New Star Trek Adventure Game

[tassieboy]

I was pretty excited to learn yesterday that there is a new Star Trek adventure game in the works to be released next year. Now when I first read the headline I was skeptical. The term "adventure game" can sometimes be used very liberally. But the company making this game are primarily made up of former Telltale employees. They describe it as a story-driven choice-based adventure game. Sounds awesome.
In my opinion, the best Star Trek games have always been adventure games. Obviously, I'm biased because I have a deep-seated love for the genre from growing up with Sierra and Lucasarts, but the ideas of peaceful exploration, solving problems through peaceful means, they all blend very nicely with the Star Trek ethos. I have such beautiful memories of playing TNG "A Final Unity", Judgement Rites and 25th Anniversary. This almost makes up for the cancellation of "Secret of The Vulcan Fury", back in the day.

Anyway, I have pretty high hopes for this. Not sure if it'll run on our family laptop, but if not, it may be the extra push I need to finally try to upgrade from our PS3 to a second-hand PS4.
https://trekmovie.com/2021/12/09/star-t ... ring-2022/

[Tawmis]

Looks like MASS EFFECT with a Star Trek skin over it; and I mean that in a very good way.

[Collector]

Let's hope that it is real Trek, not Nu-Trek.

"Secret of The Vulcan Fury" was a Ken Allen project.

[notbobsmith]

Since it is being developed by people from Telltale games, doesn't that mean it will most likely be a quick time event driven visual novel versus a "true" adventure game? I haven't played anything from Telltale, so I am not sure what they are like.

[DeadPoolX]

Since it is being developed by people from Telltale games, doesn't that mean it will most likely be a quick time event driven visual novel versus a "true" adventure game? I haven't played anything from Telltale, so I am not sure what they are like.

Not necessarily, but yeah... probably, at least if they're going for whatever passes as an Adventure game today.

It'd be nice if they could do something in the Star Trek universe that handled more like The Council. That's decidedly not a quicktime event-driven game and instead relies on using your wits, detective skills, and knowledge of the occult to discover a conspiracy in the late 18th century.

Obviously, it'd have to be changed some to fit the ST setting, but the point is it doesn't need to be a series of events where you have to hit a series of buttons at exactly the right time.

[Rath Darkblade]

Excuse me, DPX: what do you mean by "whatever passes as an adventure game today"? How is it different the adventure games of the 80s and 90s (other than, obviously, the graphics, sound, controls etc.)?

IMNSHO, a good adventure game (like a good story) should have four things:

1. A good plot. The specifics depend on if it's a comedy or a drama, obviously. If the former, you can play things up for laughs. If the latter ... not.

2. Believable characters... i.e. the protagonist, if good, must not be a goody-too-shoes but someone with flaws. For the antagonist, it's the other way around - i.e. something to redeem him/her, and absolutely no melodrama-style mwa-ha-ha-ing. The supporting cast should have strong, memorable personalities.

3. A good character arc. The protagonist should have a goal in mind, and said goal mustn't be easy to acquire. There should be pitfalls, setbacks, and alternative courses of action to pursue. He/she should learn something along the way, but whatever it is can differ: e.g. the value of friendship, the importance of family, not to take things at face value, etc.

4. A strong ending. This can be happy, sad, bittersweet - it doesn't matter which - as long as it's memorable. Think of the endings of GK1 and GK3, for instance.

Obviously all this is harder than it looks. I'm just basing it on my writing/gaming experience, as well as the "Save the Cat!" method of screenwriting and novel-writing. (They're VERY good books, by the way - I highly recommend them. I learned many things here that helped me improve my writing enormously).

[DeadPoolX]

Excuse me, DPX: what do you mean by "whatever passes as an adventure game today"? How is it different the adventure games of the 80s and 90s (other than, obviously, the graphics, sound, controls etc.)?

Well, first of all, the genre term "Adventure" isn't used today like we still use it on SHP. We see the term "Adventure" and think, "parser-based or point-and-click adventure games like those from Sierra or LucasArts," but to the mainstream gaming audience, the term "Adventure" is a vague, almost nonsense term since it's readily applied to almost every genre. Platforming games where you run and jump and shoot people are regularly labeled as "Adventure," because to modern gamers, that's what the term means.

