Return To Monkey Island - MI2 sequel from Ron Gilbert

[Darkozric]

 

[Mary Sue Leigh]

I'm starting to wonder if this may have been designed primarily for the switch and the PC version is just a port basically? That would explain simplistic controls and the visuals which were, in the words of the art director, meant to resemble a pop up storybook.
Secrets of Bing Bing Wahoo Island

 

[Jenkem]

I'm starting to wonder if this may have been designed primarily for the switch and the PC version is just a port basically? That would explain simplistic controls and the visuals which were, in the words of the art director, meant to resemble a pop up storybook.
Secrets of Bing Bing Wahoo Island

No it's because Ron Gilbert is a faggot.

 

[negator2vc]

The following are from the eurogamer interview

But, for those returning to the franchise, how did it feel going back to the Monkey Island series after all these years?
"I don't think it was important in terms of my career... It was just a fun thing to do," Gilbert laughed.
"I've been making games professionally for almost 40 years. So, I kind of don't care about my career in a lot of ways."

He don't even care if the game is successful so why care to please the fans that would have bought the game.
Just in case anyone was still thinking this will be a good game.
I guess now we know to call it : "The last turd"

 

[lightbane]

In that same review it's mentioned Ron wanted to have Elaine and Guybrush divorce but the fans didn't let him. Perhaps this will be a point in the incoming new game.

 

[Darkozric]

The following are from the eurogamer interview

But, for those returning to the franchise, how did it feel going back to the Monkey Island series after all these years?
"I don't think it was important in terms of my career... It was just a fun thing to do," Gilbert laughed.
"I've been making games professionally for almost 40 years. So, I kind of don't care about my career in a lot of ways."

He don't even care if the game is successful so why care to please the fans that would have bought the game.
Just in case anyone was still thinking this will be a good game.
I guess now we know to call it : "The last turd"

His answer is completely retarded, the dude asked how did it feel in general, and the answer is about his career. Who the fuck asked you about you career you fucking arrogant elephant.
He treats his game like it's his little whore, and the tragic part is that he's laughing like a clown while doing it!


"It's disappointing," Gilbert said in reflection, "because there's a lot of behind the scenes things I was really interested in sharing on my blog. More technical issues, more deep design issues you can deal with in more long-form writing. I was really disappointed I didn't get to do that, because of the toxicity that existed at the time."
Gilbert sadly attributes this toxicity as being a part of the time we live in. "It's the modern world," he said. "Unfortunately, you know, every developer goes through this to some level and it's just kind of one of those things you just have to get used to at some level."
This sums it up.

No one gives a fuck about the behind the scenes details and he was disappointed that he couldn't satisfy his ego by doing it. (Good)
Also he's an irresponsible fag, who blames it all to the "toxic modern world". It's like he thought, "Many creators are doing this blaming toxic shit, game developers, showrunners, why not blame the toxic world for my faggotry too? It will work!"

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Gilbert sadly attributes this toxicity as being a part of the time we live in. "It's the modern world," he said. "Unfortunately, you know, every developer goes through this to some level and it's just kind of one of those things you just have to get used to at some level."

noooooo you can't criticize developers! stahp it stahp it they're not allowed to be criticized!!!!!

 

[Darkozric]

RETURN TO HONK HONK ISLAND
Play as a non-binary Elaine Marley, and save the little clown princess Threepwoodina.

 

[JarlFrank]

In that same review it's mentioned Ron wanted to have Elaine and Guybrush divorce but the fans didn't let him. Perhaps this will be a point in the incoming new game.

They already had their breakup arc in Monkey Island 2 lol. Come up with something original, Ron.

