Pros:
- Animated images and styled text are easier than Inform.
Cons:
- Documentation is erratic. When I last looked at the manual (admittedly, a number of years ago), there were quite a few pages which just had a line in the vein of “This page is not written yet.” There were a handful of worked examples. (Compare to 400+ examples in the Inform documentation.)
- Significant amounts of the execution logic are in the runner. For example, if multiple characters move on a turn, and some of them happen to have “If this character sees X, then do Y”, in what order exactly do those tasks get run? If Campbell changes this logic, it might break any game that depends on the old behavior. (Under an Inform game, the equivalent logic is part of the game file.)
- (The above is closely connected to why interpreters for ADRIFT are limited. Zcode and Glulx were designed with the purpose of being clearly specified, and making it easy to write interpreters, so multiple interpreters exist for them.)
- ADRIFT lacks the ability to do file IO. If I understand the Inform docs correctly, a person doing an Eamon clone under Inform could create the guild hall and each adventure as separate games, sharing data through external files.
- ADRIFT’s parsing is nowhere near what an Inform game could do. For example, in Scroll Thief, a scroll can be referred to by the spell written on it, and some scrolls are rewritable. A person doing an Eamon clone could give the player weapons with names that it got reading an input file, and the player could refer to them with those names.