(re: I have to say Sierra sucks now)
here’s a statement from Jane Jensen about her new game:
“I love mysteries, I love adventure games obviously but you can’t have a game where all you do is walk around and talk to people. There has to be a variety of puzzles and that’s all that line was trying to convey that there is going to be a variety of puzzles. It is not an action/adventure game, there are no guns, there are no jumping and running puzzles. There will be possibly some mild arcades of a kind that there have always been in Sierra games just to mix the gameplay up a little bit. I’ve always done logic puzzles, for example, the drum code from Gabriel 1, so I think the fears can be laid to rest, this is not a first-person Myst-style game this is a full 3D Sierra-style, third-person adventure game.”
I don’t think she can be any clearer than that! (link to the full interview at the bottom of this post)
I’ve heard report after report after report about Broken Sword 3 and how the so-called action elements have been blown out of proportion… so i’ll hold off on making judgements until I’ve seen for myself. And I was a little concerned about the mention of action elements in TLJ2, but really, how can we condemn it until we’ve seen it? Not to mention that there have been some great true adventures released in the past few years…
Syberia wasn’t my favorite game of all time, but it was unarguably a straightforward, point-and-click adventure… not one single action element.
Shadow of Destiny / Shadow of Memories, which was ported to PC this year, is a surprising example of a true adventure from a company that usually focuses on action. No shooting, no jumping, and the only running was to get from here to there — not to mention, it has one of the most imaginative stories I’ve ever seen in a game.
Law & Order came out last year (or early this year?) No action, pure adventure. And it sold so well they’re making a sequel! I haven’t played CSI (which came out last month), but I hear it’s similar.
There are others I haven’t played — Postmortem and Runaway come to mind — and several upcoming games that were announced at E3 last month.
I can understand being under the impression that the genre is dead IF you’re looking for Sierra to make another adventure game. That’s never going to happen. But there are a ton of great games out there — some just as good, some even better. I can’t understand someone who likes adventures wallowing in the “genre is dead” mentality, when there are so many great games you could be playing instead…
-emily