What's the best user interface for adventure games?

Featuring input from Roberta Williams and Al Lowe. User interfaces in adventure games have come a long way since the early days of text-only parser games. But which UI is the best of all time? Is it the Sierra icon bar or the LucasArts 9 verbs? The answer will surprise you because it's none of those.

Credits:
"Computer Store in the Mall - 1991" - theleeoverstreet

The Adventure Game Hotspot Network:

[DavetheTurnip]

That method of troubleshooting parser commands Al Lowe discussed at the end was great.

I’m a big fan of the modern two-button system. That way it’s more about interacting with the world rather than figuring out how to interact with the world. 🙂

[Hank-iprl]

"It tastes like ship." Still gets a chuckle out of me every time.

[spladam]

Great video dude. I remember being dissapointed with KQ5 my first time, I never acquired the love for the icon interface that I had for the parser interface. It was the aspect of the games that most blew my mind from the first time I saw KQ I at a RadioShack. My mom said "try bowing to the king" so I typed "bow to the king" and we were blown away by the animation, it felt like you could do anything.

[Sattva]

Omg what a great video & an interview with AL LOWE??? 💫💫

I absolutely loved the LSL games, I thought they were hilarious and I also really liked the user interface, but never put together the brilliance behind it. This was so fun to watch.

[Dr_Slash]

I knew it was going to be LSL7! Totally agree. It's a huge shame that this style of interface isn't used in more games.
However, I still think there is huge untapped potential for a revival of text parser thanks to modern language models.

[KasumiRINA]

4:30 Interesting, it's hard to imagine nowadays but "typing" was a legit skill people spent lessons on learning extra-curricular, this was a thing since before printers and keyboards when to copy books or pamphlets you sled copy paper to print multiple pages on a typewriter... typing wasn't a thing everybody learned, most did it with one finger, and not all people even had typewriters, so getting a computer before Web 2 era really meant mostly learning mouse controls in he 1990s.

[ThisIsPete]

For me, the biggest difference between Sierra and LucasArts games when they were both established in their point and click eras was that LucasArts had what people took to calling an "intelligent" cursor -- one where the interactable objects and hotspots in the room highlighted as you swept the mouse over the scene, either by the pointer changing as in Sam and Max, or by words appearing on screen in the older titles with the text-based verb list. Maniac Mansion (plus Zac McKraken and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, from a similar time) didn't _quite_ have this fully refined, though it did have the "What is" command, allowing you to sweep the scene for hotspots, select one and then apply a verb to it. It was Monkey Island and Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis that, for me, perfected that approach, with a particularly nice refinement being the addition of obvious "default actions" on right click -- e.g. opening a door simply by right-clicking it rather than having to select "open" manually.

Sierra did not have an intelligent cursor in its peak SCI era, making for a lot more guesswork in terms of both what you could actually click on, and even which part of the mouse cursor was the important bit when clicking on something very small. (Gabriel Knight even went as far as actually highlighting the "hot spot" of each cursor, this was such an issue in earlier Sierra games!) I played and liked games from both companies back in the '90s, but LucasArts games always felt like they came out in front thanks to that additional element of user-friendliness. That and the fact that they specifically highlighted in their manuals that they wanted to minimise player deaths and "dead man walking" scenarios, which was a _very_ pointed jab at Sierra!

Interestingly, the two adventures by Dynamix, Rise of the Dragon and Heart of China, actually _did_ feature an intelligent cursor, making use of a system somewhat akin to Revolution's "two button" method -- left click would do whatever the shape of the cursor (which changed according to what it was over) indicated, while right click would give a generic "look at" description of the object or hotspot. I was always surprised that Sierra didn't pinch that interface for some of their own stuff, but I guess the engines were too fundamentally different to make that practical at the time -- at least until King's Quest VII, which finally adopted the two-button approach, complete with intelligent cursor (the wand "sparkled" when it was over a hotspot).

I think the worst ever point-and-clicker for generic negative feedback was the first Discworld game. Not only was that game pretty hard even by the standards of the genre, its generic "That doesn't work" became exceedingly irritating by the end, even amid its otherwise excellent voice acting!

[gimokk]

Honestly, I vastly prefer the "few is better" style of just two-mouse-button interactions.
Because giving me 20 options, where 19 are doing nothing at all is just me having to guess which one is the intended one. That's just wasting my time in an attempt to pretend on giving me freedom while not actually offering any at all to begin with.
So one generic "interact" and one "inspect" icon is really all that's needed at the end of the day.

[DavidXNewton]

Your videos always have great insights - I never really appreciated what Larry 7 was doing until you said it! I remember the manual for Simon the Sorcerer 2 saying "GIVE is a separate verb because there's a big difference between giving someone a chainsaw and using a chainsaw on someone" - and admitting that the use of the WEAR verb was limited ("almost unique, actually") but that having seven verbs wouldn't have looked very good. It's interesting that Sierra went from the wide open parser to very streamlined, whereas LucasArts had the middle ground for a while, giving limited verbs but still using them all pretty separately.

