Return To Monkey Island - MI2 sequel from Ron Gilbert

[Alpan]

Decent people have it rough here.

 

[agris]

We’re at rpgcodex, there are no decent people here. Just people that know, and others who haven’t realized it yet.

 

[Great Deceiver]

BTW since I'm now replaying monkey 1, there's an ultimate talkie edition that combines speech from the special edition and the original game graphics.

http://gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/monkey1.html

• It builds a talkie version for DOS and ScummVM out of the Special Edition.
• No dead ends.
• Higher quality and some additional sound effects from the SE.
• Music support for MT-32, brand new General MIDI and AdLib. Including Stan's theme and the extended LeChuck theme.
• ScummVM support for both, the old CD audio tracks and the SE tracks.
• Spiffy close-up.
• Plenty of original bugs fixed.

You can compile it yourself from the above, or do a more extended search and find it somewhere™ already compiled. Speech was the best aspect of the SE, it was very well-made. SCUMMVM is probably the best way to play it.

There's also an ultimate talkie edition for Monkey 2 by the same guy:

http://gratissaugen.de/ultimatetalkies/monkey2.html

Although I have it on ScummVM, and the voice acting is really good, it just feels 'wrong' to me to play these games with voice acting. In fact, I still play Monkey 2 with AdLib music (even though other options, like the MT32, are far superior) because I cherish my memories of playing it at the time on a SoundBlaster.

 

[Boleskine]

 

[Darkozric]

<3sRichardSimmons is our resident adventure sub-forum butthurt. Anyone who doesn't like and criticize boring adventures like the WadjetEye abominations is a shitposter. Don't mind him Alex.

 

[mindx2]

Decent people have it rough here.

There are decent people here...? I thought I was the only one!

 

[JarlFrank]

Decent people have it rough here.

There are decent people here...? I thought I was the only one!

You're too short, there's not enough space within you for malice. So you lucked out.

 

[Strig]

Decent people have it rough here.

There are decent people here...? I thought I was the only one!

You're too short, there's not enough space within you for malice. So you lucked out.

I'm a very tall self-proclaimed Decent Person™. How could this be? My self-perception can't be erroneous as I don't make mistakes.

 

[Boleskine]

This interview covers mostly the same ground, but I'm not sure this was explicitly mentioned elsewhere:

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2022...designers-tell-ars-about-long-awaited-return/

A hint system? In this economy?

Back in 2013, Gilbert wrote that his then-theoretical Monkey Island follow-up would have "no tutorials or hint systems or pansy-assed puzzles or catering to the mass-market or modernizing." Today, as he works on an actual Monkey Island game, Gilbert said his thinking has changed.

"[One thing] that people really want in games today are built-in hint systems," Gilbert told Ars.

A big part of why he changed his mind, Gilbert said, is simply the rise of the Internet. In the early '90s, before Internet access was widespread, getting stuck on completely impenetrable puzzles was just "what [adventure game] players expected," he said. Today, though, "if [players] don't have a built-in hint system, they're just going to jump over to the web and... read a walkthrough." To prevent that, Return to Monkey Island will include a hint system that has been designed to make sense "in the fantasy," Gilbert said. It will provide "more than just a walkthrough."

"[There was] a lot of stuff that we did back then and didn't think much about—a lot of very obscure puzzles," Gilbert continued. "Hiding a piece of information somewhere with no clues about where to find it—that kind of thing just wouldn't fly today... Having hint systems means that if you make the puzzle just completely weird and obscure, people just go to the hint system."

Return to Monkey Island will also borrow a frustration-management feature from Monkey Island 2 and Thimbleweed Park: an easy mode. Called "casual mode" in the new game, this option will be designed for "people [for whom] this is their first adventure game, or they haven't played adventure games in a long time, or maybe they have lives and kids now," Gilbert said. "They can play the casual mode, which is just a lot of simplification of the puzzles. That is our main way to get people into playing a point-and-click game if they haven't done it before."

