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How would you evolve the adventure genre?
Still, in my book it’s definitely the best installment in the series since The Smoking Mirror
Is that a typo or a very unpopular opinion?
I thought the general concensus was that Shadow of the Templars is one of the best adventure games.
I’m a little confused by your answer Origami! Why would you consider Dag’s reply as a typo or unpopular opinion???? & along with your following comment seems completely out of touch & irrelevant to his reply which I completely agree with BTW! If English is not your 1st language maybe you don’t understand the meaning of the word ‘since’?
Indeed, English isn’t my first language. It is my 3rd/4th. Shameful boasting lol.
But you are right. I mistakenly considered the word ‘since’ synonymous to ‘after’ in that moment, implying that Smoking Mirrors is considered best and in second place comes BS5. Don’t know what led to that confusion.
And unpopular opinion wasn’t meant in a bad way. Just to point out that it is not the popular(favoured by most) opinion, not criticizing the legitimacy of it.
One thing, in the case of the Broken Sword, the best option was to stop trying to evolve the genre and go back to its roots.
Oculus Rift will open up new avenues in the genre for sure!
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
- Carl Sagan
I see no indication that 2D animation is dying out, with Daedelic churning them out like there’s no tomorrow, but there’s no doubt the quality has plummeted.
2D animation is very much alive, I’m talking about frame by frame animation, which is indeed dying out, and is the very reason the quality has plummeted. Games like chains of satinav uses cut out and a bone tool, which is why the characters looks like puppets on a string. Compare the animations in Chains with those of The Whispered World, which is drawn frame by frame, and you’ll probably see the enormous difference. It takes a whole lot more time doing animations in this way, but it’s well worth the effort (visually that is, maybe not economically).
What about some of the DS games? Professor Layton in particular looks like it is animated frame-by-frame, the same as CoMI. The cutscenes have a very similar feel to them.
What about some of the DS games? Professor Layton in particular looks like it is animated frame-by-frame, the same as CoMI. The cutscenes have a very similar feel to them.
Yes, Layton is mostly frame by frame, but as is very common in Japanese anime, there is an exaggerated use of “holds”, meaning that, for example, a character freezes in a pose while only the mouth, eyes, or parts of the hair is animated. This is used in american animation aswell, but in Japan they tend to be very obvious about it. The main purpose of this technique is to save time, not to enhance the quality of the animations, and is part of the reason why some American animators label Japanese anime as “lazy”.
Traditional animation is a lot more common in Japan, but it seems to be crumbling even there. Japanese animators have been quite reluctant (compared to the west) to move away from traditional techniques, but there’s been an increased use of CGI in Japanese anime over the past decade. After Studio Ghibli (one of the most prominent Japanese animation studios) announced last year that they would be pausing their productions in the wake of Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement, their future is uncertain, and there’s speculation that they’ll never produce another movie, and I suspect that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Like adventure games, traditional animation will probably never go away entirely, there will always be some enthusiasts working desperately to keep it alive, but I don’t think it’s likely that it will ever pick up and continue to evolve from where it left off in the golden age. Maybe some time in the future, there’ll be some sorts of renaissance.
Duckman: Can you believe it? Five hundred bucks for a parking ticket?
Cornfed Pig: You parked in a handicapped zone.
Duckman: Who cares? Nobody parks there anyway, except for the people who are supposed to park there and, hell, I can outrun them anytime.
Heck, even the definition of “traditional” has changed. Moving on to digital drawing was inevitable and was a great step forward in streamlining the process (I shudder to think of the hours and hours of painstakingly painting in what’s now done with a click of a bucket tool), but yeah I agree it’s sad that it’s an art that’s not as present anymore in adventure games. I mean, in a way it is in the pixel art ones, but those have very limited movement almost by definition; it suits them, but I still long for having my jaw drop like when I first saw the Alladin or Lion King “you died” animations, that was a holy crap moment I rarely experienced again.
Speaking of trad. animation and Lion King, I know it’s sort of a tangent but I recommend everyone watch this Double Fine developers play, a lot of insight about how the game guys worked with the Disney animators who had no experience with games, great watch.
I can’t be the only one saddened by the fact that ALL the major animated features are now 3d. I mean I understand it from a business point, but SCREW the business point. Watching stuff like the Aristocats or 101 Dalmatians gets me all sighing and nostalgic.
And since we’re on the subject, we’re using frame by frame for our game, and it’s a bitch to control and make sure it looks great and takes up a LOT of time, but after experimenting and readjusting schedules and budgets… I wouldn’t have it any other way.
(work in progress)
So happy there are people who will appreciate the effort.
I think the puppet animation trend is completely explainable due to Spine and other similar software that’s made it so much easier for small indies to have their cake and eat it, too (2d and no frame by frame). Ultimately it’s down to convincing someone who can afford the hardware and software costs that it IS worth spending a couple of months and dollars extra just to have it look the way you dream it - good graphics tablets are expensive, good animation software is expensive… I don’t think it’s a cakewalk for most teams.