I made a couple of attempts at parser adventure games in the early 2000s, and I also kept a file with all the lines the player typed so that I could then ask them to send them to me and I could fill in any actions that I thought were clever! It's fantastic to know that I had the same idea as Al Lowe did :) I started a game tentatively called "Bastard Quest" where the idea was to make it as comically unfair as possible with many silent dead ends and unavoidable deaths, but I didn't get very far because I realized I couldn't hope to compete with what Sierra's games seemingly did without even trying (it's funny to see Roberta Williams saying that King's Quest 5 was their idea of trying to remove things that got in the way of the player enjoying themselves!)

[NoOne-gcot]

I’d definitely love to see a follow up video on more interfaces (a la BASS)!

And I’d also love to watch you play Captain Blood one of these days, speaking of bizarre interfaces…

[hotdogvan]

My favourite has always been the LucasArts nine verbs UI, although I agree it can be reduced, but maybe not as far down as 4. You still want some intentionality behind the player's actions. With just Hand for everything, it becomes too easy to cheese puzzles. Or worse, accidently solve them while trying to do something completely different (and sometimes not even understanding what just happened). Those UIs that reduce all commands down to a single right-click to look and talk, left click for everything else, are especially guilty of this.

What I don't think you mentioned re the icons for verbs: the icons add a layer of mental translation ("I want to use, Use is the...gear icon, find that, Gear icon on Item") and as you point out, cause confusion when the icons don't represent the action in a clear way. With the verbs written out in text form, you don't have that extra layer or that confusion.

But what I like most about nine-verb SCUMM (and some of its contemporaries) is that it has you build coherent sentences: "Pick Up Item", "Give Item to Person" etc. So a natural progression from the parser. But with later interfaces, like Curse of MI, Full Throttle and LSL7, you're clicking the item first, so the syntax gets reversed to "Item, Pick Up". That will never cease to feel unnatural and awkward to me (I do understand there are non-English languages where it's going to be _more_ natural though ).

[Thebitbeard]

I recall working on a game in Adventure Game Studio using the Sierra style PnC interface. I specifically didn't want any generic negative feedback, so I very specifically and intentionally made sure that every single action on every single object in the game had a unique message. It took FOREVER. The number of objects in your game (even inconsequential scenery items) times the number of total verbs equals a ton of possible messages. It was particularly frustrating having to figure out what the character would say when they tried to "talk" to all the inanimate objects.

Since then, I've grown really fond of the Beneath a Steel Sky 2 button interface. Use and examine. That's all you need to worry about. It's less guessing for the player, and less busy work for me.

[michaelturner]

I recently replayed The Dig, and I was reminded how much I actually liked the "one click does everything" interface. Yeah, it limits freedom and creativity for games that might have multiple solutions, and it can be jarring when it does something unexpected. Like if there's a grocery store display of a stack of canned tomatoes, and I'm in a one-click game, I might expect the controlled character to take one off the top, but it's weird if instead they kicked the whole display over. The kicked display might be part of some other puzzle, but if you haven't encountered the need for it yet, it's still weird. Best if there's no unknown fail state though, like clicking something in the wrong sequence or from the wrong direction locked you out.

At least The Dig still had inventory. Neverhood didn't have one, at least not one you could interact with. You could pick up various objects on your journey, like video recordings or keys, and just whenever you'd click on a video player or locked door the character would automatically use them.

Just me though.

[famistudio]

Haha! That short Al Lowe interview. Priceless! 😂

[muulwarf]

2 Minutes into this video I was thinking "hope he mentions LSL7, it had the best UI" - well, glad we're on the same page!

[jwilder]

I had infinite tolerance for text parsers as a kid. It was worth the effort. With great power comes great responsibility

[jasonblalock]

Speaking of Al Lowe, I'm surprised you didn't mention his The Black Cauldron. He basically predicted Sierra's later icon interface by eliminating the parser and moving all the common commands - look, use, etc - onto the function keys. So you walk Taran up to a door and press (iirc) F4 to use it, and it opens. It was really forward-looking design for 1985.

Also, if you do that followup GUI video, don't forget the weird modular mess of icons in Return To Zork.

[mochapoke]

I would LOVE a follow up to this video it was great!

[backlogpanic]

Don't know if any classic adventure games used a similar Larry 7 UI (maaaaybe Fallout 1 counts if you cheat a bit), but the Quest for Glory 2 VGA remake had a Point-and-Click / Parser hybrid for those that wanted it. I didn't try it at the time, but have been meaning to lately.

And more UI videos would indeed be interesting!

[alanzeng]

Great video, great pacing, informative, and interesting! Thank you for uploading this and I hope you get bigger on the platform