Second, many companies that've tried to revive the Adventure genre have, at best, created half-assed attempts (there are a few exceptions, but their games bank on nostalgia, going so far as to create new games with VGA-like graphics) that have more in-common with Dragon's Lair than the Sierra/LucasArts classics from the 80s and 90s. TellTale is a huge offender here, where their games rely on quicktime events and rushed decision-making. Even the newer King's Quest follows this trend.

Third, the control scheme can radically alter the gameplay and perhaps how we partially define a genre (or perhaps sub-genre). For instance, the term "Adventure Game" encompasses several sub-genres, such as Text Adventure (aka "Interactive Fiction"), Third-Person Adventure, First-Person Adventure, Hidden Object Adventure, Parser-based Adventure, Point-and-Click Adventure, Mouse-and-Keyboard Adventure (i.e. Grim Fandango, which isn't really P&C, but still used M+KB), etc. The control schemes in each of them are different and can, at times, massively change how the game is played.

Fourth, writing in most games is a tertiary concern. Even the classic Sierra and LucasArts Adventure games generally have weak writing with barely passable plots, characters, etc. Most of the early Sierra games didn't even have much of a story at all, and it wasn't until the 90s we started seeing anything approaching a somewhat complex storyline.

The problem here is that the more cohesive the storyline, the less player agency is available. Games are meant to be played, not read or watched, so a balance between gameplay and story needs to be made, and so long as that's the case, no game's writing can ever equal that of a passive medium where the reader or viewer gets no say in what happens. This desire to tell a story at the cost of gameplay was a major problem with TellTale's Adventure games.

[Rath Darkblade]

Hmm. I agree with you there that adventure games nowadays aren't parser-based or point-and-click-based. I also agree that platform games are not adventures! Would you call (say) Super Mario or Commander Keen "adventure games"? I think not! They're fine games on their own merits, but they're certainly not adventures.

I'm ... not so sure about TellTale. I tried their version of Monkey Island and enjoyed it. Speaking of which, I didn't think any games relied on QT events any more? I haven't seen any QuickTime events since QfG5 (e.g. the dragon is released, the dragon dies etc.)

I agree that writing in many games is concerning. There are exceptions - for instance, I thought QfG4 and (especially) the Gabriel Knight games were very well written. QfG2 has a passable story, but makes up for it with the many characters and side-quests.

As for Grim Fandango - yes, it uses M+KB, but then so do some other LucasArts games - so I'm not sure what you mean by how "massively" the gameplay is changed. I thought it was a fine game, but then I like both the noir genre and Mesoamerican culture, so I appreciated them both in GF.

[tassieboy]

Let's hope that it is real Trek, not Nu-Trek.

Without entering into that debate, the aesthetics and setting are very much steeped in 90s Star Trek (although the same could somewhat be said about Lower Decks) but my impression is very much that this game is aimed at the old-school fan of 90s Star Trek.

"Secret of The Vulcan Fury" was a Ken Allen project.

Oh, I didn't know that! That's really cool. So was Ken composing the music, or did he have broader involvement in the game?

[tassieboy]

Since it is being developed by people from Telltale games, doesn't that mean it will most likely be a quick time event driven visual novel versus a "true" adventure game? I haven't played anything from Telltale, so I am not sure what they are like.

It kind of depends. Telltale have made games that feel very much like a true adventure game, using the word in the way that we would here. Back To The Future is a good example. They have also made games that rely much more in quick-time events than true adventuring, but even those games seem to have more traditional adventure game sections.

I'm not going to hold out hope that we're getting another Judgement Rights or A Final Unity, but even if we get something that feels like a cross between Mass Effect and a modern Telltale game, it'll still be an experience I can enjoy.

[goatmeal]

I'm ... not so sure about TellTale. I tried their version of Monkey Island and enjoyed it. Speaking of which, I didn't think any games relied on QT events any more? I haven't seen any QuickTime events since QfG5 (e.g. the dragon is released, the dragon dies etc.)

A Quick Time Event (QTE) refers to an on-screen prompt to perform a pre-determined action during a cut-scene or cinematic, giving the player the illusion of interactivity and control, when in reality it's simply a button-pressing or joystick-moving Pavlovian response -- there is only one correct way of doing things, or you die and must repeat/replay. There is no variety or "randomness" in QTEs like a typical video game. Think Dragon's Lair or Space Ace.

While QFG5 uses Apple QuickTime™ movies used as pre-rendered video cut scenes, they are not Quick Time Events. There is no interactive aspect to those movies clips at all, aside from passively watching and listening to them.

