Posted by cybersoyuz 4/4/2025
Still works on windows, still fun.
Am I dreaming?
I remember in the early aughts people deemed the beat-em-up genre "dead" because there were a high-profile string of early attempts that failed to successfully translate the game experience from 2D to 3D. Fighting Force and The Bouncer were two big examples I can think of that failed miserably. Sword of the Berserk was another attempt, which had some nice production values but pretty forgettable gameplay.
So the beat-em-up genre was likely to fade from existence...until Devil May Cry came along and arguably revitalized the genre (or turned it into the "3D hack-and-slash" genre, depending on you who ask). It showed the industry how to do the gameplay properly in 3D, and now the genre is as popular as ever.
All of which is to say...there's no reason why the Adventure genre could not have persisted into the modern day, had the right game/developer come along.
Once you could get the same kind of spectacle in action games, and I'd claim Half-Life as the first notable example, there was no longer any need for mass-market adventure games.
EDIT: Thinking about it, Metal Gear Solid beat Half-Life to market, and that has the same kind of visual spectacle in an action game I'm talking about.
Fighting games made the 2D->3D jump just fine, although they kinda exist in parallel now, since some developers really like flexing their sprite chops in 2D fighters.
If you look back at my post though I acknowledged that they would have attempted to modernize had the merger not occurred. And I never said they were doomed, I said they were in deep trouble regardless. So I'm not sure what people are arguing with me about here other than semantics.
Still, the genre isn't dead today, but modern adventure games owe far more to Lucasarts than to Sierra. Even when the graphics are Sierra-like, like in The Crimson Diamond, we can see how far we've gone from the different Quest series
With modern generative models, LLMs, diffusion and voice, one could imagine dynamic adventure games that are not quite the same each time, and which could support coop play so you can play with your friends.
Maybe not this year but if the models improve like they have for another year or two...?
It's not my personal interest, so I'm not sure how good they are at creating believable puzzles. But they're certainly an obvious thing on the LLM scene.