State of point and click genre
Telltale is doing the best job for reviving the interest in point & click games I think. Everyone knows Back To The Future and The Walking Dead, so many many new comers will find the P&C style interesting and will want to get involved. Recently, after playing those two Telltale Games, the desire to play point and click games was reborn in my, and now I have finished The Dig, Full Throttle and Space Quest V in two weeks and I'm currently playing Indiana Jones & The Fate of Atlantis, and geez, it made me want to program my own point & click adventure game (wich i will do when i got the time).
No one ever mentions Harvester. I think it came out too late.
Point and Click never went anywhere, they just aren't in the mainstream as much. There has never been a time where you couldn't go into a store like Wal-Mart (or similar) and find a rack full of these games. But they have become a niche market, and nobody can be spending AAA budgets on producing big mainstream releases. They have been successful in the handheld market though.
IMO, the genre has too many downsides.
There is absolutely NO replay value. Even as much as I loved the new TellTale Back To The Future games, I waited until the whole season was out, and bundled together cheaply to finally get them. Even with Broken Sword on my tablet, I waited until it was 99 cents during a sale to pick it up, all for this reason alone. You get like 45 minutes of content + the time it takes to figure things out.
There is only ever 2 solutions to problems. Way too obvious, or obscure to the point of being impossible. That leads to lots of frustration as you travel from area to area trying every possible combination of actions until something random and nonsensical finally works. I'm not sure if there is a good happy medium there.
Point and Click never went anywhere, they just aren't in the mainstream as much. There has never been a time where you couldn't go into a store like Wal-Mart (or similar) and find a rack full of these games. But they have become a niche market, and nobody can be spending AAA budgets on producing big mainstream releases. They have been successful in the handheld market though.
IMO, the genre has too many downsides.
There is absolutely NO replay value. Even as much as I loved the new TellTale Back To The Future games, I waited until the whole season was out, and bundled together cheaply to finally get them. Even with Broken Sword on my tablet, I waited until it was 99 cents during a sale to pick it up, all for this reason alone. You get like 45 minutes of content + the time it takes to figure things out.
There is only ever 2 solutions to problems. Way too obvious, or obscure to the point of being impossible. That leads to lots of frustration as you travel from area to area trying every possible combination of actions until something random and nonsensical finally works. I'm not sure if there is a good happy medium there.
- Amnesia: The Dark Descent
I don't know if I'd call that game a "point and click" game. It incorporated a lot of FPS mechanics (like WASD+mouse controls) and much of the game is spent walking places (or running and hiding). The only "point and click" aspects I could really see were picking up and using items.
What's the purpose of point and click adventure games?
If even the fans say its just a story delivery mechanism what is the benefit of making the player click mash every pixel and use every item on every other item to make the plot continue.
Even if you don't have the budget for a portal or mass effect why not a adventure platformer or adventure turn based tactics.
If even the fans say its just a story delivery mechanism what is the benefit of making the player click mash every pixel and use every item on every other item to make the plot continue.
Even if you don't have the budget for a portal or mass effect why not a adventure platformer or adventure turn based tactics.
If even the fans say its just a story delivery mechanism what is the benefit of making the player click mash every pixel and use every item on every other item to make the plot continue.
If you're playing adventure games that way--either you're not actually trying to solve the puzzles, or you're playing the wrong adventure games, my friend. (Pixel hunting hasn't even been a thing for like half a decade; most modern adventure games include a hotspot highlighter specifically to circumvent this problem.) I like the stories when they're good, and I like using and combining items in clever (and frequently funny) ways to solve puzzles. All it boils down to.
One more quickie argument in favor of adventure games' modern relevance: The Walking Dead was Spike TV's Game of the Year for 2012. Say what you will about the quality of the VGAs, but I think it says something that an adventure game was able to win such a high-profile, mainstream award.
If even the fans say its just a story delivery mechanism what is the benefit of making the player click mash every pixel and use every item on every other item to make the plot continue.
The thing here is that once you have a good story you allow the user to interact with it and thus play it at his own pace and maybe do things their own way.
It maybe a cliche, but in a lot of (scary) movies as an example, I tend to think of the main characters as quite stupid, because the usually plunge headlong intro trouble, without the least preparation or just because they act ...well... stupid. So having a choice whether to take the baseball bat, a chainsaw or and umbrella to face the horde of zombies instead of watching the character pick for you will immediately change the reaction of the user/viewer because any consequence the character faces is a result of a decision the user has made.
Also by allowing users to change the storyline you raise the involvement factor and give them the feeling that their actions matter. As for this I think the Walking Dead is probably a good example of evolution of point and click games.
On another side-node I think having P&C games with a decent touchscreen-friendly interface on mobile-devices would also give the genre a boost.
I still don't understand the argument for why point and click makes for a good story rather than good writing makes for a good story.
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One more quickie argument in favor of adventure games' modern relevance: The Walking Dead was Spike TV's Game of the Year for 2012. Say what you will about the quality of the VGAs, but I think it says something that an adventure game was able to win such a high-profile, mainstream award.
Personally every game made by the developer had technical difficulties and didn't work without problems.
In "The Walking Dead" you won't find any engaging puzzles, they are really just point and click, with long cutscenes and annoying action sequences. Like the one in the beginning, where you wake up and fight the zombies. Try loading the shotgun, fail, try it again, ..., fighting does suck a lot. If they would have take a step back and looked at it, they would have realized that the way it works now is no fun. It feels like you are installing software, "install", "next", "agree", "next", "next", "browse", "apply", "okay", ..., "don't open readme.txt", "finish", ...
An Jurassic Park was horrible, so much potential and this is what they choose to do with it. Maybe they where targeting only children...
Back in the MS-Dos days there was a game "Ripley's Believe It or Not!: The Riddle of Master Lu" and I loved it. It was extremly hard, sometimes even unfair, but you could talk about it with your friends and try to solve the puzzles together. It also wasn't over after an hour.
Of course like many games in that time it included a lot pixel hunting, which wasn't great either.
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