[danso]

> Roberta Williams, an example of that rare species of adventure-game designers who don’t actually play adventure games, likely had little idea just how torturous an experience her games actually were. Taken as a whole, Roberta’s consistent failings as a designer seemingly must stem from that inability to place herself in her player’s shoes, and from her own seeming disinterest in improving upon her previous works in any terms but those of their surface bells and whistles. That said, however, King’s Quest IV‘s unusually extreme failings, even in terms of a Roberta Williams design, quite obviously stemmed from the frenzied circumstances of its creation as well.

Wow, I had no idea that KQ4 was so controversial. I remember it fondly, though now that I think about it, I remember it fondly for its graphics and setting. I don't remember actually ever finishing it. All the KQ games do seem poorly designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age), or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and cruel.

[Reedx]

Same here! I absolutely loved the King's Quest and Space Quest games (and really most of Sierra's adventure games) and have very fond memories of them. Definitely a big part of it was due to the settings, characters and stories. And the interaction and exploration of those worlds... on a computer. Which I was just naturally fascinated by. I was also fascinated by Ken and Roberta's story about creating games from their kitchen table. That seemed magical to me. I poured over every page of their pamphlets and magazine (Interaction).

I know that if those games were released today there's no way I would play them for long and I'd recognize them as poorly designed. But when I was a kid every new game was a big deal and so I pushed through the puzzles (I felt certain ones were ridiculous, but generally just accepted them as what adventure game puzzles were). Sometimes I'd get stuck and come back months later. Ultimately I beat most of the King's Quest and Space Quest games, even years later.

It's hard to imagine that today with the unlimited buffet of cheap or free games. The constraint used to be money, now it's time. Even for kids.

[djsumdog]

That entire genre had a lot of issues. People like to talk about the Gabriel Knight 3 / cat hair moustache as being the pivotal moment for the death of adventure games, but really it was all along in the design.

Puzzles were difficult, natural language processing is a hard problems, and commands/grammers could get weird/complex. The icon based point-n-click cleared this up a little, but Sierra had a business model build around needing to order hint books (or play with large groups of people).

No one wants hint books, because once you use one hint, you tend to just keep using them. With the Internet and things like UHS for adventure games, this model kinda hit a wall.

Telltale, Double Fine, et. al. brought this gene back by treating it more as an interactive story. The puzzles were less crazy and you could get through them without a hint guide.

Broken Age is a stealer example of both versions of this genre. Part I is more like Telltale, except with better puzzles. It's easy to get through, but still challenging. Part 2 goes back to the Sierra model though, with puzzles that make little sense and are insolvable for most casual and moderate gamers without a hint guide.

[Eric_WVGG]

"cat hair mustache" that bit is a classic. http://www.oldmanmurray.com/features/77.html

[cdr]

> Part 2 goes back to the Sierra model though, with puzzles that make little sense and are insolvable for most casual and moderate gamers without a hint guide.

Really? I don't remember having to look up hints a single time in part 2. The puzzles were more difficult, but definitely not "Sierra model". The solutions were logical if you paid attention, with the possible exception of the tree joke (I don't remember if that was part 1 or part 2).

The knot puzzle was probably the most annoying of them, but the problem with that one was having to take the long walk back and forth every time you failed.

[benologist]

King's Quest 8 just came out recently ... they've kept with the times:

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/kings-quest-the-complete-...

[jaredsohn]

I think it is just "King's Quest". But if it was numbered it would be the ninth one. (Mask of Eternity would be the eighth.)

[flukus]

We don't talk about that one...

[CaptSpify]

> All the KQ games do seem poorly designed in retrospect but I do remember chugging through the first few of them through trial and error. I've wondered if that perseverance is something that is part of the stupid bullheadedness of youth (or the weakness of age), or if at the time, we just accepted that games were supposed to be unfair and cruel.

A) We've come a looong way in terms of game abilities, and design. Designers were learning a lot back then.

B) Games were expensive. I couldn't just go buy another game for ~$20 if I didn't like the one I had, so I stuck with it.

C) Games were logistically harder to come buy. I had to go to a store, then pick up a new one. Now I just download a new one without ever putting on pants.

[derefr]

A lot of it wasn't so much design inexperience as an intentional difference in design-style due to those factors B and C.

Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make it "more worth the money."

This was partially the quarter-eating arcade-game philosophy leaking into home-console gaming, and partially the knowledge that parents want the $50 they spend on a distraction for their kids to stretch as long as possible.