 

[Boleskine]

Brace yourselves. You know what's coming:

The Codex, meanwhile:

 

[Boleskine]

https://www.ign.com/articles/return...tors-discuss-puzzle-design-for-the-modern-age

“There was a different sensibility for puzzles back then,” Gilbert said. “We were new and puzzles were new and adventure games were new. I don’t think the rules had really been established. [And] the audience was quite different back then.” And so, when designing 2022’s Return to Monkey Island, the two designers’ approach has evolved right along with the audience they’re creating the game for. “You still want to have fun, challenging, rewarding puzzles, but I think people have no tolerance for frustration anymore,” Gilbert began. “I think people have so much pulling on them, media-wise, from television shows to movies to games. When the original Monkey Island came out, there were probably ten games or five games that were released at the same time. Now there are 500. They want to play, [but] they don’t want any frustration.”

And so, Gilbert continued, “you still want to give them a challenging experience. You don’t want to give them an experience where they just click through the thing. But you want to build puzzles that are more logical, that make sense. You want when somebody solves a puzzle or will accept a hint for a puzzle that they go, ‘Oh, I should’ve thought of that.’ You don’t want them to go, ‘I never would have thought of that.’ And so I think that’s the main thing Dave and I are really trying to do with the puzzles is make sure that everything makes logical sense for the game.”

Gilbert continued this conversation topic, his voice taking on a very humble, self-reflective tone: “I think you want to challenge the audience but you want to challenge them in a fair way. You don't want to challenge them because you’ve made things obscure…I have talked to people who’ve played Monkey Island 1 or 2 for the first time recently, and they really do just complain about the puzzles. It’s the one thing that they complain about. It’s not that there are puzzles, that they’re challenging puzzles, but that they make no sense because they’re really not laid out. And for people that are huge MI fans, sometimes that’s hard to understand because they’re so seeped in what MI is that they don’t remember that something can be super confusing. I don’t want games to be mind numbingly difficult for players. I want them to enjoy the game and enjoy the story.”

Can't make the game too challenging or the zombies will give up and start watching Netflix on their phones.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

[...] puzzles were new and adventure games were new.

Buddy, 1990 was 10-15 years after the original Adventure and Scott Adams. By that time developers were already complaining that it was hard designing clever puzzles for their games because Adams thought up most of the clever ones.
Frankly, what he says is bullshit anyway. I'm not a fan of Monkey Island and I can't say its illogical. I can't say I've ever seen anyone who actually enjoys adventure games say that. Maybe a solution is lost if you're not an English-speaker though. (I remember the monkey wrench mentioned as an example) Like, I remember looking up how to deal with LeChunk at the end of the original, and thinking "oh, that was clever". I bring this up because you put someone on any kind of timer or time sensitive actions in an adventure game and they'll just start panicking. That and get so focused on the wrong idea that you end up looking it up to find out that what you wanted to do isn't even possible. These are not necessarily failings of the developer, more so the player. (and I say this as someone who has fallen victim to these things)
Let's talk more about player failings. I realize that developers like getting money from more people, which is why they foolishly try to do stupid shit like this. And perhaps, sometimes players outside the adventure genre have fair complaints, but more often than not their complaints are just whining. Rarely is it about how they had to solve some bullshit 108 identical room maze or some complicated series of bullshit events that are unrelated. Instead, its about how they couldn't figure out that you had to kill a dog with a stake or oil up a sharpening stone to sharpen an axe. These people who aren't willing to spend 5 minutes to think about the items they have and how to use them aren't going to play your game no matter how much you beg and "make it logical".
Edit: And people will make no end of justifications as to why some puzzle they couldn't solve is illogical anyway, because people are willing to make no end of excuses for their failings in serious situations, let alone something as unimportant as a silly computer game.

 

[Darkozric]

Can't make the game too challenging or the zombies will give up and start watching Netflix on their phones.

Tbh I'm more annoyed with those hipster and useless interviewers than Ron himself. Ron is saying this BS cause he finds willing idiots to do it.

All those interviewers are biased and naive. Instead of asking questions like, "should we be rewarding laziness?" or "Who chose this art style and what were his criteria of choosing it?" or "I'm sure Mark Ferrari would be very excited to work on a new MI game, why didn't he get

invited to the project?", they just listen to his BS and they smile. Ron needs to be squeezed into a corner and not have his belly scratched for a job well done.

