A (partial) list of text adventure game verbs:

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ANSWER, APPLY, ASK, ATTACK, AVOID, BEND, BITE, BLOW, BOARD, BREAK, BRING, BURN, BUY, CALL, CAST, CLEAN, CLIMB, CLOSE, CONNECT, COUNT, CROSS, CUT, DESTROY, DIAL, DIG, DISEMBARK, DIVE, DOFF, DON, DRINK, DROP, EAT, EMPTY, ENTER, ERASE, ESCAPE, EXAMINE, EXIT, EXTEND, EXTINGUISH, FILL, FIND, FLY, FOLLOW, GET, GIVE, GO, HELP, HIDE, HIT, HOLD, IGNITE, JUMP, KICK, KILL, KISS, KNOCK, LAUNCH, LEARN, LEAVE, LICK, LIE, LIGHT, LISTEN, LOCK, LOOK, MAKE, MARRY, MEASURE, MEMORIZE, MOVE, OFFER, OPEN, PICK, PLAY, POINT, POUR, PULL, PUSH, PUT, RAISE, READ, REMOVE, RIP, ROLL, SCRUB, SEARCH, SHAKE, SHOOT, SHOUT, SHOW, SIT, SLEEP, SLIDE, SMELL, STAIN, STAND, STAY, STEP, SWIM, TAKE, TASTE, TELL, THROW, TIE, TOUCH, TURN, TYPE, UNLOCK, UNTIE, WAIT, WAKE, WALK, WAVE, WEAR, WISH, WRITE, YELL

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Admittedly, a large number could be implemented by a suitably context sensitive "use" command (maybe with a secondary "use2" key for some items) and a lot of the movement commands are replaced by the standard 3D mouse/keyboard, but conversation requires a secondary interface, which typically disrupts player control. Listen and look are automatic, but the other senses aren''t represented in any obvious way. Combining items and handling multiple types of clothing pretty much requires a separate inventory screen. And then there''s hidden commands, like "plugh" or "xyzzy" in Colossal Caves (one of which is vital for solving a puzzle). Or versatile objects with more than one use in a given context. Or, of course, the dreaded mazes... short of littering the place with teleporters, I can''t think of any way to prevent a player from being able to backtrack out of a maze - avoiding being completely lost. OK, so there are special cases, and specific fixes for each case, but there''s a risk that the whole game ends up being special cases and specific fixes...

Just as an experiment, try playing through Colossal Caves, and try and figure out how to make that into a 3D game - apart from the forest outdoors, which has a slightly weird topology, practically the entire game (OK, not the active volcano and probably not the mirror) is modelled on a real cave network, so the 3D modelling should be possible (if you ignore the details of the mazes, where the topology again gets a little warped). Offhand, apart from the tight squeeze into the plover room (you can only get through if you drop everything - which is definitely not the sort of thing a 3D game usually concerns itself with...) and dealing with the Troll, nothing springs to mind as being exceptionally difficult to convert into a 3D system.

You can't expect a literal translation from a text-based interface to a graphical one. While the list looks impressive, only a small number of those verbs would be relevant to the player's interaction with particular elements of his environment.

> OPEN ROCKYOU CAN'T OPEN THAT> LIGHT ROCK WITH MATCHYOU CAN'T LIGHT THAT> DRINK ROCKYOU CAN'T DRINK THAT> DROP ROCKOK 

The reason these games had so many verbs is that they relied on verbal input, and you wanted a flexible language where you could say "LIGHT TORCH WITH MATCH" instead of "USE TORCH WITH MATCH". Like you said, many of the commands could be implemented as context sensitive commands, and any ambiguities that remain could be resolved through the use of icons, labels, or even motions. Nothing that should make it very difficult to implement.

Ultimately, the point I'm making is that there's been plenty of 2D adventure games, and it's nothing that today's game developers can't handle.

[edited by - chronos on April 7, 2003 3:08:35 AM]

There are some aspects of 2D adventures that would be difficult to implement in 3D. If there is a room that has moving obstacles to avoid, like rolling barrels coming at you, sometimes a scroller 2D view is better for timing the jumps and ducks. I don''t think you can get too frantic with 3D movements, since the goal in 3D is more to jump accurately rather than well timed, and give the player plenty of time to catch their bearing. Otherwise, it''s too overwhelming, unless it''s just me. I suppose you could give the player some markers on the wall or floor, and the player has to decide which markers to jump at, duck, and pause at, as they get a chance to see the obstacles from a safe perspective before they dive into it.

