Red_Avatar: 1. You're comparing a genre which is loved for its puzzles, laid back approach and story to one which is loved for its explosions, guns, quick responses and deaths? Really? That's not even apples and oranges, that's cars and animals. They're two MASSIVELY different genres which are possibly the two genres furthest apart of all genres because there's almost zero overlap. Adventure gaming was never supposed to be about reflexes, action, deaths - unless the deaths contributed to the story - and any adventure game that tried to introduce such elements has generally been disliked with only a few exceptions like Blade Runner, which kept the combat fair and easy.
2. The reason why deaths are almost universally disliked in adventure games is:
a) because they're often unfair and unforgiving
b) adventure games rarely have autosave nor do you save that often
c) it makes no sense
3. Accidentally falling in a river shouldn't force you to replay half an hour of the game. Forgetting some item in a store shouldn't watch you die without a decent explanation an hour later. They didn't contribute ANYTHING to the game except for frustration.
4. Sure, later the deaths were more refined and less haphazard but to defend the deaths in the early KQ and LSL games? That's just bad taste. Sierra made that mistake in many of its games - even the Space Quest series had some atrocious puzzles where you'd die for some weird reason. You pick up an item that later gets you killed - why?
5. How does this improve a game when the designer thought "oh, let's put a sausage on the table and then have a rabid dog attack and kill the player a few screens later! That will teach the player to pick up items in an adventure game!". I invented this one but there's plenty of real examples (like LSL2 where you could die several times on the boat because you forgot an item back in town). Only a fool would defend such practices that are not tied to the story nor skill nor the game itself, but rather trial and error based on nothing but the sadistic imagination of the designers.
1. A simple I disagree would have sufficed.......also deaths were a BIG part of the early KQ/SQ/etc games.......and alot of people liked them. As such, such people knew to save often(as the death prompt always succinctly put it in so varied a fashion) to avoid frustration.
2. You don't have any concrete proof to say deaths in adventures are almost universally disliked.....
3. I disagree that that's all they contributed. Such sweeping generalizations are also hard to swallow by any thinking individual, gamer or no.
4. Because it was FUN for some to figure out what was deadly and what wasn't, and how to dodge such things and save often in case they made a mistake?
5.I only meant random player deaths due to messing up in a current scene were ok and fun, not losing because you missed an item beforehand.