I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g.
King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so
that was novel and creative. Today the games tend
to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was
lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still
innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new
to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics
and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In
part this may be me getting older, but in part I also
think that the whole computer game segment got much
more boring over time.
I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.
Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense of sameness?
Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.
I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.
Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.
Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life
'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense
of sameness?
In short, no. There were >19,000 games released on steam this year alone in all possible genres (most of them not FPSs or simulators). Even if 90% are "bad" (because 90% of anything is bad) the top 10% (1,900) still span every possible genre including many that didn't exist in the 80s. I suggest that if you're truly interested in finding some modern gems that you try to search for communities that revolve around your interests (for example on reddit).
How many of those are puzzle-based classical Adventure Games like the recent Lucy dreaming?
Many of the genres are baloney, at least the stuff that comes back in search results as recent - it's all Work Simulator, a slow grind, the ubiquitous first person shooter, horror or everyone's favorite hack and slash genre.
We're drowning in numbers, is all you're really telling me.
It’s not a genre I care about so I don’t know. What I’m saying is that discoverability is bad but the supply is there. You need to work to find it. I find the games I like most via recommendations on genre-specific subreddits and discord servers.
If anything, now there is a discovery problem where the novel, incredible inventive games take longer to surface via word of mouth because there are so many. The quality and choice have never been higher. But that feeling that we’re all playing and enjoying the same things is gone.
100% agreed. The golden age of gaming is right now, Kickstarter and Steam have opened up the field to smaller studios in a way that has never happened before.
The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games can seem soulless.
But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it and better games coming out right now that there ever has been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed by imitators which grow the niche.
I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs" (and maybe a tiny amount of vague Rogue-like-likeness). If you read much about old games (e.g. [1]) it is obvious that the history of games is full of evolutionary dead-ends and forgotten mainstream games (and entire almost-forgotten mainstream genres).
Yeah, it's hard not to consider the runaway success of games like Stardew Valley as counterexamples to the idea that the creativity is completely gone. But you wouldn't blame someone if they superficially looked at screentshots and thought it was a run of the mill retro pixel game. But it's wild to me that there are people who come from broken homes or rough childhoods who say the game was literally therapy for them and showed them a vision of domestic life or human interaction that they could realistically replicate or at least shoot for in real life.
I'm currently playing a game that is a blatent rip-off of Stardew Valley to the point where I frequently question why they were so obvious. (Or maybe those elements are rip-offs of Harvest Moon, I haven't played Harvest Moon to know.) Still, it's enjoyable. The design elements and places where it does diverge from Stardew Valley make it more enjoyable in my opinion.
As the saying goes, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."
Harvest Moon defines the "Turning round a dilapidated farm in a small village where you give everyone gifts all the time" genre. It all comes from there.
EDIT: Stardew Valley has so many QoL improvements over harvest moon though. The early HM games are punishing.
> I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs
Huh? That is also an artifact of what kind of games you follow. Just of the top of my head:
- colony sims
- strategy games (tactical/operational/grand-, with rt, rt+pause, turnbased options for each)
- racing games
- 4x games
- flight sims
- spaceflight sims
- rpgs
- survival games
- shmups/ bullet hell
- roguelike/roguelite
- exploration
- rhytm games
- horror
- factory builder / management sim
Monkey Island. The difficulty of the first game and the difficulty of the last game. The last game was still a game, but the challenge wasn't there. It just wasn't there. We might as well just be playing Progress Quest.
Monkey Island 1 and 2 have deep memories for me. I'll never forget playing Monkey Island 2 during a cold Christmas when I was a kid. The PC speaker music was great (King's Quest V was my other present and I still remember the opening music). One day I got the Sound Blaster on my 486 SX and it blew my mind.
The Monkey Island that came out a few years ago sadly felt like a puzzle-free story for children and their parents to sit together to play. Elaine lacked humor and cynicism, there was a child's voice in some of the narration, the graphics were strangely cubic and stylistic instead of warm, and the characters seemed caricatures of themselves (like season 5 of a comedy series where the writing devolves into self-referential insider jokes about the past seasons).
I feel terrible saying that.
Will Adventure games come back, or are we lost on the new ADHD world of interruptible short content?
I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed interesting at the time because our access was so limited. Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the kinds of games that they actually prefer.
I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.
There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.
There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.
It's less mainstream, but there are still a lot of good adventure games released in the indie scene. The Crimson Diamond released last year got a lot of good press and is a text parser + graphical adventure game with an EGA style palette.
