Sierra Revived by Activision. Good? Bad?

[Gunstar Green]

So many of those classic Sierra games were infused with the personality and passion of their original creators. Leisure Suit Larry was Al Lowe! Corey & Lori Cole were the Quest for Glory series... Jane Jensen made Gabriel Knight what it was... Without those original creators, it's like Dean Kootz re-writing Stephen King's The Stand... or a bunch of indie musicians creating new Led Zeppelin records. They may be decent in their own right in the end... but they will never be the same.

I know what you mean. Another one is Mark Crowe and Scott Murphy, Space Quest's "Two Guys from Andromeda." You even save them from a parody version of Microsoft in Space Quest 3.

Sierra means more Incredible Machine games, right?

Hey, if we're talking Incredible Machine games...then let's just open it up to Dynamix:

Earthsiege
Tribes
Red Baron
Stellar 7
Skyfox
Aces of the Pacific/Aces over Europe
Betrayal at Krondor
Rise of the Dragon

....etc...etc...etc...

So many awesome games!

It would be awesome to see some Dynamix franchises return. Earth/Starsiege especially.

[BogusMeatFactory]

Then Fast may move to California.

GOG is excellent all around, even if they have been transitioning to a greater focus on indie games in recent years.

And as for King's Quest and Quest for Glory, let's face it, those series are dead. This is the only way we will ever see them revived. But even if new Sierra and Activision botch the job, ateast their names will return briefly to the lexicon of the modern gamer instead of forever forgotten.

Quest for Glory isn't really dead. The creators are making a game set in the universe called, Hero-U.

[fastbilly1]

Dude, GOG is a beast. If they had a USA office I would move to work for them. Every interaction I have ever had with them has been smooth. I had an issue with my library a couple months ago, they looked at it, realized the issue, fixed it, and offered me a free game for the inconvenience. Heck, just joining nets you seven or eight free games.

They're in the process of spinning up a US office in California.

Where did you hear this?

[Erik_Twice]

I'm sure it will matter as much as having a brand called "Atari".

[samsonlonghair]

Touché!

[MrPopo]

Dude, GOG is a beast. If they had a USA office I would move to work for them. Every interaction I have ever had with them has been smooth. I had an issue with my library a couple months ago, they looked at it, realized the issue, fixed it, and offered me a free game for the inconvenience. Heck, just joining nets you seven or eight free games.

They're in the process of spinning up a US office in California.

Where did you hear this?

I can't find it any more, but I remember reading a forum post from one of the GOG staffers earlier this year about it.

[BogusMeatFactory]

So Activision put out the trailer for The New King's Quest Game and there is a lot of interesting things to garner from it.

First off, it looks very much like it will be an adventure game in the way that TellTale's, The Walking Dead and, The Wolf Among Us are. It definitely is trying to recreate the first King's Quest as Graham tries to collect the treasures. Does the art and character design appeal to you? Do you feel that this is a natural step in the right direction of resurrecting the franchise for a modern audience?

What did you think about the trailer? Upset? Interested?

[Erik_Twice]

It looks awful: Platforming*, Pseudo-stealh, the designers being on record saying it's not a point and cllick game...Yeah, I don't expect anything good to come from it.

Being frank, it's extremely unlikely we'll ever see a King Quest-like game again. The KQ games have a sharp, cruel wit philosophy that is unlikely to be shared by 2014 developers and that I doubt would be tolerated in the marketplace.

So yeah, I expect it to be junk and I found the art style cheap, generic and ugly.

*I know some KQ games had cliffs you could fall off.

[isiolia]

It definitely is trying to recreate the first King's Quest as Graham tries to collect the treasures. Does the art and character design appeal to you? Do you feel that this is a natural step in the right direction of resurrecting the franchise for a modern audience?

What did you think about the trailer? Upset? Interested?

Some of it is hard to say from what they've shown so far. Character art could be an approximation of what the old stuff would look like in full 3D. Subjectively, I don't especially care for it, but I don't think it's terrible. Just, not my taste.
Environments seem better, stylized, low poly perhaps, but nice.

More generally, it seems like it's heading more in the general direction that Roberta Williams would have tried to take the series anyway. Not that KQVIII was super loved exactly, but the series had already moved away from being a point and click.

On the flip side, it feels like they're resurrecting the name for a product that - so far - feels like it'll be something less than the series represented at its peak. The King's Quest games were a flagship product, and often a high water mark for presentation. This...doesn't look to be. It looks like a $15 digital title - and it could well be a damn good $15 digital title, but I'm not so sure that warrants calling it King's Quest. Feels like that should be a game that redefines interactive fiction, spread across like 6 Blu-rays or something.

[BogusMeatFactory]

I am going to take the opposite opinion here and think it is a great thing. Sure, I don't necessarily like the character design of Graham himself, but in no way do I feel that this game is not in the spirit of the original.

Also, has anyone played the King's Quest games recently? Outside of III and VI, they are absolutely awful. There was no cohesiveness to the world and it was simply a strange amalgamation of fantasy tropes and fairy tales that left the puzzles obtuse and nonsensical.

@Erik You mention that it isn't point and click and therefor won't be good, but over half of the King's Quest games were not point and click adventure games. We had a single action game (which was horrible) and the rest were parser based, which in all honest is more akin to the current style of Adventure games in the modern era.

What I see, like I said, is a game that will probably mimic TellTale's style of Adventure game, but retelling the stories of Graham and his rise. If so, I will have no gripes over it. Do I think that it will be the second coming? Nah, but King's Quest was never very good to begin with in comparison to the other series. Sure it was the flagship for Sierra, but it really lacked the quality that other titles like Space Quest, Quest for Glory and even Gold Rush had in terms of game design.