Amir0x said:
Second of all, "casuals" taking a liking to something is no indicator of high quality. More often than not, it's an indicator that something sucks. Casuals widely hate depth, they have shit motor skills and refuse to make any effort to get better. So they take the path of least resistance - no matter what impact it has on their skills.
I disagree, to some degree. Maybe a game that attracts casuals might be a lower quality game from a subjective standpoint, but from an objective standpoint it takes a ton of work to convey a complex idea in a simple manner.
Take Myst for example. It's a terrible adventure game: only one item in your inventory at a time, only three characters (and two of them non-interactive), and impossible to die. It had neither the humor and personality of LucasArts-style games, nor the clever-for-the-sake-of-clever, death-around-every-corner style of Sierra adventure games. It did have incredible graphics (for the time), which most veterans of adventure games scoffed as its only selling point. And it outsold every other graphic adventure ever.
But, it wasn't Myst that killed the adventure game genre. To some degree,
they committed suicide, but ultimately it was the dozens of Myst clones that never realized exactly what it was about Myst that made it sell so well. It wasn't just the pretty graphics! Rise of the Robots had excellent graphics too. The game design was a fully-conceptualized world and puzzles that made sense within the world. You could find or derive the solution to all of the game's puzzles with the resources within the game world without resorting to brute force (although it doesn't penalize brute force tactics, either). There was also a detective element to the game, as there are not one but two "bad" endings. Compared to the wallbanger logic illustrated in the OMM article, Myst was a breath of fresh air.
The other thing that helped was that, being a glorified Hypercard stack, it ran on pretty much any PC with a VGA card and a CD-ROM drive.
My point is that while Myst wasn't a quality adventure game for genre enthusiasts, it
was a quality product that as much enthralled players as it did baffle the game designers who couldn't see why anyone would enjoy it.