I‘ll try to keep this as short as it gets. First of all, I‘d like to say that TLJ was the best game I‘ve ever played (and I don’t mean just the best adventure). To tell you the truth, I wasn’t amazed when I heard about preparing TLJ2. I always thought that TLJ was so great, it didn’t need to have a sequel. Then I thought, what the hell, it’s my favourite game, why not a 2nd part?

Maybe because I loved it so much, makes me worry about the stuff I read regarding its sequel. You may say it won’t be an action/adventure but it will still have some action. When I first heard this, I was shocked (maybe most of the adventurers out there had the same feeling too)! I mean, why do this? Is it to attract more gamers? Sure, you will find some action-gamers who might give it a shot. Don’t you think, though, that hardcore adventurers (like myself) will stay out of trouble? As I have seen in many forums, all this “action” stuff has left a bitter taste. Please tell me it isn’t true ‘cause it makes me feel very sad (and I’m 100% sure that I’m not the only one).

The last topic I’d like to talk about is this “never-seen-before-innovative” interface. Many, many adventure games in the past have tried to introduce a “great-revolutionary” interface and guess how many finally achieved their goal? Right, none of them! That’s because the point & click interface used in TLJ was simply the best there is! Why change it then, since it got so many great reviews (always talking about the interface)? I’m not saying that it shouldn’t change with the times, but is it really necessary to change with this sequel? If it doesn’t turn out to be as good as you expect, it may ruin the whole gaming experience (trust me, it has happened to quite a few adventures). And I strongly believe that point & click is not dead!!! There were, are, and will be so many great games that use this kind of interface.

I hope you get my point and understand why I am so hesitant about TLJ2. I also hope that my fears are not well-founded and enjoy the sequel as much as the 1st game. It would be great if you took my thoughts under consideration. I’d be very satisfied if I saw my letter in your site. Otherwise, a reply would be great (I ask too much, don’t I?).

Thanks for writing, John. Now, I don't necessarily disagree with you - your subjective opinions are as valid as mine - but I do have some general thoughts regarding interface and action in adventure games that I would like to share. Feel free to disagree.

Once upon a time, not that many years ago, point-and-click was the innovative new interface. The mouse had just become standard issue for the PC, which opened up for a number of new possibilities. No longer were the designers, or the players, limited to using the keyboard.

I'm quite sure that a lot of adventure gamers complained about this imminent "loss of freedom". After all, they were used to the text parsers of the Infocom games, and the direct keyboard control of the early King's Quest games. Why change something that worked so well in the first place?

Aren't you all glad that someone did?

With The Longest Journey, we were basically dipping our collective big toe in the water. Most of us had played adventure games all of our lives, but we'd never made a proper one. We toyed with some intriguing new ideas regarding interface and controls, but in the end we decided to just "steal" from the best and create a solid, old-fashioned point-and-clicker. It worked well. We were happy with it. And except for a few annoying bits where a different, more intuitive, and more direct control scheme would have worked much, much better, I have no regrets.

Fast forward seven years. With The Longest Journey .static, we're not changing the interface just because we 'feel' like it, because we don't like point-and-click, or because we're 'selling out'. We're changing it because we want to make something that's better suited to the new game. See, we could have made a straight, vanilla sequel to The Longest Journey, called it The Longest Journey II, used the exact same game engine, and had it star April Ryan as she saves the world...again. That's what a lot of sequels do, which is why we're not calling this a sequel. We're taking the concept one step further, continuing the storyline, but making a game that (we hope and believe) will revolutionise the adventure genre.

With everything we've learned since the first game - and we've learned a lot - we want to make something different, something exciting, something new. And that also means a new interface.

Will altering the interface ruin the game? No. Why not? Because we have some excellent designers and programmers who won't let that happen. I won't let that happen. It's my job to make sure that we don't let that happen. We're going to spend a lot of time tweaking the interface and controls, developing numerous iterations, testing it, letting other people test it, until it's pitch perfect.

Have faith in our game-making abilities, and we promise we won't screw it up.

This is all for the PC, by the way, where the mouse will still be the primary - and preferred - input device. You'll still point, you'll still click, but this time around you'll be in direct control of the player character while you're pointing and clicking. Let's call it Point-and-Click 2.0. P&C: The Next Generation.

With the consoles it's actually a bit easier, since the controls will be radically different from the PC version. The dual-stick analogue game pads are perfectly tailored to a third-person direct control adventure game, and we're currently looking at, and playing, a wide variety of console games to find the perfect mix of simplicity and flexibility, and then we'll evolve that into the rather unique interface we're envisioning. (You know you've got a great job when playing PlayStation 2 games can honestly be called "research".)