It could be implemented with 3D rendering by just showing it from the side, but that would make it just 3D-ized 2D.

As for the lighting torch with match idea, that''s a simple matter of opening the inventory, dragging a match off the box of matches, placing it over the torch and clicking.

Hmm. I wonder if developing a nicely rounded out text adventure would suit the design of a 3D adventure better than knowing you were planning on doing it in 3D.

One thing I should mention, there will be an option to play in either First-Person Mode or Fixed Camera Mode, the later involving clear camera angles to view your character in the best possible way in leiu of the obstacles that they must overcome with camera positions changing only when at safe points to limit confusion.

Of course, there probably won''t be much in the way of barrels rolling at the player, though the same rules would apply and I believe once a player knows the freedom of movement they have they will be able to do some very wicked moves, ala Tomb Raider gymnastics, yet with realtime assistance provided by the game at very key areas of accurate movement. This way, it will be more based on timing rather than accuracy and will hopefully balance well for the player.

In fact, one room that will focus on these aspects will definitly be remembered by those who make it there, I call it the Mash Bash Room! It will involve a ton of intertwined pistons constantly cycling on a timed system and there will be only a very few safe spots for breathers! I just hope it turns out to be as easy to make as I have planned it out to be!

But hey, I''ll never know untill we get that far

- Chris

I''m going to try to clarify myself here at the risk of twisting things even more for those who haven''t been able to get near this wild track I have going here...and guess what, it becomes another epic post. Oh well. I like this one better than the first.

The games I mention, I have realized, do so because they are able to transcend the really easy genre classifications. Pitfall was probably a poor choice among those, but it still rises above many platform games because it is also a puzzle - it has a continous world, of which there is a single optimal path that allows you to collect every treasure within the time limit while avoiding the most obstacles possible. Assuming you don''t have a map to do the path-finding for you, you are playing two games: Jumping over the scorpions and swinging on vines, and also figuring out a better path to take the next time you play.

Pitfall would be less than half the game if it worked by randomly generating a screen, starting you at one side, and then having you get across and grab the treasure only to repeat the process in a new screen.

Tomb Raider, Doom, etc. do not allow this. You are shuttled through the game almost along a rail, which is evident by their use of clearly defined levels. Every player faces the same obstacles with no choice(or only an occasional choice). Without the choices and accompanying time limit, there is no real puzzle, just some interrupted jumping/killing. That doesn''t make them lesser games, but it DOES put more focus on the core mechanics and leaves less room to expand them from.

Adventure doesn''t really have too much beyond moving items around, and Indy is an improvement in that respect, but they give some leeway in terms of strategies, since you can choose which items to bring along when - a cautious Adventure player might take the magnet so that he can drag around both his sword and key, rather than boldly charging in, and likewise someone playing Indy has a choice over when to use his items. Again, there are two games, the obvious action and puzzles and the strategies in getting past them.

With that in mind, we can generalize and see that most great games do work like this - there is more than one game going on, but they are well-connected or allow one game to shape the course of the other to some extent; they form a well-synthesized experience.

Most(all) RPGs have a simplified form of this: By fighting more battles, it becomes easier to fight later battles. So in theory you choose between more battles or harder battles. But we know that''s not quite true, that a player will always have to fight some to "build up," and get into unwanted random battles, or fight many scripted battles, and those things, as far as I can tell, just drag down the player''s enjoyment of the game, because there''s often too much time when the two games are out of synch with each other. As time has gone on, the flaws of poor implementations of this design formula have gotten glaringly obvious because the plots get bigger and the effects more impressive, but either too much time is spent on concerns like logistics and "where do I go next, this world is too damn big" or too much time is spent on "not another random battle that has become meaningless because the game gives out special items like candy - and it took wayy too long for that spell''s effect to play, I won''t cast it next time" and the game is then either too much to comprehend in a little bite sized piece and demands hours sucked away, or it''s simply underwhelming and frustratingly drawn-out.

Similarly, with modern first person shooters, there are often problems with a lot of time between facing foes, gratuitous puzzles and key-hunts, cutscenes, and incorporating platformer elements. Exploring the level should be a game too, and one that integrates well with the fighting. If it doesn''t, it''ll be another quickly forgotten shooter.

That, I think now, is why I picked out the games I did - they simply did not subsist by the one game alone with the technology given, they expanded on it, and a lot of games that followed those have bogged themselves down, burdening themselves down with good intentions to improve on predecessors but bad ideas of how to do so.

