More Genre Coffin Nails

Clan lords and intertubes (Interactive Storytelling, Part 3 Addendum)

In this series’ previous entry, there was another important element in the demise of the adventure genre I should have discussed: the advent of the internet.

When there was no internet, if you were playing Sam & Max Hit the Road, and got stuck, there weren’t a lot of options open to you. The main one was calling LucasArts’ Hint Line and paying 1.99 USD per minute for help.

The internet was opened to the public in 1991, and by 1993, it started actually being used as such. America Online’s carpet-bombing strategy of distributing free trial disks came the same year. Quake allowed multiplayer online matches via the internet in 1997, a year before Grim Fandango’s release.

The problems this posed for game companies working in the adventure genre were manifold: not only would there be game walkthroughs available online nearly as soon as someone solved them, but the revenue stream from tip lines also dried up. Most importantly, the genre was feeling long-in-the-tooth compared to other offerings and needed not just an evolution, but a revolution.

By the time I was designing quests like The Cairn Stones in Diablo II, I was very aware of the issue. It’s for this reason I used the procedural generation already used to generate dungeons, and many other elements. In the Cairn Stones quest, the order of both on the scroll and the stones are randomized. This means the solution to your stones won’t necessarily be the same as another player’s and a walkthrough will do you no good.

The much more elaborate puzzles in the adventure genre, however, did not lend themselves well to such design solutions. Escape from Monkey Island included the “Monkey Kombat” subgame, wherein “monkey words” each defeated two others in rock-paper-scissors fashion. Which defeated which was randomized, so requiring exploration to solve. But it felt tedious rather than fun and was one of the most hated elements of the game.

I felt actual puzzle gameplay was outside what made sense for Diablo II, so Cairn Stones was really just lock-and-key—get the scroll, have it translated, and use it on the stones. Even still, a player could just keep clicking the stones and hit on the solution fairly easily.

I did have to face actual puzzle gameplay in the internet age when I joined the strike team for WarCraft Adventures: Lord of the Clans (WCA).

In Blizzard’s parlance of the time, a strike team was a group from one studio tapped to look at another’s first playable, give feedback, and make recommendations. I did this for StarCraft, then joined the team to continue in this role right up to its successful launch. WCA was less fortunate.

While Diablo revitalized a supposedly dead genre, we did so by making significant changes to it, removing the P&PRPG cruft in favor of a quick-to-the-fun experience that still had a ton of depth to explore. WCA brought nothing new to the table. One reviewer of a leaked section of gameplay hit the nail on the head, calling it:¹²

[A] conventional, borderline dull point-and-click adventure [… that] doesn’t quite feel like Warcraft.

Despite Blizzard’s protests to the contrary, the playable really was that bad. I’d have enjoyed working in the genre and taking on the challenge of innovating it for the internet age. But it would have required a full reboot just to get to the level of a decent adventure game for the previous decade.

For these reasons, I lobbied hard for the game’s cancellation. I was pleased to have eventually convinced Blizzard’s leadership a mercy killing was the best course of action.