作者：Richard Cobbett

冒险游戏着实很差劲。发表此等评论的并非动作游戏粉丝，也并非试图通过战斗来解决所有问题的RPG游戏玩家。这个评论来自于我这个玩过所有Sierra和LucasArts游戏的业余游戏玩家。只要是属于这两个公司的游戏，我都体验过，或者至少有所了解，包括《断剑》、《Zork》、《东方快车谋杀案》、《Kingdom O’Magic》和《Les Manley》等。我打通过优秀的和劣质的冒险游戏，冒险一直是我最喜欢的题材。正是这个题材将我带入游戏世界中，也是我最为怀念的题材。即便是在今日，这个题材仍然还有着巨大的潜力。尽管如此，如今的冒险游戏确实很差劲。

我认为这种情况可以得到改变，这正是为何我对目前的状况感到愤怒的原因。冒险游戏本应该再次绽放耀眼的光芒，要点在于游戏公司需要努力去争取，但是几乎没有人愿意去做此类尝试。

《妙探闯通关》的谜题并不理想，其出彩之处是丰富的想象力(from pcgamer)

没落的原因

长久以来，冒险都被视作是落后的题材，人们都已经忘却了它们曾经是最具超前意识的题材之一。设计、技术、抱负，方方面面均是如此。《King’s Quest》首作是以IBM个人电脑为平台的经典之作。冒险游戏《Talkie》是首款使用全对话的游戏，在传统软盘升级昂贵之时成为了CD-ROM技术的主要推动力。冒险是首个精巧使用256色图像以及随后的高清图像的题材。正如我们通过《第七访客》和《Myst》所看到的那样，它们成为了游戏视频和动画方面的先驱者。冒险题材还有更多值得炫耀的资本。

随着实时3D的崛起，该题材逐渐没落。主要原因在于，当时该技术还无法提供玩家现在所期盼看到的视觉真实性和互动密集性。而且，随着行业内逐渐推广更多专注于动作的游戏，最终便出现了动作冒险题材。在此类游戏中，冒险经历和用刀剑砍杀怪物同等重要。这导致了《King’s Quest》系列游戏最后一款作品《Mask of Eternity》的覆灭。

事实上，冒险题材根本不依赖于最新的技术。对其他任意题材而言，采用新技术不会造成影响。而且，诸如面部动画（游戏邦注：《吸血鬼：避世之血族》中采用）和复杂环境（游戏邦注：《终极刺客：血钱》中采用）之类的做法都可以提升游戏体验。但是从核心上来说，冒险游戏的精华并不在于它们的技术，而在于它们如何使用这些技术，而这往往起源于寻找新的想法而不是让游戏屈从于行业准则。过去也有游戏采用上述做法，它们都失败了，没有人关心这些游戏。Sierra和Lucasarts之类的公司之所以会受人喜欢，是因为他们采取了别样的做法。

冒险是起点

让我们先回顾下经典的冒险游戏，看看某些游戏具有怎样的抱负。首先，我要简单介绍下这类游戏。冒险是个比你想象中要复杂得多的提出，在许多方面都非同寻常，原因在于你玩冒险游戏时所体验的并非游戏真正提供的内容。在《孤岛危机》中，你开枪射杀敌人并对此印象深刻。这便是游戏所要传达的内容，故事以及做出动作的原因只是外在的东西。但是在《狩魔猎人》中，你要做的是前往新奥尔良调查巫术谋杀者，与某个有趣的角色经历这些事情。谜题很重要，但是它们的主要作用是承担缓和体验并使其更具互动性的机制。也就是说，谜题是方法而不是结果。回到过去，即便有时候谜题和逻辑会有所冲突，但这是我们在比其他题材更具说服力的沙盘中体验游戏所需付出的代价。

著名冒险游戏制作人Jane Jensen的《灰质》看起来优于《狩魔猎人》，但故事情节却比较糟糕(from pcgamer)