If I could tell you everything we've got planned for the game (and the interface), I think you'd all understand why we want to, and should, do something different. But that will have to wait until late this year or early next year - maybe not until E3 '04. We want to make very sure that, by the time we demo the new interface, it'll be as polished as a brass pot which has recently been polished and is very, very shiny. But I appreciate your concerns, John, and all I can ask for is patience and trust. I really don't think any of you will be disappointed...unless you can't imagine playing any game that doesn't have the exact same interface as the first one did. Keep an open mind.

Now, regarding action (and open minds): funnily enough, Ray Ivey over at Just Adventure wrote an article about adventure gamers and whiners (there's a connection?). He also came up with this definition of "the adventure game":

ADVENTURE GAME: A computer/video game wherein the gameplay is a mixture of story, exploration and puzzle solving (in almost ANY ratio of the three), WITHOUT containing SIGNIFICANT combat elements.

I disagree.

Okay, I partly agree.

I agree that an adventure game needs a (linear) story, and a significant amount of exploration and puzzle solving. I also believe that a good adventure requires interaction with the environment and other characters, the ability to pick up, examine, and use items, and, perhaps most significantly, a writer/designer created protagonist. In other words, if the player creates her own character, it's not really an adventure; it's a role-playing game. The difference? Mainly character development. There's a very fine line, in my opinion, between adventures and RPGs...and this is it. The idea of a common protagonist with a backstory and an arc is central to the adventure. (Or at least to my definition of the adventure.)

Then there's combat.

I believe that combat is not a decided factor as to whether or not a game is an adventure game.

Certainly, if combat is much more central to the gameplay than exploration and puzzle-solving, then it's not strictly an adventure - it's an action-adventure (which is another hard-to-define genre; it's not all Tomb Raider or Onimusha). But some amount of combat, as long as it doesn't feel out of place, and as long as it has a natural place in the story, can work well in an adventure game (and has, in fact, worked well in many great adventures - Shenmue, for example, or, controversially, Full Throttle).

How much is "some amount of combat"?

If you're playing a French resistance fighter in war-torn Paris, attempting to gather crucial data from the Nazis, I'd expect there to be a bit of combat, and a lot of sneaking around being paranoid about getting spotted. Does that sound like a first-person shooter? What if it's in third person? An action-adventure, then? What if you spend one third of the game speaking with non-player characters, one third solving puzzles, and one third sneaking through shadows and shooting Germans? Is the game, then, only two thirds adventure? Is it less than purebreed, and thus not worthy of the moniker? Who makes the call? You?

Genres are blending. Look at Grand Theft Auto III - which genre does that belong to? Driving? Shooting? Adventure? Action-adventure?

There are still games that can be easily labelled, like Doom III. No one's claiming that will be anything but a purebred first-person shooter. But what about Half-Life 2, where there are multiple solutions to every scenario, and where you interact with people and the environment? Is that a straight FPS? Or a FPS-adventure-RPG blend? And what about the Resident Evil or Silent Hill games - survival horror titles in general - where you spend most of the time exploring and solving puzzles, interspersed with intense and frightening monster encounters? You spend more time worrying about meeting something awful and dead than you do trying to kill it. It's a game about atmosphere and dread...and a whole lot of adventuring. That's not a real adventure, just because you got guns?

It's about time the adventure genre (and some adventure gamers - by no means all) becomes inclusive rather than exclusive. There's room for different sorts of adventures, and different sorts of adventure gamers. Not one gamer is alike in his or her tastes. I am, by nature, pretty open-minded about games, and I'll play anything, as long as its good. I love genre-benders and -blenders. I believe that games are evolving, and the audience with them, and my ambition is to work on games that reflect this. My ambition is also to work on games that reach a lot of players, of course; not for fame and fortune (both would be nice, but we're not quite there yet - and I don't get percentages), but because I'm a storyteller, and I want to use and advance our medium to tell great stories, in a brand new and revolutionary fashion, to a lot of people.

So we're putting action and combat into the game, and slapping on a crowd-pleasing new interface, to sell a lot more copies? No, we're introducing action elements and improved interface and controls to tell a better story, to tell a new story, one that requires new forms of interaction, new gameplay, in addition to the tried-and-true adventure gameplay. Which will result in a better game. Which will reach more people. Which will guarantee the continuation of the story.

If that's selling out, then stick a price-tag on me and display me in the window.

As usual, all of the above views are my own. They don't reflect any official or unofficial Funcom policy, and if you're going to disagree, disagree with me personally. Oh, and if you agree with any (or all) of the above, I'd be happy to hear from you too. In the end, though, we're going to make The Longest Journey .static the way it's been designed, interface and all, and I am very confident that adventure gamers - gamers in general - will, at the very least, appreciate what we're doing, and hopefully also like (and play) the end result...and then wait in breathless anticipation of the next Journey.  ¶ 16:03