Features like these reflect how game design and player expectations have changed since the early '90s, Grossman said. "Frustration is a bigger factor for people," he said. "There are more demands on [players'] time now, and they just don't tolerate frustration as well as they did 30 years ago."

These days, Grossman said, "people want to be stuck, but only for five minutes at a time... I play these [older adventure games] with my son, who was just approaching 8 years old, and maybe he has a skewed perspective, but we will work on something for about two and a half minutes and then he will just say, 'Get your phone out. Look up the solution. Look it up!'"

While many gamers have fond memories of solving the nigh-impossible puzzles in the original Monkey Island games, Grossman thinks some re-evaluation might be warranted. "A criticism of those old games... is that there was a strong aspect of just reading the mind of the designer and guessing what they wanted you to do," he said. "And you can see where that comes from because we really did put things out there for people to find and not say anything about them. It was hard to make discoveries."

Those are all fair and truthful points on the impatience of modern audiences and unwillingness to lose themselves in figuring out a puzzle, no matter how wacky or obscure it is. Still, it looks like Gilbert and Grossman are banking more on the ubiquitous nature of the Monkey Island brand's influence or reputation ("Oh, a new Monkey Island game? I've heard of that series.") rather than on the thirsts of the diehard, seasoned adventurers who welcome a challenging experience sans any hand holding. Casting a wider net makes sense.

Every time something old becomes new again there's a fork in the road. Do you make the new thing primarily for the "fans" or do you "modernize" it? It's too early to really say anything definitive one way or the other but ReMI may be a game that manages to find a balance there in a way most on the Codex would say something like Broken Age failed.

There's always been a beautiful dissonance in the logic of: "In order to have new people playing point-and-click games, a genre generally known for critical thinking and puzzle solving, we are implementing a mode that doesn't require those players to think critically or solve puzzles."

"We want to create an FPS play mode that minimizes movement and shooting at things."
"We want to create an RTS play mode that minimizes resource management and fast-paced decision making."
"We want to create an RPG play mode that minimizes character customization, exploration, and questing."

 

[MRY]

The easy mode in Monkey Island 2 was very well done. Honestly, I'd much rather have an optional easy mode than have a compulsory one.

 

[Jenkem]

Lucasarts point and clicks were already babby mode after growing up with Sierra games.

 

[MRY]

While many Sierra games had some outrageous puzzles, and of course they had death and walking-dead, I think sometimes the design was easier because Sierra games tended to have multiple paths, varying solution possibilities (some more obvious than others), non-blocking failures, etc. Like, QFG is an easier game than DOTT, even though can die in QFG and not in DOTT.

 

[Great Deceiver]

*Sometimes* being the operative word, of course, and I would add - very rarely. Your example is also cherry-picked. For example, any Police Quest is certainly harder than, say, Full Throttle. We also must specify whether we're talking about parser or point and click Sierra - something like Codename: Iceman is infinitely harder than anything Lucasarts ever put out (not that I like Iceman, btw). KQ3 is way harder than Monkey 2, and so on. On the whole, Sierra games were much, much harder, especially the older ones.

I don't think they were more enjoyable for being harder, but for me they were certainly more memorable. I can't remember almost anything from DoTT (granted, it's been forever since I've played it but I would consider it on the 'harder' end of the Lucas spectrum), but I can pretty much remember all of Conquests of Camelot or PQ1 (it's been even longer). These things are very personal, I suppose.

On the more relevant topic, though - I think it's always a bad sign when developers signal that they're looking to alienate the biggest share of their product's proven audience to try and capture a broader one. It almost never works. I don't have an opinion about MI2/Curse's "easy" modes as I've never bothered with them - but did they really work to bring more people in? Do you know anyone whose first experience with these games was the simplified mode and who went on to become a fan?

