Red Dead Redemption did that pretty well with the treasure hunting challenge.
YES, YES, YES.
That’s exactly how I feel.
I understand that some people may prefer games with overarching plots that constantly feel “urgent”, and that’s fine, but I like doing my own thing and being able to freely roam in the world, trying to figure everything out.
King’s Quest 4 is a game I always enjoy replaying because I feel so free to do whatever I want and can even swim out to some island. Yes, there’s a plot, but you kind of forget about it at times and get involved with cool, imaginative, fun subplots that put you in such crazy situations like getting swallowed by a whale or exploring a haunted house. That’s how I think the open world vs. plot urgency issue could be resolved; have several smaller, interesting subplots in different areas of the land. It’s okay if the player is more focused on each of those mini stories at the time and if each subplot seems only loosely connected to the others. Having one dominant, restrictive, linear story dictating all the action takes away too much of the player’s freedom.
Having a lot of freedom makes the world feel bigger and more real to me, and I hope the new King’s Quest has that open feel. Also, I would also advocate for plenty of chances for death (adds tension and also makes the world feel more real), but that’s another debate. I’m also hopeful the new game has a grand adventure feel to it (similar to how the classic games had you soaring with an owl over vast lands, facing off with dragons, setting sail for some scary magic island, riding unicorns to evil fairy castles, transforming into animals to escape danger, etc.)
I think imagining it as somehow directly Skyrim w/o combat is lacking imagination. I could easily picture huge scale huge budget adventure games working brilliantly given a good dev team. They don’t have to follow some familiar format to be more “open world”.
Gamers in general seem to have a big problem with imagination in this respect, adventure gamers in particular. The “major” problems that 3D-haters have with the idea of large 3D adventure games would all be solvable by a competent dev team, and those of us who are unbiased could brainstorm our own solutions as well (and have done so in this thread).
I just finished The Testament of Sherlock Holmes, and while it’s not fully open world, the locations it has are fairly large and linear in form, it does a lot of things right when 3D adventures are discussed.
The first thing that pops in my mind is that it grants the user a freedom of control. You can either use the point and click interface or you can move in 3d person over the shoulder mode or use the 1st person mode. Each work pretty nicely, but I did play mostly with the combination of 3rd person and 1st person modes.
It also does the exploration of gameworld fairly well, though in some cases it was a bit annoying if you needed some specific object, like a rope and had to get the rope from somewhere instead of just cutting a piece of rope next to you with a knife.
I think in a free world adventure one important point would be, that most of the puzzles aren’t “the object” based (unless it’s some very specific object, like the crown of England), but the player could use any similar object in order to solve it.
A good sign.
Nice to see that Roberta is involved at least in some capacity. I wonder if she’ll get some sort of “advisor” credit as well as creator cred.
now sierra is sorta ‘on-line’ again
I wonder where they parked their boat.
There are another couple of images on Facebook that show their design for King Graham.
That’s a great picture! It’s always heartwarming for me to see Roberta and Ken, and I hope this new King’s Quest will be treated with care. Also, I’m glad Ken is holding onto his trademark mustache.
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