Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by AdmiralAsshat | Hacker News Reader

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It's pretty easy to say "Oh yes, genre _____ died, therefore it was doomed to die" rather than evaluating whether it died because it failed to meaningfully evolve.

I remember in the early aughts people deemed the beat-em-up genre "dead" because there were a high-profile string of early attempts that failed to successfully translate the game experience from 2D to 3D. Fighting Force and The Bouncer were two big examples I can think of that failed miserably. Sword of the Berserk was another attempt, which had some nice production values but pretty forgettable gameplay.

So the beat-em-up genre was likely to fade from existence...until Devil May Cry came along and arguably revitalized the genre (or turned it into the "3D hack-and-slash" genre, depending on you who ask). It showed the industry how to do the gameplay properly in 3D, and now the genre is as popular as ever.

All of which is to say...there's no reason why the Adventure genre could not have persisted into the modern day, had the right game/developer come along.

I think adventure games were doomed because their success depended on hardware restrictions limiting the competition. The main selling point of adventure games was graphical spectacle. Adventure games had better graphics than any other genre because the lack of action meant they could show the most impressive static images. For the bulk of the audience, puzzles were secondary to this, serving mostly to ration out the graphical spectacle so the players felt they got value for money. Look at the success of Myst. I would be very surprised if more than 10% of people who bought it completed it. Myst simply looked better than any other game and that was enough for it to sell. Even King's Quest 1 was considered graphically impressive at the time; it was advertised as "3D" because the characters could be partly obscured by foreground objects and this was an important selling point.

Once you could get the same kind of spectacle in action games, and I'd claim Half-Life as the first notable example, there was no longer any need for mass-market adventure games.

EDIT: Thinking about it, Metal Gear Solid beat Half-Life to market, and that has the same kind of visual spectacle in an action game I'm talking about.

Not sure I entirely agree. Myst had mass market appeal because it was one of the first crossover/"casual" games that didn't require the player to immediately start killing things within a few seconds of starting up the game. I could let my mother play Myst--I don't think I could let her play Half-Life. For one thing, if trying to show her Minecraft taught me anything, it's that the paradigm of separated Looking vs Moving (i.e. WASD+Mouse) control is one too many things to juggle for your average non-gamer.

This is Tekken erasure.

Not sure I understand your comment. Tekken was a fighting game, not a beat-em-up? Unless we're counting Tekken Force Mode from Tekken 3.

Fighting games made the 2D->3D jump just fine, although they kinda exist in parallel now, since some developers really like flexing their sprite chops in 2D fighters.

Well. Yeah, if they made great decisions like Capcom did, the adventure genre may have been more prominent to this day. I mean, Capcom even developed the Ace Attorney games which are themselves visual novels/adventure games.

If you look back at my post though I acknowledged that they would have attempted to modernize had the merger not occurred. And I never said they were doomed, I said they were in deep trouble regardless. So I'm not sure what people are arguing with me about here other than semantics.

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