I consider myself to be very open minded, but it comes at a cost. Notably liking things I think I LIKE, or making myself like something because I’m supposed to like something. There’s also the general peer pressure of liking things that make you look like you have good taste. Vice versa when it comes to disliking. This isn’t like a huge revelation or anything, I think there’s always going be some sort of psychological bend to why we like or dislike something.
The big confession I have to make is: as a whole, I do not like point and click adventure games. I’ve tried many times to get into them, but a lot of things hold me back. I considered myself a fan of them awhile back. Many fans of the genre would admit there are shortcomings to them (especially the old ones), and generally the game’s quality comes down to how well they stay away from the pitfalls.
Point and click generally refers to a genre of game where it’s typically 2D with gorgeous illustrated backgrounds that you walk around in, there’s an unlikely hero who you control that narrates everything and picks up items and use them to progress in a myriad of ways that the creator/writer intends for you to go through. As a whole I do not mind the aspect of resolving obstacles through non combative methods. There’s a bigger issue I think.
It’s scope and structure. Because the backgrounds get a lot of effort put into them, and aren’t made through reused 16x16 tiles (like say Link to the Past is) there’s going to be less space to traverse. I think this particular limitation is interesting because it’s more of a delegation of resources. Big budget open world games can afford to make large spaces that are beautiful to look at and explore for long periods of time but they typically suffer from checklist syndrome, there’s more space but there’s less meaning per square mile overall. Maybe that’s a new measurement? There are exceptions like Breath of the Wild where you’re at least interacting with the environment and space itself, but that also has its own repetition and not much room for unique variety depending on how you perceive the 100th identical looking shrine.
In a point and click’s case I just don’t like that I’m invited to a fantastical world only to be blocked off by an NPC that could care less about your predicament and will be thwarted off through convoluted MacGyver-esque means. You then find another area that you spend the next hour getting stuck on before you can move on. I don’t think saving time on backgrounds is purely why these tropes work their way into adventure games though. There is a particular design philopshy that has persisted in the offices of Sierra and Lucas Arts (RIP) that’s likely a result of many humorous tropes that are hard to get rid of and are just “how it is.”
This is less about ranting about point and click games, but more to call to attention about space and purpose. As a designer, having a fetch quest that requires a bit of backtracking is useful to me. I can see why point and clicks rely on this type of stuff because you reuse NPCs/locations thereby getting more “content value” out of them. Without a combat system or a reusable puzzle (like say The Witness) you have to develop set pieces that relate to a particular area or NPC. When you want to bump up the gameplay time, you end up with these scenarios that feel longer than they should be. There’s a huge craft to this, but also a risk.
If you do have a reusable combat system though, you can simply say “Go from A to B” and have incidental combat along the way to give meat to the bones of the game. Though games will still resort to weird offshoot set pieces that feel like point and click adventures merely to inject variety. They may not involve combining a series of items in a dumb way but maybe a toned down version of it like talking to a series of NPCs to forward the story.
I guess to say that it’s easy to fall into the trap of coming up with a cool scenario only to realize it’s about 5 minutes of gameplay. So you tack on goals within goals to give more purpose to that scenario. This is enough to get the game done but it makes you wonder if it could have been better if you had more foresight. Point and click games often feel like there’s the foresight that there’s going to be tacked on fetch quests in the first place because that’s just how the genre works.
At some point I’d like to explore what it means to make scenarios in games that don’t feel like “things given to the player to do” because it does plague a lot of games, not just point and clicks. There’s always that moment in the later half of the game where the story takes a backseat and you’re asked to go to a previous area or do something of no relevance but fills a certain content quota. That might just come down to preference, there are people in this world that have no problem with the tri-force charts in Wind Waker. I myself do not mind checklist simulators, assuming I’m in the mood for it and there’s not much resistance, like familiar junk food.
One example of a non fetchy scenario would be of, of all things, from Oblivion. The Dark Brotherhood. I have never beaten Oblivion or any Elder Scrolls game for that matter, but I will always enjoy the Brotherhood questline. If I were to describe them to you, you’d think I’d be describing a poor man’s Assassin’s Creed. It’s a optional series of quests where you assassinate NPCs out in the world, it’s triggered by simply murdering anyone in the world (that isn’t classified as a bandit or monster if I recall). But it’s the dressing up of it and the way you are brought into it that seals the deal for me.
In the quest Whodunit? You’re basically locked within a mansion with the optional goal of not being seen as the murderer. This just reuses the combat system in Oblivion where you simply kill NPCs in rooms where other NPCs aren’t watching. It’s not very difficult, and there’s not much to figure out. Yet it cements a scenario that I feel like I didn’t “have to do” I wanted to do it because I wanted to climb the ranks of the brotherhood. I wanted to do it because I didn’t know exactly what I was expecting. I remember taking my time to talk to NPCs and really feel the role I was carrying out. It felt like a game within a game even though it’s just a quest designer probably using what they had to smoosh together systems that aren’t always designed to be used in this way. There was so much context to what you were doing it was hard to really notice that you were being directed.
The Dark Brotherhood benefits from a lot of things. For instance being inside of a much bigger game means everything I was doing at the brotherhood felt voluntary. I could stop at any moment. The secret lair (the hub where you get your assignments) is also a place I could have walked past while doing other tasks in the world. It might have not had the same effect if this was a contained game, but who knows. It might have just left a good impression at the right place right time, but I think there’s something worth exploring there. How to not make things feel like tasks but actually natural to the player. It might come down to merely doing goals differently from common games. Once the method of new goal making is discovered, it becomes the new trend and we see it for what it is, so our job as designers is to keep up with expectations.
Extracting purpose from assets and sequences is what I constantly think about as a game developer though and is always weighing on my mind. I don’t really have the answers to any of the stuff I just said (in this article anyway). But I’d like to at some point make a guided effort into really figuring out how to make playable scenarios feel more than they actually are.
