Avid Kotaku reader Threepwood4life has pointed us in the direction of a new interview with LucasArts' Craig Derrick, where he talks about the potential for new adventure games in the wake of the success of the Monkey Island revival.
You can read it for yourself of course, but the jist of it seems to be: 'if we make new adventure games, they will be a mixture of action and adventure.' Which I am cool with.
If we were to truly get back into the "adventure" business then I would say we need to take some of what we've learned from the "action" side of the business a little bit, look at today's audience sensibilities and reinvent the genre just as we did with Maniac Mansion 23 years ago.
There's some more of the usual guff about Monkey Island 2: Special Edition in there too, so get your fill and make merry with delight.
Source: Kotaku
I just hope it's a genuine push to evolve and improve the genre rather than pander to the sensibilities of a generation of young console gamers who have been inundated with action focused games. Adding action elements is generally the first thing a company will do when attempting this, and while it sometimes works really well (Psychonauts, BG&E) I'd be so much more excited to see an evolution of plot and thought focused games which involve no arbitrary killing whatsoever, taking the reality of their plot\world more seriously (even if the plot itself is comedic).
Game violence seems to me like an infection in the industry that's really hard to cure. It's not like I don't love some violent games, I've played the hell out of Valve's games, the Fallouts, GTAs, etc etc, but sometimes I feel like developers are thinking "will people even buy our game if you don't kill stuff in it?" rather than even attempting to make non-violent games which are as engaging as the latest blockbuster FPS.
He also doesn't say that they will incorporate action into their games, just a bit of trying to push the adventure genre forwards.
At least for the most part. Sure there are exceptions and the odd mini-game here and there, but one of the main draws to adventure gaming is that I can relax and proceed through the game purely at the pace of my ability to solve brain teasers, puzzles and listen to or read dialogue.
In other words, "action-adventure" games =/= "adventure" games. I'm not opposed to new games with both adventure and action elements, but I don't know if I would classify them as adventure games at that point.
What made you think that lol
Anyways, a lot of these ideas are worrying me. I don't know why. Maybe it's because Singapore came-up again...I really don't know. There's nothing to be afraid of, but I keep hoping Lucas stick to making original IPs and licensing out their old ones to the original developers...I really, really hope they do so.