The Crimson Diamond is unique in that it's deliberately trying to evoke a very specific era and platform: late '80s, Sierra SCI engine. It's particularly inspired by The Colonel's Bequest. That's why it uses EGA-style graphics and parser input.
But adventure gaming never went away, it just became more and more of a niche. There are lots of high-quality amateur games, but there's been a steady tricky of high-quality "indie" commercial games since the '90s. I'd recommend Wadjet Eye Games' entire catalog: https://wadjeteyegames.com/games/
If this is your view of modern gaming, I think it’s you that has changed. This year alone my play list has been - blue prince, hollow knight: silksong, Ball X pit, split fiction, clair obscur, monster hunter wilds, arc raiders, helldivers 2 (came to Xbox, so this one is a stretch), nightrein, Indiana jones, dispatch… That’s on top of the “big” hitter that are still very fun experiences.
I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or other forms of first-person gaming.
AAA companies might pump out a lot of FPS- though it's arguable that they also grind out all sorts of other reliable and less-than-groundbreaking genres, from flavor of the decade trends (MMORPGs/MOBAs/live service battle royales/extraction shooters) to annual sports titles to Assassin's Creed sequels. The Call of Duty machine aside, I'm not sure if FPS is as much of a cash cow as it used to be.
And if you look at this best-selling video games list, there's only a single FPS in the top ten (PUBG, which is technically also third-person):
It might be that they're targeting the 8 - 18 year old boy demographic, and that's always a huge cash cow, whereas older gamers have refined taste but don't spend that much money on games because they don't spend that many hours on gaming
Here’s the highest rated games on PS5, Xbox and switch this year. There is _one_ first person shooter in the top ten of all three of these lists combined
Almost none of the FPS shooters try to to something creative, though. Duke Nukem 3D is still unbeaten for fun in multiplayer (and we still get it out now and then for that) with simple gimmicks like the holo duke, pipe bombs and laser mines.
Even just looking at "game uses 3D engine" we don't really have many great things. There's portal, and while some of the other stuff have promising ideas (like infinifactory), for all of them the controls tend to get in the way of fun.
For ease of use and fun pretty much all simulations - even as far back as the 90s - just using isometric projection are still unbeaten by attempts to go full 3D.
Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here) with the coming of Ultima Underworld.
That’s a fair point. I suppose if I wanted to focus on the first person perspective I could have mentioned Myst coming out the same year as DOOM, though I doubt it was even the first FP adventure game.
It was a real time action-adventure game with puzzles. TR made point and click adventures obsolete as they drove a puzzle-event bound game with free exploration. OTOH, text adventures would still be featureful and playable as they achieved incredible things very expensive to do with graphical games.
If Tomb Raider is an "adventure game" so is Donkey Kong. Tomb Raider is basically a platformer like Donkey Kong but in 3D. Neither made actual adventure games "obsolete" because taxing your hand-eye reflexes is a different sort of fun than taxing your brain.
Also, definitively, what killed the adventure genre would be the PS1 survival horrors. You have everything there: items, combinations, loads of puzzles, action and a shitfed perspective.
Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite Eve...
Pretty much the definition of an old 'point and click' aventure with action points.
> All games involve some kind of exploration, but I’m talking about something like Myst, the long-ago graphic adventures by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of the game was basically “click on everything everywhere.” Today, those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people who didn’t start playing videogames until they got an iPhone. But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)
- Darren Franich, "Metal Gear Solid: The strangest great videogame franchise"
I fondly remember playing games typed out from books and magazines when I was younger - although I usually tricked my little brother into typing out the game so we could both play it.
Jokes on me though, since now he can type at over 100 wpm (and uses dvorak)
One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.
Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many.
I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.
AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.
In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.
So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.
I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.
My experience was that in practice all that mapped-out world of most social mu*s was largely ignored by players; they'd all end up in a few gathering spots, or in private spaces disconnected from the main map, open only to their owners and people they teleported in.
MUDs are a low-tech version of what I'm describing. It relies on other people being available and generally leverages the usual tropes with repetitive killing-based gameplay.
LLMs are limited today, but one day they may be able to provide the well-paced narrative you're talking about. The LLM would be a skilled fiction writer that would introduce interesting events as I explore the world.
If I decide to go to a bar and talk to random strangers, it could give me interesting life stories to listen without any action. But, suddenly, a mysterious man walks in, gives me a sealed envelope and departs without saying a word... What is in the envelope?
You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character
and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that
is disruptive to those players who seek immersion.
It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when
you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from
playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was
the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a
unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had much fun actually doing a campaign.
