Sierra Gets Creative
filfre.net
filfre.net
It's interesting, how in comparison in Loom[1], there are practically no such deaths at all. The most that can happen - you'll get stuck with progress and will have to return to previous areas to finish what you missed. King's Quests on the other hand are infamous for brutal deaths caused by all kind of mistakes, like failing to feed hungry chicken in time.
That feature was a nice reprieve after playing the Sierra-designed games. Though sometimes the abrupt endings in the Sierra games had their point; for example, forgetting to secure your weapon before taking an inmate into jail would result in a game-over scene in Police Quest 1. Not sure how that could be resolved the LucasFilm way.
From reasonable abrupt endings, the most hilarious one was in the Neverhood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4MARAsx1Vo
I never found any other ways to kill him, but I certainly tried.
"No... that's not what happened."
Then you start the scene over.
The much bigger problem comes when you can make the game unwinnable, but not actually lose right away (well, you've lost, you just don't know it yet). You merrily continue on for hours until much later you realize (if you do realize) that your mistake those many hours ago doomed you, and you need to go all the way back to a save from before then. Killing the player character right away (or at least soon) would be a much more merciful outcome than letting them blindly proceed down a path to nowhere.
I assume the dual intent of such dead ends were to make things seem more "realistic," as real-world errors are often permanent and aren't always immediately apparent, and also to extend the playtime.
Sudden brutal deaths are still a staple of many games and genres (even the new "modernized" King's Quest), but the silently-unwinnable state has happily fallen more or less totally out of fashion.
Yeah, I'd consider it a design flaw of the game, if it would reach a dead end that way. A better solution would be to turn mistakes in consequences of the story itself. I.e. not mechanically being stuck on something, but the plot taking a different turn, environment changing in different fashion and so on. I.e. reactivity of the game should reflect those choices and mistakes in more organic fashion. Even better, the game could provide alternative solutions to problems, allowing to work around previous missteps even at later stages (but may be requiring more effort and time).
> The much bigger problem comes when you can make the game unwinnable, but not actually lose right away
Yeah, that sort of thing instilled a life-long habit of constantly saving my progress and having saves that go back many hours. I specifically blame King's Quest II for that. There was a bridge that you could only cross a handful of times and then it collapsed. If it collapsed too early in the game, you are screwed and need a save prior to crossing it unnecessarily.
In addition at the very end the bad guy casts a spell at you, and the bird flies into the way and you don't die... if you didn't save that bird 4 hours earlier you have no way to possibly know that is why you are doomed to failure in the final fight.
It felt like shitty game design at the time, and by today's standards it would be completely unacceptable to most players.
Stupid cleaning robots....
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.
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.
https://www.humblebundle.com/store/kings-quest-the-complete-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
After Zork: Grand Inquisitor, I really thought that Activision finally had a handle on the brand they bought, but then they just... stopped. Until 2009, when they licensed the IP to Jolt Online to make a crap browser game.
So I wouldn't expect much from Activision with the Sierra IP.
In what is one of the most Vivendi "we don't know what we want to do" event, just a couple years later they then decided they wanted to sell their main french telecom company (SFR) and at the same time bought Gameloft and agressively bought Ubisoft shares (the two biggest french video games companies).
Too bad. I highly doubt Activision will ever release them. I tried to contact a bunch of companies via email, regarding the source code for EarthSiege 2, but never got a reply :(
If anyone knows anyone who worked on ES2 and might shed a light on some weird things I encountered during reverse engineering, please contact me!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCqDIRMRTTY
Interesting to watch, but I can certainly see what they meant when they said that the game was fundamentally broken, that it requires you to perform a bunch of actions which you must wander around trying to figure out pretty much without any help at all.
As a play-through video, I enjoyed it. As I game, I would have become very frustrated, I would not have enjoyed it and I would have given up within short time.
The story as a whole combines a lot of folk tales and IMO does so to pretty good success. I also think that there are some elements from the game which would be worth basing another game on for something like a gamejam entry. For example, the scarab that scares away the zombies and the mummy, that could be reused in such a game. Just, the scarab would not be so hard to come by.
I remember thinking that the game designers were probably asked to make some of the puzzles frustratingly difficult so that a post-sale revenue stream could be realized.
I also remember playing through these games without the help of the tip hotline. Sharing ideas and discussing strategies with my family. It made for a very fun experience and a very rewarding feeling when you finally figured something out.
It also made for a very frustrating experience when you did something wrong or missed something along the way and had to go back to a very early save point to fix your mistake. I guess you could say that this was poor design but I still have very fond memories of the series.
Of course for most of that era, the PC was "controlled" by IBM who had zero respect for video games.
A NBC News piece about Sierra Online in 1983; brought back lots of great memories, and feels like the 80's version of the feature piece on a startup unicorn: http://www.nbcuniversalarchives.com/nbcuni/clip/51A17175_s01...