/ Previews / Adventure / King's Quest: Mask of Eternity / Page 3
	What did Roberta Williams do to re-energize the Adventure genre? Probably not much.

Now Williams had a dilemma -- she had to make a really good game that had almost no background from her earlier games in absolutely anything except for the story. This led to what the game currently is: an upgrade for everything that the game is known for, especially the graphics. She put a lot of work into it, play-testing not the adventure games you would expect her to, but 3D games and action games. Williams mentioned that she has not played a true adventure game in the past couple of years, because she saw no need to look back in the past (because she's seen most of it already). She needed to derive a new style of adventure game, and the only way she could do that was by looking at the games that people are playing now.

The result is a game that looks nothing like its predecessors but has the features at heart that it always has had. Williams says this: "...the one thing I never forget is what the very 'core' of an adventure game is: It's an interactive story at its very heart, usually supplemented by obstacles, puzzles, characters, dialog, and, most of all, exploration." The best part of all of this is that it won't exactly look or feel like the original -- but it'll all be there with a modern twist.

The game looks to be, at the visual outset, another Tomb Raider game. When I asked Williams about this, she was relatively insulted by me calling it a Tomb Raider-styled game. (Man, I sure ask the wrong set of questions sometimes, don't I?) After explaining it to me, it sounds like a much less-linear version of the only major non-point-and-click adventure game to come out last Christmas, SSI's Excalibur 2555 A.D. (which I happen to own for the Playstation). That game, in my opinion, was slightly underrated because of some elements (like minor control bugs and the fact that you're limited to a dungeon-like area). Of course, I didn't enjoy those reviews and burned the reviewers to a crisp (they screamed a lot).

The gameplay turns out to be much less linear than most adventure games I have been, going all the way back to the Zork series. It also turns out to be a much more exploration-based experience, as opposed to the linear, events-based kind of gameplay that almost all adventure games (including all of the earlier King's Quest games) have been guilty of. Excalibur 2555 A.D. tried to recreate the 2D experience in the third dimension but didn't go all the way -- it had some moments to explore but was almost entirely events-based.