The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.
It is my understanding that muds (and all the flavors of Mush in particular) can sort-of do it, by letting players create their own story through roleplay, supported by an extremely open (and often player-modifiable) world, as well as good admins / GMs.
That is more like "computer tabletop", however, and doesn't scale beyond a small number of players.
You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."
It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.
Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...
If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.
I've never played Avalon but it looks like a better text adventure. I'm not talking about hardcoded or randomized worlds, but truly reactive worlds.
In my experiment with ChatGPT, I was walking around in a museum (that was the scenario) and decided to flirt with a woman who happened to be there. The flirting was something I decided to do on the spot with no prompting from the AI. The woman had just been part of the room description up to that point. But it reacted to this new situation in a semi-realistic way, essentially creating a new "adventure" on the spot. I met her on the next day, brought a gift (and so did she), but then it started hallucinating... :(
It did for a long time, but depending on busy friends makes it so I can't play this whenever I want. My "dream" game is a single-player game I can play as many times I want without having to rely on others.
Something about the modern day fails to match the feelings of when MUDs were in their prime. With text you can describe so much more than a picture can paint. You can visualize a smell, a taste, or a feeling in text, but it doesn't translate well when you have graphics painting your imagination for you.
I'd just begun my first professional engineering job after college. The company I was working for had a mainframe computer on which there was a copy of Adventure. When I discovered the game, there were a number of late nights playing it. One night, long after everyone had gone home, I was playing in my office with the lights off. The only light was from the green phosphorous monitor I was using. All of a sudden, I stumbled into the breath-taking view room with its erupting volcano. The words describing the scene filled the screen with descriptive prose that simply glowed in the dark room. The effect was mesmerizing. Forty-seven years later, I've never forgotten that.
I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy.
While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored.
Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).
There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what you have to figure out to get the babel fish...
Text adventures whilst sometimes infuriating, if played as they are meant to be back when released with a piece of graph paper to help map out where you have been and where you go, there is still some magic about them that isn't had with graphical games. Every room becomes exciting which just isn't the case even in my favourite games such as Fallout New Vegas. Oh more bottle caps again in a drawer but I can begin to tell what rooms will be essential to look in and which won't buy the middle of the game. There is none of that in text games, you just have to explore and get truly lost, another thing that is much harder to do nowadays.
Some fantastic text adventures can still be had online. There are MUDs (my favorite), Roguelikes, Sims, and even cyberpunk adventures. A half dozen Star Wars ones as well.
This was peak 1986. A few years later and we’d be jumping a little pixel plumber on cathode ray tubes.
> Play was central to the formation of personal computer culture.
In his book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson applies this thesis to pretty much all the things. Enjoyable book, but the thesis probably does not hold up too much scrutiny.
For Spanish speakers there, there's "Aventura.z5" at IFDB, you can play it with a Frotz interpreter. It's 99% close to the original modulo some odd wordplay. The backstory and all it's the same, with the Mammoth Cave descriptions with the slaves and the like.
I think the most annoying thing of a lot of modern games is the whole crafting thing that is bolted onto everything. But there are some real gems out there for old school gamers. I loved Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity 2, Expedition 33 and Disco Elysium for example as really fun and interesting CRPG's. It's just that the cost of taking a risk these days is to high for studios and most kids are playing "free" games for most of their time. So even though the market is big it feels like the "growth" is mostly in the "free" games part of the market which is terrible.
I guess nowadays nobody would want to play e. g. King's Quest and what not, but in the 1980s or so that was novel and creative. Today the games tend to have powerful 3D engines, but the creativity was lost for the most part. Sometimes there is still innovation (Little Nightmares brought something new to the table, for instance) and of course the graphics and sounds are great, but something is gone now. In part this may be me getting older, but in part I also think that the whole computer game segment got much more boring over time.
I think it's mostly that you're no longer interested in computer games and as such aren't aware of what's currently available. IMO there has never been a bigger and more varied supply of good games as there are today, in pretty much every genre (my personal taste is mostly for small indie games, not AAA). I started playing computer games in the late 1980s myself and have never stopped.
Is that true? While there's a much larger overall volume of content out there, many many games to choose from... Don't you see a pattern around first person shooters, real life 'simulators' built on repetitive OCD grind, and a general sense of sameness?
Nothing feels really novel. Where the innovation is seems to focus on graphical realism, which of course I love.
I'm strongly attached to Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 and while I'm near the end of the game, I'm dragging my feet so I don't have to go back to the drawing board of sorting through endless terrible FPS and retro hack and slash games on Steam that don't interest me and are copies of 20 year old games.