 

[Alienman]

or maybe they have lives and kids now

God, I hate this justification. If you can't find the time to play a game, maybe don't, or think about your life, why that is. Also, it's the same reasoning used to defend microtransactions, like "shortcuts".

 

[AdamReith]

I'm of the opinion that thirty minutes of compelling thought provoking gameplay is superior to thirty minutes of mindless clicking.

I think it's less about their schedules and more they don't just don't get these games. The mind space that's required to enjoy them is lost to them.

They should just make visual novels if they intend to dumb down the puzzles, it would be better for everybody.

 

[Alpan]

On the more relevant topic, though - I think it's always a bad sign when developers signal that they're looking to alienate the biggest share of their product's proven audience to try and capture a broader one. It almost never works. I don't have an opinion about MI2/Curse's "easy" modes as I've never bothered with them - but did they really work to bring more people in? Do you know anyone whose first experience with these games was the simplified mode and who went on to become a fan?

This is nitpicking.

It's only a bad signal if you assume that the developers are compromising themselves to produce the free option. As MRY points out, this was not the case with MI2. It wasn't the case with Curse, either.

And your question is rhetorical. Unless you somehow think everyone who played MI2 or Curse played it on the higher difficulty -- and recall that these games presented these options as "default" and "harder" -- yes, obviously many people went on to become fans of the games despite playing on the easier setting.

 

[Alex]

The easy mode in Monkey Island 2 was very well done. Honestly, I'd much rather have an optional easy mode than have a compulsory one.

People who worry about having an easy mode in first place are missing the point, though. Really, if you are worried about an audience that just wants to read a story, make a story, not a game.

 

[jfrisby]

Man is it disheartening to hear him echo the same tired 'puzzles are problematic' talking points, he always seemed extremely focused on puzzles. That and the 'oh actually most of my MI3 ideas got used by other games' thing from that other interview that he'd never bothered to mention for 30 years.

 

[Viata]

Make the game the way you want, let playtesters play your game. Write down the puzzles they had the most problem with(and the bugs, of course), then make an easy version of those for people who want an easy mode. Done. They always need to complicate things.

 

[Alex]

Make the game the way you want, let playtesters play your game. Write down the puzzles they had the most problem with(and the bugs, of course), then make them even harder and laugh evilly. Done. They always need to complicate things.

Fixed.

 

[Viata]

As if any of these devs have the balls to do that.

 

[Alex]

I first made this an edit to the earlier post, but I figured it should be posted alone, since it is a completely different thought.

To be frank, I think a big part of the problem in adventure games that came after the 90s isn't so much that the puzzles are dumbed down, but rather that they are presented in sequence, separated much more cleanly from other puzzles. Older adventure games usually had a somewhat large map you could explore and it wasn't clear to which puzzle the clues, items and whatnot you found around were meant to interact, what puzzles actually worked together and even what stuff wasn't part of a puzzle at all but just part of the game world.

And this isn't something you can just tone down with an "easy mode". Making your puzzles compartmentalised will reflect on the design of the game's narrative and exploration. Making an easy mode that is also compartmentalised might as well require you to redo your game from scratch.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

I think it's less about their schedules and more they don't just don't get these games. The mind space that's required to enjoy them is lost to them.

Yeah, it never occurs to people that if they're constantly getting stuck in adventure games and then instantly looking up a walkthrough, maybe the problem isn't the game itself. I'm not saying there aren't games that actually do have puzzles you're unlikely to solve even this way, they exist, but the process of winning an adventure game does require some puzzling out of these things. Sometimes even walking away from the game and coming back in a day or two. There's nothing quite like doing some menial task and then thinking up the solution to a puzzle, and finding out that it works.

 

[Tramboi]

I think playing TP should assuage any doubt about Ron puzzle-design capabilities. He knows his drill.

And a hint system IS good. Infocom did it ffs.

 

[Viata]

Problem is that TP seems to be different to what they are planning him given that interview. TP was supposed to be like those old school point and click, while this game doesn't seem to be the same.