This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.

I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.

So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.

  • uralsolo [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    5·
    1 year ago

    The series peak for me is Rome: Total Realism 7. The zoomed in Mediterranean map, having to balance your family members’ political and military careers, the way integration of conquered territory was modeled chefs-kiss. I think Empire: Total War’s lukewarm reception scared CA away from doing “realistic” combat, since Napoleon and later Shogun 2 both introduced a bunch of “special abilities” that made things really video game-y - but IMO if they had done a deep dive into realism, overhauled siege warfare and enemy AI, and scaled everything up to full historical battle sizes, they could have kept the series’ charm instead of going full fantasy which is what they did (fukken three Warhammer games? Really?).