Adventure games (the topic here) are my favorite though, and it's very rare that anything comes out. The Sierra and LucasArts days are over (RIP). That said a few gems come out here and there, like Lucy Dreaming.
How many of those are puzzle-based classical Adventure Games like the recent Lucy dreaming?
Many of the genres are baloney, at least the stuff that comes back in search results as recent - it's all Work Simulator, a slow grind, the ubiquitous first person shooter, horror or everyone's favorite hack and slash genre.
We're drowning in numbers, is all you're really telling me.
It’s not a genre I care about so I don’t know. What I’m saying is that discoverability is bad but the supply is there. You need to work to find it. I find the games I like most via recommendations on genre-specific subreddits and discord servers.
If anything, now there is a discovery problem where the novel, incredible inventive games take longer to surface via word of mouth because there are so many. The quality and choice have never been higher. But that feeling that we’re all playing and enjoying the same things is gone.
Just started KCD2 last night by the way.
100% agreed. The golden age of gaming is right now, Kickstarter and Steam have opened up the field to smaller studios in a way that has never happened before.
The biggest, most advertised titles are often very good-looking and very "bubblegum", for the exact same reason that the most popular genres of pop are like they are. To appeal to the widest audience, you have to file off all the sharp corners, and if that's the market you see then modern games can seem soulless.
But that's not all of the market! No matter what genre you are interested in, there's probably more work ongoing in it and better games coming out right now that there ever has been in history. Most of them are less refined and sell a lot less than the mainstream games, but occasionally one succeeds well enough to expand past the small niche audience, which inevitably brings a lot more people into the niche, followed by imitators which grow the niche.
I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs" (and maybe a tiny amount of vague Rogue-like-likeness). If you read much about old games (e.g. [1]) it is obvious that the history of games is full of evolutionary dead-ends and forgotten mainstream games (and entire almost-forgotten mainstream genres).
[1] https://www.cgwmuseum.org/
Yeah, it's hard not to consider the runaway success of games like Stardew Valley as counterexamples to the idea that the creativity is completely gone. But you wouldn't blame someone if they superficially looked at screentshots and thought it was a run of the mill retro pixel game. But it's wild to me that there are people who come from broken homes or rough childhoods who say the game was literally therapy for them and showed them a vision of domestic life or human interaction that they could realistically replicate or at least shoot for in real life.
Stardew Valley is HarvestMoon++
It is a lovely, very enjoyable game but it is _incredibly_ derivative.
I'm currently playing a game that is a blatent rip-off of Stardew Valley to the point where I frequently question why they were so obvious. (Or maybe those elements are rip-offs of Harvest Moon, I haven't played Harvest Moon to know.) Still, it's enjoyable. The design elements and places where it does diverge from Stardew Valley make it more enjoyable in my opinion.
As the saying goes, "good artists borrow, great artists steal."
Harvest Moon defines the "Turning round a dilapidated farm in a small village where you give everyone gifts all the time" genre. It all comes from there.
EDIT: Stardew Valley has so many QoL improvements over harvest moon though. The early HM games are punishing.
> I feel like the indie-games are almost as clustered in small areas of potential "game design space" as AAA-games are, but just clustered in different areas, in particular around "games inspired by ha handful of SNES games and early Playstation JRPGs
Huh? That is also an artifact of what kind of games you follow. Just of the top of my head:
are all having a great time.Monkey Island. The difficulty of the first game and the difficulty of the last game. The last game was still a game, but the challenge wasn't there. It just wasn't there. We might as well just be playing Progress Quest.
Monkey Island 1 and 2 have deep memories for me. I'll never forget playing Monkey Island 2 during a cold Christmas when I was a kid. The PC speaker music was great (King's Quest V was my other present and I still remember the opening music). One day I got the Sound Blaster on my 486 SX and it blew my mind.
The Monkey Island that came out a few years ago sadly felt like a puzzle-free story for children and their parents to sit together to play. Elaine lacked humor and cynicism, there was a child's voice in some of the narration, the graphics were strangely cubic and stylistic instead of warm, and the characters seemed caricatures of themselves (like season 5 of a comedy series where the writing devolves into self-referential insider jokes about the past seasons).
I feel terrible saying that.
Will Adventure games come back, or are we lost on the new ADHD world of interruptible short content?