I should have been the one who asks the questions, then we would see if Ron could still wear the pathetic and caricature-ish smile on his face.

 

[Taxnomore]

It still wouldn't be too hard for this to be the best point and click released those last three years.

 

[Darkozric]

It still wouldn't be too hard for this to be the best point and click released those last three years.

Considering the "quality" of recent adventures you're not wrong, the standards are very low. RtMI will be the adventure of the year, until the one-man made Neyyah is released and fuck all of them for good.

 

[Pyke]

*ahem*

 

[Darkozric]

*ahem*

Oops, I forgot our precious necromancer!

 

[negator2vc]

This is considered good adventure UI these days? Yikes!
Is the UI a good place to put some cheap jokes instead of actual hotspot info & possible actions?

 

[Dexter]

I'm starting to wonder if this may have been designed primarily for the switch and the PC version is just a port basically? That would explain simplistic controls and the visuals which were, in the words of the art director, meant to resemble a pop up storybook.
Secrets of Bing Bing Wahoo Island

It's Mobile, not Switch. "Broken Age" and various others of these "Grumpy old designer is RETURNING to REVIVE the Adventure game genre!" style games were already made to be played while tapping away on iPads/iPhones while on the couch, toilet or bus.

Honestly don't really care anymore, we gave the "KickStarter revolution" a fair chance, but at this point I'm mostly over these geriatrics trying to relive their glory days before their due retirement and more often than not raping their legacy instead. I guess it might be sad to look at in some ways, but to feel strong emotions like fury or anger as depicted or joy or hope on the other hand you'd have to care in the first place. I might have felt anger say when the Germans raped Simon the Sorcerer back in 2007 by releasing a part 4. In 2022 after a decade of franchise rape I'm more ambivalent and amused about some Mobile Shovelware wearing a Monkey Island skinsuit. This would be worse if there were no Alternatives, but I think it's time to "put the past behind" as they say and give more young blood a chance instead.

Gilbert began. “I think people have so much pulling on them, media-wise, from television shows to movies to games. When the original Monkey Island came out, there were probably ten games or five games that were released at the same time. Now there are 500. They want to play, [but] they don’t want any frustration.”

Good point Gilbert, there are many Alternatives. So again, why should I buy and play your game that would likely prove to be an exercise in frustration when there's some pretty good other stuff releasing like BROK, The Excavation of Hob's Barrow (stupid name change btw. should have left it Incantamentum, which had a lot more mystery to it), Dreams in the Witch House or Season of the Warlock etc. to look forward to and play or many movies and television shows to enjoy instead, and nobody is dependent on some guy that made some pretty good and amusing games 32 years ago? You have to provide some more compelling reason than "I'm using the name Monkey Island!".

On another note, Adventure games are some of the easiest games to design from a gameplay and game systems perspective and an Open Source AI Tool was released just a few weeks ago that could take care of the most difficult part, which is appealing 2D background art and character portraits and design, I wonder what kind of consequences this will have for Point&Click Adventure games in the coming years?

Saw this btw.: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiff...ocus_tenebrarum_a_new_video_game_made_almost/


Renaissance of the Point & Click Graphic Adventure genre based on AI art?

 

[JarlFrank]

Calling the adventure game genre dead at this point when we've had many decent (and many mediocre, admittedly) games in the last decade is fucking dishonest at worst, and clueless at best.

Wadjet Eye developed and published some decent games. Technobabylon was my favorite but the others aren't too shabby either.
There were two new Leisure Suit Larry games which were decent enough, surprisingly, especially considering the devs are German and SJWs. But they still had the original lewdness and the puzzles weren't bad either.
We got a new Tex Murphy game with the original actor in it, and it was also pretty good.
There are a bunch of indie adventures made by very small teams, some even by individuals, both humorous and serious: Clam Man, Guard Duty, The Sundew, The Castle (which is basically a Maniac Mansion clone lol), Heroine's Quest, VirtuaVerse.
Daedalic released some decent games too, like the Deponia series and the two Dark Eye adventures, which I enjoyed a lot.