However, that doesn''t mean, I don''t think, that the only way to go is to synthesize your games from multiple parts - there are many bad examples of that that probably should haven''t seen daylight, and there are many good examples of games that stress a single design, keep it moving as fast as the player can/wants to handle, and include features to vary things up along the way - I.E. every good racing game and puzzle game there''s ever been. Pure text and graphic adventures, where the game is effectively a series of puzzles, fall in this category to some extent - however, they have the blessing/curse of effectively bordering the line between book/movie and game, making the integration of story, as opposed to a second type of game, with the puzzles most essential.

I would say that a true adventure, as it should be defined, would be total immersion in the game. This immersion is brought throught choice. Though pitfall really had little choice to it, the player feels as though he has influenced the course of the game play and is not just a generic player that makes generic choices the same as any other who plays it. Games such as doom have 1 level to them. skill. If you are good at it you kill stuff, bad you die. There is no decision of whether you want to kill the giant mutant that is approaching you, and any player that stepped on tp that platform would have the same decision as the innevitable one that you are to make.

Now relating this to MMORPGs. With the new ability to communicate with other players, and have full customization, they could be defined as the ultimate adventure. everquest, for example, leaves no 2 characters alike. On the other hand, it requires no skill other than patience =P. Any player could sit down for um a year? and max out their character''s level. What I''m saying is the illusion of adventure is all that can be created, a trick to play on the player, and if your audience is fooled by shooting a target such as in zelda, so be it. So why not doom? Because the level of interaction is so low that it is unnoticable in my opinion. But then again it was a pretty popular game, so in all this we see the shallowness of human society..

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Original post by RTF
But if we look at the most heralded beginnings of modern 3d games with Wolf3d and Doom, we see only the shooters. Where had the equivalent Adventure-based games gone?

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Not sure why the shooters took off as the sole 3D game experience in the beginning...probably because Wolf3d was the first game to really give the user a visceral, immersive experience in 3D and so copying commenced.

However, once the technology was proven adventure games did start to make a re-emergence. Does anyone remember a game called Tomb Raider?

Regards,
Jeff

Actually I believe the reason FPSs are so popular is their very lack of immersion...their very simplicity.

The fact that the player never makes a real decision is part of the ''sit down and shoot stuff'' mentality that made space invaders so popular. And I don''t think fps gamer are really any different from space invaders, except that they got prettier and added more weapons.

This got me thinking to DnD: Shadows over Mystara...by all accounts a fun little hack and slash arcade game. Yet, the simple reason that it allowed people to choose a path at certain points got me to replay that game far more than I ever would have...simply to see what I missed.

I never played through Doom more than once.

My belief is that the player should never have to think ''I should be able to do that'', be it from seeing a monster do something the player can''t (a pet peeve of mine in RPGs) to whether he can climb that wall.

Warren Spector mentioned once that his objective in Deus Ex 2 isn''t to provide alternate paths everywhere, but simply to provide the player with the framework necessary to create their own paths.

That, I believe, is immersion.

Moo.

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Original post by RTF
Tomb Raider, Doom, etc. do not allow this. You are shuttled through the game almost along a rail, which is evident by their use of clearly defined levels. Every player faces the same obstacles with no choice(or only an occasional choice).

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So go play Red Faction. Don''t want to go down the corridor? Blow a hole in the side of the room. Yeah, it''s not perfect, but it''s a nice proof of concept.

Narrative and immersion are antiparallel concepts in game design; pick a spot somewhere in the continuum.

Also keep in mind that too much freedom may leave the player lost. It''s critical to always make the paths obvious, even if the player is presented with choices. I would also recommend ensuring that all paths eventually lead to conlcusions - not necessarily the same ones, but satisfying ones - without backtracking or player frustration may ensue.

My two bits.

Of all games one of my favourites is an adventure game, of reasonably recent times. It has FPS elements but it is primarily an adventure - Outcast. I have yet to play a game that captures me as much as that did. The orchestral score.. the huge vistas.. (Even though it was voxels the gfx were exceptional)... utterly captivating storyline and volumous world.. there seems to be so many ''other little things'' you can do, its huge.

This game took 6 years to make. And it is unlikely you will find a publisher anywhere on planet Earth that would commit to a 6 years development line anymore. These are just harsh realities. 6 years = massive cost, with unknown returns. In a perfect world, we would have these sorts of great experience games filling the shelves, but capitalism rules well.. and we will have to do with the few diamonds amoungst the rubble..