I agree that mainstream games tend to feel more predictable in their mechanics than what we got in the 8-bit era, but I'm not sure that that means they're more boring. There were a lot of crap games that came out in the old days that only seemed interesting at the time because our access was so limited. Nowadays anyone can play thousands of games for free, on pretty much any device, so they can choose to spend their time in the kinds of games that they actually prefer.
I'm not sure it's worth lamenting that the most popular games today tend to have addictive mechanics and otherwise little novelty. Clearly that's what people enjoy. If you are interested in experimental or avant garde games, then that stuff is still out there in the indie scene. Lots of them are bad games, but they still might be good ideas.
There's plenty of examples I am sure people can share on the thread, but here's one that comes to mind for me as interesting but not very fun: Bokida - Heartfelt Reunion. It's a gigantic monochromatic world with impenetrable puzzles and weird geometry that reminded me of those old freescape games like Driller. I don't think I enjoyed it very much but somehow I did play it all the way through and it still sticks in my mind today because no other game I played really did the same stuff. But, then, it's possible that that's just my subjective experience and for someone who plays Minecraft or something similar, Bokida was just derivative and forgettable? I dunno.
There's a lot out there, though. I think we're in a golden age of games! As a kid I could never have imagined having a literal "backlog" of dozens of games I've already bought but not even started yet because there's so much to play.
It's less mainstream, but there are still a lot of good adventure games released in the indie scene. The Crimson Diamond released last year got a lot of good press and is a text parser + graphical adventure game with an EGA style palette.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Crimson_Diamond
The Crimson Diamond is unique in that it's deliberately trying to evoke a very specific era and platform: late '80s, Sierra SCI engine. It's particularly inspired by The Colonel's Bequest. That's why it uses EGA-style graphics and parser input.
But adventure gaming never went away, it just became more and more of a niche. There are lots of high-quality amateur games, but there's been a steady tricky of high-quality "indie" commercial games since the '90s. I'd recommend Wadjet Eye Games' entire catalog: https://wadjeteyegames.com/games/
If this is your view of modern gaming, I think it’s you that has changed. This year alone my play list has been - blue prince, hollow knight: silksong, Ball X pit, split fiction, clair obscur, monster hunter wilds, arc raiders, helldivers 2 (came to Xbox, so this one is a stretch), nightrein, Indiana jones, dispatch… That’s on top of the “big” hitter that are still very fun experiences.
When the first-person shooter arrived, somehow we collectively decided that's what all games should now be.
I think we've learned that creativity comes from constraints. Early computing platforms certainly were replete with that.
I've never been into Doom clones (to use the term from back in the day) and yet I have enjoyed playing countless video games from about 1984 through to the present. Very few of them are first-person games, whether they're head-clickers or other forms of first-person gaming.
To be sure, all games are not FPS. But you know, what are the so-called "AAA" game companies constantly grinding out…
AAA companies might pump out a lot of FPS- though it's arguable that they also grind out all sorts of other reliable and less-than-groundbreaking genres, from flavor of the decade trends (MMORPGs/MOBAs/live service battle royales/extraction shooters) to annual sports titles to Assassin's Creed sequels. The Call of Duty machine aside, I'm not sure if FPS is as much of a cash cow as it used to be.
And if you look at this best-selling video games list, there's only a single FPS in the top ten (PUBG, which is technically also third-person):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_gam...
It might be that they're targeting the 8 - 18 year old boy demographic, and that's always a huge cash cow, whereas older gamers have refined taste but don't spend that much money on games because they don't spend that many hours on gaming
Here’s the highest rated games on PS5, Xbox and switch this year. There is _one_ first person shooter in the top ten of all three of these lists combined
[0] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/ps5/all/current-year/... [1] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/xbox-series-x/all/cur... [2] https://www.metacritic.com/browse/game/all/all/current-year/...
Almost none of the FPS shooters try to to something creative, though. Duke Nukem 3D is still unbeaten for fun in multiplayer (and we still get it out now and then for that) with simple gimmicks like the holo duke, pipe bombs and laser mines.
Even just looking at "game uses 3D engine" we don't really have many great things. There's portal, and while some of the other stuff have promising ideas (like infinifactory), for all of them the controls tend to get in the way of fun.
For ease of use and fun pretty much all simulations - even as far back as the 90s - just using isometric projection are still unbeaten by attempts to go full 3D.
Adventure games became FPS as early as 1992 (only one year before DOOM, so maybe I'm not making much of a point here) with the coming of Ultima Underworld.
Wasn't UU an RPG rather than an adventure game?
It was really a blending of multiple genres. Was really ground breaking by for its time.