Sure, the games I listed range from good to meh, but it's not like all the games we got in the 80s and 90s were good. Plenty of meh back then, too. The point is, we get a lot of adventures to choose from. It's not like the genre only gets one title per year and we have to be grateful for each release.

So under that background, why should anyone be hyped for the new Monkey Island? Just because it's the resurrection of a classic franchise headed by its original creator? Lol, maybe reddit-tier soyjaks get hyped by that alone, but the actual game looks anything but appealing at this point.
The visuals are ugly. Pretty much every single other adventure game released in the last decade looks better than this. It is one of the worst-looking games I've ever seen. So the art is not a reason to look forward to the game.
The jokes that have been revealed up to now were all unfunny as fuck. Especially that "blah blah blah" joke. They could have made LeChuck spew technobabble like in Star Trek except it's voodoo terms instead, that could have been funny. But no. They went with the lamest, cringeiest joke imaginable. So the humor isn't a reason to look forward to the game.
The interface is terrible, every adventure made with the free fucking AGS engine has a better interface than this. And when an adventure game has a bad interface like this, it automatically limits the complexity of interactions and puzzles. On top of that, Ron confirmed that he wants to dumb down puzzle design for the normies, so the gameplay is not a reason to look forward to the game.

So, with all these other adventure games on the market, made by small and passionate newcomer teams, why would I be interested in this travesty? No reason at all.

 

[Morpheus Kitami]

Calling the adventure game genre dead at this point when we've had many decent (and many mediocre, admittedly) games in the last decade is fucking dishonest at worst, and clueless at best.

I said that the only period that was true for was the late '00s early '10s in the random news thread, but it deserves repeating. Even then new adventure games were coming out in the commercial sphere. People saying they're dead are basically just admitting they didn't care about the genre anymore. In amateur spheres, people have been doing amazing things since the '90s in text adventures and there are a ton of interesting AGS games. Including fangames of Lucasarts titles, which at this rate, I'm sure are better than this game will be.

 

[Tramboi]

Well there's this childhood attachment to wonderful memories, characters and so on...

And there's this adult(ish) brain not wanting to encourage compromising those memories, so I'll play it, but not day1 full-price, sorry Ron, but thanks for TP.

 

[Darkozric]

Sure, the games I listed range from good to meh, but it's not like all the games we got in the 80s and 90s were good. Plenty of meh back then, too. The point is, we get a lot of adventures to choose from. It's not like the genre only gets one title per year and we have to be grateful for each release.

Not that I necessarily disagree with your take, it's balanced, but I would like to add that back then the good ones outnumbered the mediocre.
Also we should not forget that we're in a period that VN and Narrative-driven Walking sims are thriving. Which is pretty bad for traditional adventures.

Anyway, if I was to pick one wadjeteye game and throw the rest into oblivion, that one would be Resonance.
Tesla Effect was good and can't wait for the Pandora Directive Remaster, VirtuaVerse was a nice surprise made by chip-tune makers, Heroine's Quest was also good, and some other indie shit also have the potential to be just ok or good.
Also I'm hyped about Neyyah and Bone Totem.

 

[Viata]

Calling the adventure game genre dead at this point when we've had many decent (and many mediocre, admittedly) games in the last decade is fucking dishonest at worst, and clueless at best.

If you push this, clueless people will think it's true and not try to look for what has been released recently and will not find out you are pushing some trash compared to what have been released recently. It's marketing.

 

[ADULF HITLOR FAN KLUB]

Guybrush Threepwood via Stable Diffusion

Here is what I got.

I dunno man.... but I guess dick fingers would be an improvement over a dick nose.