It has been declared dead, dying or at least in bad shape. Yet developers keep creating new adventure games. Adventure games used to be a large genre, spawning such titles as Police Quest, Space Quest, Discworld, Gabriel Knight and many more. A 6-page article has been published on IGN with a fascinating discussion on adventure gaming. Why do adventure games no longer attract a large crowd? Is there too little publicity for them? Are gamers no longer interested? The adventure gamers community seems to be alive and well at sites such as Just Adventure and Adventure Gamers. In my opinion the lack of innovation in the genre is dragging it down hugely. If you look at the releases of last year (there are exceptions of course!) you see a lot of games that are VERY similar but with a different look and different character names – like some of the recycled crap (pardon my French) that comes out of Hollywood. It’s clear that developers want to avoid risky changes to game play. You have to take risk to hit gold, so think outside the box for once in your next games, please.
If you have 20 minutes – read the IGN feature on adventure gaming.