That’s a fair point. I suppose if I wanted to focus on the first person perspective I could have mentioned Myst coming out the same year as DOOM, though I doubt it was even the first FP adventure game.
UU was an RPG. What adventure games became were either full hybrid 3D mechanics (Tomb Raider) and niche point and click ones.
Tomb Raider isn't an "adventure" game, no matter what the "mainstream gaming press" says. Monkey Island is.
It was a real time action-adventure game with puzzles. TR made point and click adventures obsolete as they drove a puzzle-event bound game with free exploration. OTOH, text adventures would still be featureful and playable as they achieved incredible things very expensive to do with graphical games.
If Tomb Raider is an "adventure game" so is Donkey Kong. Tomb Raider is basically a platformer like Donkey Kong but in 3D. Neither made actual adventure games "obsolete" because taxing your hand-eye reflexes is a different sort of fun than taxing your brain.
Also, definitively, what killed the adventure genre would be the PS1 survival horrors. You have everything there: items, combinations, loads of puzzles, action and a shitfed perspective. Silent Hill, Resident Evil, Parasite Eve...
Pretty much the definition of an old 'point and click' aventure with action points.
Alone in the Dark predates those by like 4 years though...
It does and there were also plenty of horror adventure games, but Alone of the Dark would also make the jump to RE-style survival horror.
TR has more to do than platforming, and more convoluted puzzles than DK.
> All games involve some kind of exploration, but I’m talking about something like Myst, the long-ago graphic adventures by LucasArts and Interplay, where the whole central mechanic of the game was basically “click on everything everywhere.” Today, those games can feel hilariously primitive, and they were probably always pretty boring for the vast majority of people who didn’t start playing videogames until they got an iPhone. But there’s a serenity to Myst that you can’t really find in any major videogame today. It’s videogame Tarkovsky, really: The whole point of the game is experiencing the quiet, looking at everything. So Myst is boring, but only in the way Tarkovsky and Russian novels are boring. (The problem isn’t that they’re slow. The problem is that the world has made you too fast.)
- Darren Franich, "Metal Gear Solid: The strangest great videogame franchise"
https://ew.com/article/2015/09/04/metal-gear-solid-strangest...
Terraria and Stardew Valley show that it isn't just about graphics.
People play such games today too.
I fondly remember playing games typed out from books and magazines when I was younger - although I usually tricked my little brother into typing out the game so we could both play it.
Jokes on me though, since now he can type at over 100 wpm (and uses dvorak)
For a fascinating insight into "The Colossal Cave Adventure" see the Literate Program version of the source:
http://literateprogramming.com/adventure.pdf
One of my dream games is a truly open world text adventure. I got a glimpse of it by having ChatGPT run this game, but it started hallucinating and misremembering after a few rounds. It has to be perfect to avoid breaking the immersion, but I'd pay $100 for such a game even without graphics.
Isn't this what MUDs are? I tried a few in the early days of the internet and even back then they were like much bigger and more dynamic versions of text adventures of the 80s. For me I bounced off the idea that I had to role-play with other humans - I thought it was far more interesting to chat with other humans about real-world topics - but if you are looking for a large, text-based role-play experience then it's probably worth trying out a few. There might even be some that can be soloed these days, there are so many.
I think the challenge of trying to make an "endless" game using an LLM is the same challenge that all procgen games face - they are boring for people who are seeking a well-paced narrative. There are players who enjoy the mechanics of looting/crafting/trading/etc who will gladly play games where the story is incidental or emergent, but if you're specifically looking for something with a bit more narrative depth, I'm not sure procgen will ever work. Even if there is a system that tries to project coherent storylines onto the generated world, you still need the player to do things that fit into a storyline (and not break the world in such a way that it undermines the storyline!), otherwise the pacing will be off. But if the system forces the player into a storyline, then it breaks the illusion that the world was ever truly open. So you can't have it both ways - either there is a narrative arc that the player submits to, or the player is building their own narrative inside a sandbox.
AAA games try to have it both ways, of course, but it's always pretty clear when you are walking through procgen locations and leafing through stacks of irrelevant lore vs when you are playing a bespoke storyline mission that meaningfully progresses the state of the world.
What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one. And then I wanted a way to join MUDs together—like if you leave a forest by a certain path you are, unbeknownst to you, rerouted to a different MUD that picks up where the forest left off.
In this way I imagined in time a world larger and richer than any that had come before it—where you could really just keep going, keep playing, never see all of it.
