Comment by mrtranscendence | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrtranscendence | Hacker News Reader

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mrtranscendence

I'll quibble a bit ...

> The article mentions unnamed youngsters not liking the real-ish time mechanics of Titanic Adventure Out of Time, or the difficulty of the puzzles, feeling that they're too punishing. I doubt it

But none of your examples are particularly recent, except arguably Final Fantasy XIII-3. Recent games with a strict timer are rare, and when they exist -- like the recent indie metroidvania Unsighted -- they get a lot of criticism for it. As for difficult puzzles, well, are there any non-indie games with difficult puzzles in recent history? Sure, such games continue to get made, but they're fairly niche.

> Hollow Knight is maybe the most critically acclaimed indie game of all time and most people play it with a fan wiki open

I don't know how many people play Hollow Knight while constantly consulting a guide, but if they do, it doesn't imply an appetite for taking notes while playing games. If I'd had to take notes while playing Hollow Knight (and I did not, though I did consult a guide a couple times) I wouldn't have enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. I don't know anyone who takes notes playing games. Heck, I don't remember who it was off the top of my head, but recently a journalist caught a bunch of flack when he suggested taking notes while playing Elden Ring.

> Point and click adventures are still quite popular

The graphical point-and-click adventure is nowhere near as popular, in relative terms, as it used to be. They do get made, but mostly by indies with small budgets and small audiences. I also don't think Return of the Obra Dinn is a great example, but maybe I'm too rigid in what I think a point-and-click adventure is.

All that is to say ... it's no surprise that difficult or otherwise challenging games survive to this day; the sheer size of the market means that niche audiences can have their needs met. But a game like Monkey Island couldn't be made today and expect to be the kind of juggernaut it once was.

I mean, real time mechanics were uncommon when T:AOOT was released and they're uncommon now. But there are examples of them sprinkled throughout the history of gaming -- which was the purpose of showing examples that are spaced out from then until now), including well after the purported decline in youngster competence described in the article. Want more recent examples? Outer Wilds, Twelve Minutes, Forgotten City, Deathloop are all in the last 5 years and all feature the loop version of the time gating mechanic. The Longing is a game that takes place in real time over a one year period and that's been picking up a bit of notice. Consortium is adventure-ish and uses real time.

I'm not saying that these mechanics don't have detractors now, just as they had detractors then. I'm saying there isn't really a generational gap that would make me believe that kids these days wouldn't have a similar reaction to it as people did back then, and the evidence for this is that lots of minor variations of this kind of mechanic exist and mostly it's been in games that do pretty well.

In Hollow Knight, the use of a fan wiki is less about notes in the adventure game sense and more about optimizing builds, reading about lore, checking quest solutions, and looking up boss strategies. It's possible that some unspecified journalist made some unspecified remark about taking notes while playing Elden Ring and some unspecified Twitter demons gave him some unspecified grief about it. And yet, a huge number of people who play Elden Ring do it with a wiki open. Fandom has raised something like $100,000,000 in VC and its primary business model is being a wiki for video games; it's almost entirely supplanted traditional FAQs.

There are of course games that require more traditional "stuff I learned" notes these days, a prime example is The Outer Wilds (> 1 million sales on Steam despite a one year late release, Overwhelmingly Positive reviews, probably my favourite game of the 21st century, Adventure Gamers Game of the Year 2019 so let's sidestep whether you think it's an adventure game please). You might also think about Stardew Valley (20 million+ copies sold, is played almost entirely with Wiki lookups) or Minecraft (300 million copies, has a thriving ecosystem of secondary information and content, including videos, wikis, etc.) What would convince you that there is still a demand for games that require or encourage the use of supplementary information and thinking?

As to team size, point and click adventures don't require the budget of an open world game like Red Dead Redemption 2. About 15 people are credited on Myst. About 20-25 on Secret of Monkey Island. Tons of PnCs today have much larger budgets and larger team sizes than they ever did. The fact that the market also sustains an Asssassin's Creed game made by 2500 people over 3 years doesn't take away from the space for creative adventure games. The relative terms framing is just bonkers. James Cameron has half-billion dollar budget films, but Parasite still exists.

Monkey Island was never a juggernaut. The US sales in the first two years were about 100,000 copies. You don't think Monkey Island could be made today and sell 100,000 copies in the US? Thimbleweed Park (2017, Ron Gilbert) is well over 100,000 copies in the US across platforms. Broken Age is around 100,000 copies on Steam. The Witness over 500k on Steam. Inscryption is over a million on Steam, and that just launched 9 months ago. Papers Please around 2 million on Steam. Agent A, which is I think 3 people in a flash-style animation, is coming up on 100k on Steam. The Grim Fandango re-release is coming on the game's entire original sales run. Phoenix Wright in the 500k range. Gorogoa in the 500k range. The Room around a million units. Granted you can play with the numbers -- lifetime versus first few years sales, discounting, countries of availability, upfront MSRP, availability of console ports versus just PC, whatever. My point isn't to prove all these games outsold Monkey Island, it's to suggest I don't see the apparently cavernous collapsed alleged in demand for PnCs.

It's true that nothing is Myst anymore, but nothing was Myst back then either. PnCs are alive and well.

Do you happen to have a blog or website? As a kid I was an avid gamer and your comments are really insightful in this arena.

> and the evidence for this is that lots of minor variations of this kind of mechanic exist and mostly it's been in games that do pretty well.

The loop version of the time mechanic, where you're intended to loop back around and not expected to win the game in a certain amount of time, is much more forgiving than a strict timer mechanic. I guess I don't see the existence of looping games as an indication that younger gamers have an appetite for difficult or obtuse mechanics that used to be more common.

Further, all of those games except Deathloop are not particularly mainstream. Yes, they may have sold a million copies, but it's important to keep in mind that the size of the prize is much greater than it was thirty years ago. There are 160M total gamers in the US alone right now; whereas when I was a kid in the 80s basically no adults played video games, and not every kid did, either. It's not surprising to me that a million people enjoyed a weird mechanic when the number of gamers in the world might number in the billions.

> You don't think Monkey Island could be made today and sell 100,000 copies in the US?

You're selling 100,000 copies short -- that's a fairly large number that many indies would be more than happy with. Regardless, I'm not sure Monkey Island could sell as well, if it were a new property and not backed by an established company. Can you give me examples of point-and-clicks released recently that sold so well? And I mean true point-and-clicks -- Lucas Arts or Sierra style inventory puzzle games. Double Fine released one in 2014 (Broken Age), which I think barely broke even sales-wise. That's the closest I can think of off the top of my head. All the others I've played in the past few years haven't been mainstream games.

> PnCs are alive and well.

I never said they weren't. They're just not mainstream in any way. Most younger people aren't going to be playing them. My nieces and nephews wouldn't know what to do with one, frankly.

> In Hollow Knight, the use of a fan wiki is less about notes in the adventure game sense and more about optimizing builds, reading about lore, checking quest solutions, and looking up boss strategies.

I'm not sure how important this is. It doesn't necessarily comport with my experience with Hollow Knight in particular, but regardless, the fact that people are willing to look things up doesn't seem to say anything important about how likely younger people are to engage with difficult or unforgiving mechanics. When things are difficult people might have to look something up, sure, but that doesn't mean they want to have to look things up. When I did look something up for Hollow Knight it was because I was stuck; I would've hated having to alt-tab out to a fan wiki every ninety seconds to look up tips and tricks and walkthroughs.

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