当然，此规则也存在例外情况，比如《谜题侦探》和《雷顿教授》以及更早的《Blue Ice》和《Zork: Grand Inquisitor》等游戏。尽管如此，许多基于故事的游戏都将谜题作为路障，只是为了让紧张的动作暂时停止下来。而许多基于谜题的游戏却尝试传播非谜题般的感觉，比如在《Spycraft》中扮演间谍，在《Traitor’s Gate》中扮演世界上最厉害的小偷以及在《Myst》中扮演旅行者。

事实上，“冒险游戏”曾经并非是固定的题材。对于最棒的游戏而言，冒险只是个开始，它们采纳这种基本想法并将其延伸到新颖有趣的方向，使得游戏的体验独特且令人印象深刻。可能扩展成大型游戏，比如即时动作游戏《东方快车谋杀案》。或者添加其他的元素，比如《Quest for Glory》将角色扮演和角色发展融入到冒险核心中。或者某些看起来较为简单的东西，比如被许多冒险游戏借鉴的《猴岛的秘密》中的Three Trials结构，这可以扩展游戏世界的范围并且提供多项挑战。

你对这个题材的挖掘越深，你就会发现越多十分睿智却已经被大多数人遗忘的想法。比如，《Conquests of the Longbow》就是触及道德问题的首批游戏之一。玩家所扮演的角色是Robin Hood，你需要拯救Lady Marian，为King Richard筹集赎金，挫败Sheriff of Nottingham的阴谋等，通常对某种情况的处理可以采用多种多样的方法。比如，假设你需要一件僧侣的服饰来潜入当地的修道院，那么你可以购买，也可能击败旅行者来获取，游戏同样都会进行下去。

还有个例子，便是游戏《A Mind Forever Voyaging》，这是款出自Infocom之手的文字冒险游戏。上一分钟你扮演的是普通人Perry Simm，下一分钟你忽然感到“觉醒”过来，发现你的整个生活都只是模拟而已。事实上，你是世界上最为强大的分析性电脑PRISM，到目前为止你的全部生活就是构建现实世界的完美模拟。你的工作就是模拟未来的情况，测试某项计划的可行性。你发现将来10年内，整个世界井然有序。计划开展20年后，问题才是逐渐显现。30年后，美国成了地狱般的国度。这款游戏中几乎没有谜题，只是观察而已，但仍然是款非常优秀的游戏。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Editorial: How to save adventure games

Richard Cobbett

Adventure games suck. Sorry, but it’s true. This isn’t a lunk-headed action fan telling you this, nor a snotty RPG fan who wants to solve every problem with a sword. No. This is coming to you from a guy who considers beating every Sierra and LucasArts game ever made to be an amateur claim. If it exists, I’ve likely played it, or at least know of it. Broken Sword? Zork? The Last Express? Kingdom O’Magic? Les Manley? I’ve finished great adventures and rubbish adventures, and make no mistake, adventures are my favourite genre of all time. They’re what got me into gaming, the genre I’m most nostalgic about, and one still bursting with incredible untapped potential even today. Even so, today, they suck.

And that’s something that can change. That’s why I get cross. Adventure games deserve to be great once again. The catch is, they have to earn it, and almost none of them are even trying.

Go north. Look.

Adventures have been a backward looking genre for so long, people have forgotten they used to be one of the most forward thinking. Design, technology, ambition… they had it all. The original King’s Quest was a showpiece for IBM’s PCjr home computer. ‘Talkie’ adventures, the first to bring full speech to games, were one of the main draws for CD-ROM technology back when it was an expensive upgrade to traditional floppy disks. Adventures were the first genre to make good use of 256 colour graphics, and later, high resolution. They tested the water for video, and animation, and rendered 3D, as seen in The 7th Guest and Myst. And more! If you wanted to show off, you reached for an adventure.

Only with the rise of real-time 3D did they falter. This was primarily because the primitive nature of the technology at the time wasn’t up to providing the same visual fidelity and density of interaction that fans now expected. This, combined with an industry push toward more action focused games, usually resulted in action-adventures where lever pulling and hitting things with swords was about as good as it got. That was the fate of the final King’s Quest game, Mask of Eternity, while the games that tried to keep the faith buckled under the weight of the technology – two examples being Simon the Sorcerer 3D, which simply stank, and the profoundly underwhelming Gabriel Knight 3, even ignoring That Puzzle.