I never got deep into it, but I remember reading magazine articles back in the 90s that that's exactly what the new generation of MUDs were. Wiki has pages on MOO, TinyMUCK, MUSH etc - these are basically platforms where the players themselves can expand out new objects and locations, presumably in a similar way to Second Life or other MMO sandboxes do today.
So the tools already exist, but it seems to me that they primarily appeal to a very specific type of gamer, one that doesn't have much overlap with the type of gamer who would like an "endless" open world or the type of gamer who would like a tightly-plotted narrative experience. I think it's more something that appeals to fans of table-top RPGs, people who are looking for a collaborative storytelling environment.
I think many gamers have the imagination of an epic infinite metaverse style game, but then when they actually get the opportunity to participate in one, it turns out that that's not really what they wanted after all, because it requires a level of creative labor that they weren't expecting. This is why I think the market has naturally segmented into sandbox builders, survival/roguelikes, traditional narrative adventures etc.
My experience was that in practice all that mapped-out world of most social mu*s was largely ignored by players; they'd all end up in a few gathering spots, or in private spaces disconnected from the main map, open only to their owners and people they teleported in.
> What I wanted in MUDs was a simple editor to allow people with little technical skill a means to create a world—or extend an existing one.
Those are MOOs. They're fully programmable in MOO code. Here's the original MOO: https://lambda.moo.mud.org/
There's no point to a MOO other than to be itself, although LambdaMOO does have an RPG system in it you can play: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO
Server resources: https://www.wrog.net/moo/
Programmer's manual: https://www.wrog.net/moo/progman.html
yduJ's venerable duck tutorial: https://jkira.github.io/moo-cows/docs/tutorials/wind-up-duck...
MUDs are a low-tech version of what I'm describing. It relies on other people being available and generally leverages the usual tropes with repetitive killing-based gameplay.
LLMs are limited today, but one day they may be able to provide the well-paced narrative you're talking about. The LLM would be a skilled fiction writer that would introduce interesting events as I explore the world.
If I decide to go to a bar and talk to random strangers, it could give me interesting life stories to listen without any action. But, suddenly, a mysterious man walks in, gives me a sealed envelope and departs without saying a word... What is in the envelope?
> chat with other humans about real-world topics
You can do this with regard to a MUD too, but typically out of character and not every MUD would allow OOC chatting within the game world, as that is disruptive to those players who seek immersion.
It seems to me as if you may not have found a good roleplaying MUD back when you played MUDs. You may be missing out on that experience. I retired from playing MUDs about 11 years ago permanently, but the in-world roleplay was the only thing that was interesting to me since it was the creation of a unique storyline potentially involving many other playercharacters.
I think I just don't really vibe with roleplaying in realtime with other humans, to be honest. I grew up trying to play tabletop RPGs (my dad was a DM and used D&D mechanics as a way to make storytime more engaging), but while I really enjoyed making up characters, I never had much fun actually doing a campaign.
The thing I love about computer games is that I can go through them at my own pace, pause whenever I like, hang around looking at a cool visual, go back to an old save and try something different, whatever. Multiplayer takes all that freedom away because everything has to progress on somebody else's timetable, which isn't as fun for me. Nowadays being expected to perform on a time limit just reminds me of work, which is the last thing I want when I'm playing a game.
It is my understanding that muds (and all the flavors of Mush in particular) can sort-of do it, by letting players create their own story through roleplay, supported by an extremely open (and often player-modifiable) world, as well as good admins / GMs.
That is more like "computer tabletop", however, and doesn't scale beyond a small number of players.
You're on to something. I tried this too, a few months ago, with offline Ollama/Magistral on Mac. "You're a dungeonmaster for a single player adventure game, with me as the player..."
It lost track of things almost immediately. But the foundation was there.
Maybe if we had a MUD-tuned model...
If it has an approximate way to track state, and a "pre-caching" method where it can internally generate an entire town all at once, room by room, so hallucinations are rarer... actually starts to sound like a traditional DM's method of world building for a campaign.
Maybe something like an LLM-assisted Inform (interactive fiction engine). https://ganelson.github.io/inform-website/
Side note: been playing Aesir, then the Aesir 2 MUD since 1994. It's still up!
Maybe you could ask an LLM to build a campaign then ask another one to run it.
Instead of relying on the model's memory alone, you could have it read/write to a file.
Would Avalon count?
https://www.avalon-rpg.com/intro/mud
I've never played Avalon but it looks like a better text adventure. I'm not talking about hardcoded or randomized worlds, but truly reactive worlds.
