The second big issue with duration is the immersion I mentioned before. In order for a game to be enjoyable and therefore memorable you need to invest in its characters, its world, its puzzles. When it ends after a couple of hours, no matter how good it was, it will just be forgotten and will leave you with an empty feeling like you wasted your time instead of having fun. If you went to the movies and the movie you chose only lasted 5 minutes you will feel unsatisfied. If the latest book from your favorite author only had 5 pages you probably wouldn't bother to read it.
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| Oh, how I wish Blacksad was a proper adventure game... |
So, let's get back to adventures and the problems of the scene today that caused it to die. Another major problem that must be addressed is how people involved in the genre refuse to accept that their favorite genre is dead so they try to include as many an possible games as they can in order to... do what exactly... mot feel sad? They simply refuse to accept a real problem and in the end they alienate the real fans of the genre. Look to what has happened to all those sites dedicated to adventures all over the world. Almost all of them have either closed doors or been abandoned. Every European country used to have at least 2-3 sites dedicated to adventures. Now there are only 3-4 left in the whole world. As for the big ones, the international ones, as far as I'm concerned there is only one left. And people still ignore and deny the death of the genre. When you go to a site that was supposed to be about adventure games and all you see is news and reviews and forums about visual novels, interactive movies, walking simulators, horror exploration games, puzzle platformers etc, you lose interest and stop visiting. It's simple as that. When you go to a site that is supposedly about the games you love and find nothing about them, or you have to dig very deep to find it, you simply don't visit any more. Web-masters refused to accept that simple fact flooding their sites with everything they liked just to keep them current and alive to the point that the real fans abandoned them completely. Instead of focusing on the real adventure games and keeping their core audience they started accepting any game where you don't kill anyone or anything as an adventure game to please them all. When you go to an adventure game forum and read posts about games like Zelda, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, The Walking Dead etc you simply leave and don't come back.
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| A decent tribute to classic adventures, but it forgot the most important thing: Duration! |
Now we come to the other big issue of the Adventure game scene. Are there any real fans left? Are there adventure game enthusiasts the way they existed twenty, thirty or even forty years ago? Again this is an issue of perspective and definition. What is an adventure game enthusiast? Well, first of all you have to be a gamer. That's important. You have to play the actual games. Not buy them only for your digital collection (is that even a thing?), not watching videos on YouTube and Twitch but actually playing them. Also, being active on a forum about them and not playing them doesn't make you one. Being a person who used to like them but for whatever reason doesn't play even a single adventure game in a year certainly doesn't make you one. I'm starting with this point because I read recently in a forum dedicated to the genre a post that rapidly disintegrated into why we don't play more adventure games. And the answers, or should I say excuses, were ridiculous. People claimed they outgrew them, they find them difficult (current games?), they don't like to think when playing games because they think enough at school and work, or they don't like puzzles altogether and their 'anachronistic' gameplay mechanics. And the excuses kept coming. And the weird thing is that THEY are supposed to be the core audience of the adventure games, the few that are left. Again, that discussion was in a forum dedicated to adventure games only! Some reasons I could understand, like the quality of today's games but I will get back to that later. The bottom line is if a manager from a video game company read this thread he would surmise logically that there are no real fans of the genre any more and therefore no point in making a commercial adventure game. And that's simply wrong. The fanbase didn't just disappear, it simply refuses to visit those kinds of forums for all the reasons I mentioned before. My point is that by allowing talk about games that are strange to the genre and then saying that you don't even play real adventures anymore you harm what you claim to love.
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| Whispers of a Machine would have been a great game if it was released in 1992, but not today. |
So, are there still adventure game enthusiasts? I believe yes, although very few and their numbers are declining. Also those few tend not to be active in the scene, like joining sites dedicated to adventures and communicating in forums. They simply keep to themselves because the scene made them feel ostracized. After the 10th time a guy opened a thread about how TellTale's games were not adventure games and shouldn't be included in the site only to be ganged upon by the other forumites telling him he doesn't understand 'modern' adventures and that puzzles are the worst thing that happened to adventures and they are so glad that mechanic went extinct, it's obvious that the guy would feel that this place isn't for him and simply leave. The first couple of times somebody tried to express his opinions in a mild and respectful manner nothing happened. But then people started getting put down by the administrators for trolling and stirring flame wars to the point it became taboo to even talk about what is and is not an adventure game. Nowadays when someone mentions in a thread politely that the game they are talking about is not an adventure and has no place there he automatically becomes a target.
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| In Moons of Madness you don't shoot the monsters, so it must be an adventure right? |
Unfortunately modern times demand generic gamers. Companies try to mix as many genres as possible to attract as bigger audience as possible. They try to mold a gamer that plays everything and has no genre that specifically loves. They prefer it when between an Assassin's Creed and a Call Of Duty you play an adventure game. That way you are never bored so you can get back and back again to their latest installments, year after year. And that's where adventure games lose because they are small productions, made with low budget and they can't compete with the big AAA games. When a 10-year-old plays an adventure game between two AAA games the chances are he won't play another adventure in his life. Let alone become an adventure game enthusiast. Most of us who love the genre grew up in the 80s and 90s when adventure games were the at the top of the food chain. They had the best graphics, the best sound and music, the best scenarios, the best of everything and on top of that great gameplay. It was easy to fall in love with them. It was natural. And with so few releases back them everyone who played PC games happened upon them for one reason or another. Nowadays with the digital distribution you have to specifically search for them and search hard to find them, and when you do almost all the time you are disappointed. Unfortunately digital distribution reduced the quality control of the released games to practically zero. You can even release a 'game' without an executable to run it and it is acceptable. The point I want to make is that it is impossible in our times for adventure games as they are now to make new fans, new enthusiasts, to make new and especially young people fall in love with the genre. And I mean the 'real' genre, the good ol' adventure games that required thinking, that were slow and didn't require reflexes, not the passive experiences that people nowadays try to force us to accept as the 'modern' adventures, the 'non-traditional' ones. Adventure games died because there are no young people playing them. And everything we do just makes it harder and harder for the new generation to learn and fall in love with them.
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| The Walking Dead games are the definition of interactive movies. Even if you don't press a button the story will continue... |
The final result is that even people who claim to love adventures don't play them any more or just re-play the classics. The reasons vary from person to person and everyone has an excuse when forced to explain why, but the bottom line remains the same. If the self-claimed fans don't play the current adventures how are they expect the new generation to play them when they can choose from any of the hundreds of AAA games released every year instead? And if they don't play adventure games how can they convince the new generation that adventure games are worth playing?
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| The Sinking City is a decent AAA game that will appeal to the masses, but it has nothing to do with adventure games unfortunately... |
Now, to get back to that list of 180 games I mentioned before. I checked that list. I didn't play them but I read reviews and saw YouTube videos about each and every one of them to see how many real adventures were actually released in 2019. And I was mortified. I didn't expect the number to be so low. I asked myself the question "Which of those games should I show to my 10-year-old nephew in order to make him fall in love with the genre?' as the basis of my research. The results were disheartening. I counted all those adventure games that fitted my criteria even if the game was bad. As long it was a proper release I counted it. I would love to see the results of a poll asking the fans of the genre how many of those so-called 'adventure' games first they bought, second they played and finished and third they actually enjoyed. That would be very interesting and informative.
To be continued...