Adventures don’t actually need the latest technology, of course. As with any genre, it doesn’t hurt, and such things as facial animation (as seen in Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines) and complex environments (such as those in Hitman: Blood Money, which is at least an honorary adventure, even if you are packing weapons) all help make the experience more immersive. But at heart, the best adventures were great not because of their technology but because of how they used it, and that always started with finding new ideas instead of willingly tying themselves down to What These Games Must Be. There were games that took that approach in the olden days. They were crap. Nobody cared about them. Companies like Sierra and Lucasarts were loved because they did things differently.

Starting point

Befpre we continue, let’s head back to the classics, and see just how ambitious some of them were. First though, a quick primer. Adventures are a more complicated genre than you’d think, and an unusual one in many ways – not least because the reason you sign up to play one tends to be completely divorced from what the game actually offers. Play Crysis? You sign up to shoot men with guns and be impressed. That’s what it delivers, and the story and reason for doing so is effectively a bonus. Play Gabriel Knight? Chances are it’s because you want to poke around New Orleans investigating a cult of voodoo murderers, and hang with a fun character. The puzzles are important, but they’re primarily a mechanism to facilitate that experience and make it interactive – the means, not the end. Even back in the day, bad puzzles and moon logic chafed, but they were the price we paid for getting to play in a more convincing sandbox than any other genre was even close to being able to pull off. RPGs? Oh, please…

(Note: There are of course exceptions to this rule, like Puzzle Agent and the Professor Layton games, or going back further, things like Blue Ice and Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Most story based games however treat their puzzles as roadblocks more than anything else, just stopping the action cold until you’re done staring in confusion and/or have forced through. Even many of the puzzle based ones are still trying to convey a feeling rather than brainteasers though, from pretending to be a spy in Spycraft to being the world’s greatest thief in Traitor’s Gate, or a tourist in a boring land during Myst.)

As a result, ‘adventure game’ used to be more than a set genre. For the best games, it was simply a starting point, they’d take the basic ideas and spin them off in new and interesting directions that made their experiences unique and memorable. It might be something big and grand, like the real-time action of The Last Express. Or an additional element, like Quest for Glory fusing roleplaying stats and character development to the adventure core. Or something seemingly simpler, like The Secret of Monkey Island’s Three Trials structure, as stolen by almost every other adventure game ever, to widen the scope of its world and offer multiple challenges at once. More on that in a moment – it’s an important piece of history.

The more you dig into the genre, the more utterly brilliant, largely forgotten ideas you find. Conquests of the Longbow, for instance, was one of the first games to make morality work. Playing as Robin Hood, you had to rescue the Lady Marian, raise a ransom for King Richard, foil the Sheriff of Nottingham and more, and often there were a number of ways to deal with situations. If you needed a monk’s habit to sneak into the local monastery for instance, you could buy one, or beat one out of a traveller, and the game would generally continue. Only at the end might it come back to bite you, when the king finally returns and you’re put on trial to see if you’re really the honourable outlaw you claim to be.

Here’s another example: A Mind Forever Voyaging. This was a text adventure from Infocom with an amazing premise. One minute, you’re Perry Simm, generic everyman. The next, you ‘wake up’ to find that your whole life has just been a simulation, and that you’re really PRISM, the world’s most powerful analytical computer, and that your whole life so far has been building a perfect simulation of the real world. Your job is to step forward into simulations of the future to test the viability of the seemingly-benign Plan For Renewed National Purpose. At 10 years into the future, you can see it’s working… mostly. At 20 years, cracks are starting to appear. 30 years on, America is a dystopian hell. The challenge of the game is to prove that this will be the case, and discredit the Senator before he can have you deactivated. It’s a game with almost no puzzles at all, simply observation, but it’s still brilliant. (Source: PC Gamer)