[DeadPoolX]

Hmm. I agree with you there that adventure games nowadays aren't parser-based or point-and-click-based. I also agree that platform games are not adventures! Would you call (say) Super Mario or Commander Keen "adventure games"? I think not! They're fine games on their own merits, but they're certainly not adventures.

But that's the point: platform games are now considered under the umbrella of "Adventure" simply because there's an adventure of some sort to be had. It's more or less a perversion of the term, not unlike someone calling almost every game a "role-playing game" because you take on the role of a character.

I'm ... not so sure about TellTale. I tried their version of Monkey Island and enjoyed it. Speaking of which, I didn't think any games relied on QT events any more? I haven't seen any QuickTime events since QfG5 (e.g. the dragon is released, the dragon dies etc.)

Rath, your experience with TellTale games are extremely limited. Yes, their very early titles didn't rely on QTEs (as Goatmeal explained, a Quick Time Event today has NOTHING to do with the Apple video codec you're thinking of), but nearly every single game they made (starting from Jurassic Park and moving to The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Batman, The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, etc) heavily relied on QTEs to drive the animation, choices, and story along.

This example from The Wolf Among Us might clear things up for you:

I agree that writing in many games is concerning. There are exceptions - for instance, I thought QfG4 and (especially) the Gabriel Knight games were very well written. QfG2 has a passable story, but makes up for it with the many characters and side-quests.

Yes, QFG4 and GK were well written for games, but not well written when compared to other forms of passive media. Like I said, this is the problem that faces an interactive medium like gaming: the tighter the narrative, the less player agency is available and vice-versa.

As for Grim Fandango - yes, it uses M+KB, but then so do some other LucasArts games - so I'm not sure what you mean by how "massively" the gameplay is changed.

Grim Fandango was not a traditional P&C Adventure. You didn't move a cursor around that you could change into various forms ("talk" versus "look"), and instead you guided Manny around the 3D environment and when he came upon something he could interact with in some way, he'd turn his head towards it. That's why I called M+KB, because you do in fact use the mouse and keyboard (you could also use a controller), but the interface and controls aren't the same as say... King's Quest VI.

[Rath Darkblade]

Hmm. I agree with you there that adventure games nowadays aren't parser-based or point-and-click-based. I also agree that platform games are not adventures! Would you call (say) Super Mario or Commander Keen "adventure games"? I think not! They're fine games on their own merits, but they're certainly not adventures.

But that's the point: platform games are now considered under the umbrella of "Adventure" simply because there's an adventure of some sort to be had. It's more or less a perversion of the term, not unlike someone calling almost every game a "role-playing game" because you take on the role of a character.

Yikes. That's like saying that "Wolf Among Us" is a role-playing game. It's not. Neverwinter Nights, or (to a lesser extent) Dragon Age, Witcher, or Pillars of Eternity are role-palying games. "Wolf Among Us" is ... I have no idea what genre it is, actually.

I'm ... not so sure about TellTale. I tried their version of Monkey Island and enjoyed it. Speaking of which, I didn't think any games relied on QT events any more? I haven't seen any QuickTime events since QfG5 (e.g. the dragon is released, the dragon dies etc.)

Rath, your experience with TellTale games are extremely limited. Yes, their very early titles didn't rely on QTEs (as Goatmeal explained, a Quick Time Event today has NOTHING to do with the Apple video codec you're thinking of), but nearly every single game they made (starting from Jurassic Park and moving to The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Batman, The Wolf Among Us, Tales from the Borderlands, etc) heavily relied on QTEs to drive the animation, choices, and story along.

This example from The Wolf Among Us might clear things up for you:

Ah, I see what you mean. It's a sequence where you have very limited time to do what the game wants you to, or you die. (I think "Witcher 2" had something similar). That's not adventure or RPG, that's bull-droppings.

For the record, I've played both TellTale's "Back to the Future" game and their Monkey Island game. They were both fun. AWAU ... doesn't look like fun.

[Collector]

"Secret of The Vulcan Fury" was a Ken Allen project.

Oh, I didn't know that! That's really cool. So was Ken composing the music, or did he have broader involvement in the game?

Designer/director. Obviously the music for the trailer was his, too.

[notbobsmith]

I found some new footage of Star Trek: Resurgence. The actor they got to play Spock is really doing a good job. Not just in terms of voice, but imitating Nimoy's intonation as well.