In my experiment with ChatGPT, I was walking around in a museum (that was the scenario) and decided to flirt with a woman who happened to be there. The flirting was something I decided to do on the spot with no prompting from the AI. The woman had just been part of the room description up to that point. But it reacted to this new situation in a semi-realistic way, essentially creating a new "adventure" on the spot. I met her on the next day, brought a gift (and so did she), but then it started hallucinating... :(
Would D&D not work for you?
It did for a long time, but depending on busy friends makes it so I can't play this whenever I want. My "dream" game is a single-player game I can play as many times I want without having to rely on others.
Something about the modern day fails to match the feelings of when MUDs were in their prime. With text you can describe so much more than a picture can paint. You can visualize a smell, a taste, or a feeling in text, but it doesn't translate well when you have graphics painting your imagination for you.
I'd just begun my first professional engineering job after college. The company I was working for had a mainframe computer on which there was a copy of Adventure. When I discovered the game, there were a number of late nights playing it. One night, long after everyone had gone home, I was playing in my office with the lights off. The only light was from the green phosphorous monitor I was using. All of a sudden, I stumbled into the breath-taking view room with its erupting volcano. The words describing the scene filled the screen with descriptive prose that simply glowed in the dark room. The effect was mesmerizing. Forty-seven years later, I've never forgotten that.
Interesting.
I recently investigated text based adventure games in Python as a possible tool to teach and evaluate outdoor wilderness safety knowledge and awareness (backpacking and overnight camping) for wilderness therapy.
While doing the research I recalled a friend showing me a text adventure game on his i386 PC. I could not understand the appeal. The possibilities the game suggested were vast, but the effective actions were unattainable--I was not able to see even the most basic level of progress before I became bored.
Now, outlining the wilderness safety "game", its obvious to me some understanding of software and programming would have made the game accessible. Then maybe a key in a room would be better understood as a metaphor of the code. In other words, a game at text level can be an attempt to model a complicated problem in an interactive program. If you can write a game where the final product is convincing (suspend disbelief), then maybe the game's model can be useful for other things. In my case instruction and evaluation of basic domain knowledge. And this level of programming awareness is useful in not getting bored (or experiencing cognitive gap between what a text implies and what the game can deliver).
There was a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy text adventure, with writing from Douglas Adams. It's entertaining, but insane what you have to figure out to get the babel fish...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_th...
There's a good three-part writeup starting here, covering Douglas and the game:
https://www.filfre.net/2013/11/douglas-adams/
For my money the "best" adventure game was and is The Hobbit, but that may well be because it's the first one I was haunted by.
Similar two-part writeup starts here :
https://www.filfre.net/2012/11/the-hobbit/
The Hobbit had randomness and emergent gameplay in ways that even Infocom didn't quite reproduce. A classic.
Text adventures whilst sometimes infuriating, if played as they are meant to be back when released with a piece of graph paper to help map out where you have been and where you go, there is still some magic about them that isn't had with graphical games. Every room becomes exciting which just isn't the case even in my favourite games such as Fallout New Vegas. Oh more bottle caps again in a drawer but I can begin to tell what rooms will be essential to look in and which won't buy the middle of the game. There is none of that in text games, you just have to explore and get truly lost, another thing that is much harder to do nowadays.
Some fantastic text adventures can still be had online. There are MUDs (my favorite), Roguelikes, Sims, and even cyberpunk adventures. A half dozen Star Wars ones as well.
This was peak 1986. A few years later and we’d be jumping a little pixel plumber on cathode ray tubes.
Can’t wait for the next part…
I loved this game. I want to make it into a mud.
I wonder how a book of type-in AI prompts would do…
... with generative "AI" being nondeterministic, it will be a different experience for every "player".
Sometimes it will even match what the prompt author intended.
> Play was central to the formation of personal computer culture.
In his book, Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World, Steven Johnson applies this thesis to pretty much all the things. Enjoyable book, but the thesis probably does not hold up too much scrutiny.
For Spanish speakers there, there's "Aventura.z5" at IFDB, you can play it with a Frotz interpreter. It's 99% close to the original modulo some odd wordplay. The backstory and all it's the same, with the Mammoth Cave descriptions with the slaves and the like.
I think the most annoying thing of a lot of modern games is the whole crafting thing that is bolted onto everything. But there are some real gems out there for old school gamers. I loved Baldurs Gate 3, Divinity 2, Expedition 33 and Disco Elysium for example as really fun and interesting CRPG's. It's just that the cost of taking a risk these days is to high for studios and most kids are playing "free" games for most of their time. So even though the market is big it feels like the "growth" is mostly in the "free" games part of the market which is terrible.