(Hmm, there seems to be a limit on how many characters can be posted! Didn’t realize I had typed so much! :D)
……
But by blindly turning your back on them without giving them so much as a chance, this realistically will never happen, as you’re shunning the handful of people with the experience and desire to make it possible.
People learn best by observation. Pulling apart the old Sierra games and analysing them has many, MANY advantages. It teaches you what made these games so special and how to plan out a similar game so that it maintains the classic charm. Because you have to program every little detail, you discover things that the casual player would never notice. The whole process gives a fan game creator much insight into how a good adventure game should be constructed.
In addition to our current Sierra remakes, we’ve also been very hard at work on our first commercial adventure game, Al Emmo and the Lost Dutchman’s Mine. Trust me when I say that this commercial title would not be turning out the way it is without the experience we’ve gained from remaking Sierra classics. So thanks to Ken, Roberta, Josh and all the other former Sierra employees who helped out and offered words of advice and encouragement — and for making all these great games in the first place! The experience of remaking games is also educational and personal… it is about learning as much as it’s about giving starved fans more old school games to play. In the end, it all seems to work out for everybody – even the dissenters! 🙂
Oh, and just to touch on a point raised earlier in this thread by various posters, absolutely no disrespect is intended to the Williams’ whatsoever. To even suggest so is absurd! Honestly, we would not spend 2+ years working on a remake if we didn’t utterly enjoy the original and want more people experience it who otherwise wouldn’t have the chance. The statement about the illogical puzzles and dated technology are not jabs at the Roberta, they’re simply retrospective facts that are stated by many modern gamers. Every game has its flaws, and the creators learn from these and use the experience to make a better product next time around. KQ2 was no exception…it had it’s memorable faults, and Roberta did a good job of making sure they weren’t carried over to later KQ games. Something to note is that these things were deemed flaws by public consensus…not merely by our own dev team. This was the majority’s opinion, and we took it into consideration when planning the remake.
In it’s time, KQ2’s puzzles were, no doubt, deemed challenging. However, this was in the days before the Internet and hint lines, so players were required to think much harder and for longer periods of time without the temptation of resorting to a walkthrough. Most modern players do not have the same kind of persistence. Particularly not non-adventure game players. In order to adapt the game to modern standards of playability (and keep the story flowing at a reasonable pace) we decided to add more logic to some puzzle solutions. In fact, most ‘illogical’ solutions from the original actually remain the same… it’s just that more information was added to hint at why the player should use item X to solve puzzle Y.