Re: Joey’s original questions,
The first adventures I played - the early 80s Sierra Online games like Mystery House, Wizard and the Princess and Cranston Manor - had graphics permanently on display, with a few lines of text beneath for typing and feedback. To me, that was what an adventure game was. The graphics correlated with locations on a one to one basis (they changed each time you moved from one room to another) and most objects you could pick up or drop would be displayed on the screen if present, and removed when taken or destroyed.
Those graphics had the extra purpose of showing the features of the room. There wasn’t the need to say ‘you see a table’ – nor room for it in the 4 text lines beneath the display. You would just see a picture of a table and then try to interact with it by typing EXAMINE TABLE or something. Most prominent things you saw in the picture were there to be interacted with.
This worked in lots of ways - the graphics were elementary and relatively speaking, so were the games. You could try interacting with anything you saw in the drawings, quickly accepting that a feature was really just ‘painted on’ if the game returned ‘You don’t see that here.’ There wasn’t the graphical resolution yet to overstuff the image with non-functioning scenery/objects.
Outside of this style of game, other advancements were going on. Infocom with their dense text. And graphics got better. Then there came the querulous 16 bit era where some games still used graphics in every location, and a text parser beneath, and borrowed from both worlds. People can debate the success of these games (of which previously mentioned ‘Dream Zone’ is a good-looking example, and with cool music to boot) – but my experience was they emphasised the querulousness of BOTH text and graphics. The graphics were advanced enough that more features would appear in the graphics only, leading you to the kind of scanning you’d expect of a point and click adventure. At the same time, the text was a bit denser - but not that much. The feeling was you had to read between the lines of both. I find Level 9 adventures like ‘The Pawn’ fall painfully into this area, though the pics are really atmospheric. Also… the graphics would not necessarily change in every location, just sometimes. That was something that really disturbed me, but that’s because I came out of the Sierra school.
So today, given the detail you can put into graphics, and the amount of time we spend minimising distractions in the text descriptions that might cause players to try to play with things that aren’t there - I have a feeling graphics are perilously viewed (or they are by me ) because of what they can suggest which you then might have to implement. In a point and click game, we dispense with a zillion player actions in a contract knowing that wiggling cursors over hotspots will activate them. In text games, the hotspots are in the text, or can be read between the lines of the text. That’s what appeals to me in them vs point and click, that not everything is ‘there’ to be brute forced out. The illusion that I intuit the solutions and actions myself, from no list of options, is the magic part to me.
And then there’s the fact graphics are a ton more work. I’d like to see a Sierra styled one graphic = one room, plus you can see people and objects, and there’s a text parser on the side, game - done in modern style, but I’m never gonna do that and I’m not sure anyone else will.
- Wade