In the 80s, since games were size-limited (small tapes/cartridges and low memory headroom), this translated to games that were preternaturally challenging to stretch out their play-time. This is the classic "Nintendo Hard" game-design philosophy; but it's also responsible for grind-fest RPGs (another way of taking a small amount of content and padding it out.)

In the 90s, with lower size-limits, we instead saw the temporary emergence and flourishing of the really long game—everything was advertised by talking about how expansive the world was, and how many hours of content there were to get through. We still look back on this era as being responsible for the creation of many classic action-adventure and adventure-RPG games for this reason.

All this stopped when we hit the 3D era and art-asset production became the overriding cost of producing a game. Games weren't limited in "content" in the scenario/script sense, but they were limited in "content" in the unique-things-to-see sense. There was a temporary burst of interest in exploiting this divide directly (some early PSX games fiddled with procedural generation to overcome the problem), but this was limited to a few minor studios; the majority instead moved their games toward being increasingly high-production-value cinematic affairs.

With a fixed amount of stuff to see, getting the player to care about looking at it all more than once became the overriding concern; thus, replayability rather than difficulty became the goal. (Replay-value was always part of the design philosophy of some studios, but now it became part of the basic culture of the industry.) This is when you start to see things like "missions" and "achievements" emerge, that give you many things to do within the same few set-piece areas.

[flukus]

> Where today we speak of "replay value", of games that you finish and then want to play again, no such concept existed back then. Instead, it was assumed that a game that was "beaten" (let alone "mastered") would be put away, and so a game should resist being beaten for as long as possible to make it "more worth the money."

I always thought the games being designed that way was to add replay value. You could get close to the end but then have to start over again because you missed something.

They also had the much better option of optional quests/points.

[derefr]

This is a valid way to look at things too. It's sort of a matter of semantics on how the meaning of the word "play", referring to video games, has shifted over time.

In the arcade-game era, a "play" was the outermost unit of gameplay. It's what you'd get in exchange for a quarter from an arcade machine: one attempt at beating the game (possibly with the assistance of mechanisms like extra lives.) So "re-play-ability", if it came up in the game-design vocabulary of that era, would refer to how effectively a game could continue to solicit quarters from a given player. This included difficulty, but also required a feeling of progression rather than frustration, and a decent minimum length for any given "play" (because no parent would keep giving their child quarters for a machine that eats one every minute or two.)

Coming with the era of battery-backed save files, the "play" (play-session) was replaced as the overarching unit of gameplay consumption with the play-through: the creation and on-and-off usage of the same save file, for weeks/months, until you get to some point where the game shows you a "The End" screen and you (in many games) get a percentage score for how many of the game's optional puzzles you solved. (Basically bringing to home consoles the conception of gaming that existed on time-sharing mainframe systems in the 70s.)

Both before and after the ability to restore progress, players could decide to quit a game before beating it, unless the game was good enough to drag them back in; and both before and after, players might continue to play after beating a game, to do better. But the arcade† and arcade-inspired eras definitely favoured the first kind of "replay value" compared to the progessive-play-through era.

† (Assuming that "beating" the game was a sensible thing to talk about. Many games of the arcade era would let pretty much anyone "get to the end" with the barest effort; the point of them was instead to compete on point-score or leaderboard-ranking. "Replay value", in these games, effectively referred to the same thing the term "depth" does in competitive games like chess: how well the game serves to measure skill difference in high-level play.)

[logfromblammo]

I think the canonical example of bad adventure game design is a "puzzle" in the Gabriel Knight series to construct a false mustache to disguise yourself as Lt. Mosely, who does not have a mustache, to commit credit card fraud.

It involves maple syrup and a cat. I remember brute-forcing through it by clicking everything and trying to combine everything with everything else, because online FAQs were not yet commonly available to me at the time. I liked the story enough to plow through the cloudcuckoolander puzzle logic.

After the Sierra games, the last example I can recall of WTF game puzzles was being required to incinerate a bizarrely out-of-place brassiere to get the underwire in Return to Zork. It would appear that either game designers have learned to behave themselves, or that I have stopped playing games that don't make any danged sense.

[Jeema101]

I remember as kid just being in awe of the game mechanics and the graphics in those Sierra games. It was fun just to explore and type stuff in and see what was possible, even if you had no hope of ever finishing the game.