Whew, sorry about the wall of text, I just get all excited when I see adventure games and traditional animation in the same context
With recent European 2D animated feature films, I can’t even tell how much of it is done by hand and how much is computer generated, I just know they look exceptional. I’m talking about movies like Le jour des corneilles, Le tableau, Loulou, l’incroyable secret (and I can name a couple dozens more). I think in many aspects they’re technically superior to any old style cartoon. As one example, it used to be nearly impossible to create complex moving shadows or patterns seen in recent titles, because the slightest mismatch between the frames would result in flickering.
Getting back on topic (or closer to the topic), sprite animation unfortunately has serious disadvantages when combined with interactivity. If you only have bitmaps for right-to-left movement, while the character needs to move to the left and a bit forward or back, this creates an unpleasant gliding effect, where the animation phases don’t quite match how the sprite is moved across the screen. Same issue when the character needs to turn. Night of the Rabbit is amazingly beautiful, but that strafing effect is often noticeable there. Also it limits how much you can zoom in and out on the character without noticeable quality loss.
With 3D models you can use pretty much any camera perspective. You can put the viewpoint behind the character, very close and above him, to create the feeling of a small confined space, and the next scene can be a vast open location with a different camera perspective.
In the end it really boils down to the gameplay and the atmosphere. When (in late 1990s?) the developers started saying, ‘2D is outdated, we need to move to 3D’, that resulted in games with completely lifeless pre-rendered backgrounds, no background activities/animations, very little interactivity. That was the problem.
^
Don’t forget to mention L’illusioniste.
@ Mr Bagg.. ehm Underhill! Thanks for that link, a really interesting watch. There was a great chemistry between Greg Rice and Louis Castle, and Greg came prepared! He’d obviously been practising the games. I don’t think I ever played Aladdin, but I remember struggling with that monkey throwing puzzle in Lion King. Difficult, but fun game. Love the animations. -And great gif of Kitteh! 
@Lancelot, great movie suggestions! A couple of them were already on my “to watch-list”, but I hadn’t heard of Loulou, l’incroyable secret before. It’s now added to my list. Thank you
Duckman: Can you believe it? Five hundred bucks for a parking ticket?
Cornfed Pig: You parked in a handicapped zone.
Duckman: Who cares? Nobody parks there anyway, except for the people who are supposed to park there and, hell, I can outrun them anytime.
Would it make sense to have a kind of a sandbox adventure game? I started wondering about it after experiencing yet another hilarious (non-scripted!) event in Far Cry 4. I was flying around in the buzzer minding my own business. Two soldiers in a car noticed me, turned towards me and immediately fell off a cliff.
So I wondered what an adventure game in the FC4 universe would be like. Suppose you’re given the task to bring that car to the rebels’ base. You can do it any way you like. You can make the soldiers chase you and lure them to the base that way. You can tamper with a road sign to send them the wrong way (okay, I’m stealing that idea from another game). You can make sure that something happens to the driver, then impersonate him and drive the car to the destination yourself. And so on.
Or suppose you need to smuggle a rare animal through a checkpoint. You can hide the cage between many other cages with non-contraband animals. Or you can attach the cage to the buzzer and fly across. Or bribe a customs officer.
But I’m not completely sure that idea would work. It all becomes too action-oriented. I’m not thinking about an action game with puzzle elements, the focus has to be on the puzzles. It shouldn’t make you replay the chase ten times to get it right. Maybe it even should be done from a tactical perspective, where you issue the commands and then just observe how it plays out. And of course the player shouldn’t be made to roam through a huge map trying to figure out what’s relevant for one small puzzle.
Talos Principle is doing something similar, but I’m thinking about something geared towards puzzles in the sense of traditional adventure games, not logic puzzles.
[Another small off-topic note: Le Tableau is actually a 3D movie. But it only goes to show .]
i used to think the sandbox genre might pump new energy in adventure games. The selling point for sandbox games are their depth of interaction (you can do stuff besides killing things) and that’s a big draw card for me at least. David Cage tried it and said he wasn’t happy with the results. Basically, you have these large worlds but most of it is just for show - an issue I felt with GTA V. LA Noire was an extremely well written game but it also fell into the same trap. Phenomenal cosmic powers, itty bitty living space. I don’t know what will draw money to the kind of games I like. Marketing seems pretty effective.
I’m not sure classic adventures needs to evolve much. In some ways genre evolved already, with action-adventure hybrids and games like Heavy Rain and Walking Dead. I still prefer classic point&clicks; like Broken Age though.
However, I do think adventures in VR will be great. Especially in room-sized VR (that HTC Vive will offer this year).
There are already Occultus Rift and Project Morpheus adventure games out there and people love them, say they are great.
Right now, all modes of adventure games are in production - text, cartoon, FMV, rendered, rotoscoped. There’s something for everyone.
I tend to play all of them, VR adventure games should be super, but won’t in any way means the other types of adventure games will decrease in popularity.
I enjoy playing adventure games on my Alienware M17 r4 and my Nintendo Switch OLED.
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