Return to Monkey Island (2022) - Ron Gilbert onboard!

[K]

I didn't have a 3D card in my PC so I played through Curse in its entirety without clicking the option for 3D acceleration, and installed it specially on a friend's computer just so that I could see what the 3D acceleration did. 

[Wiper]

1 hour ago, Cheeko said:

The trailer has Ron Gilbert’s name plastered all over it but no one seems to be talking about Tim Schafer, is this all a massive fuck you to him? 

 

He's taking it remarkably well if so

 

 

But no, it would be a bit off (misleading, even) to give him billing in the announcement when he's not involved with the project! 

[Cheeko]

He’s saying he’s excited that the art director of Knights and Bikes is involved, not that he’s super pumped the game is getting made without him.

[Thor]

38 minutes ago, Cheeko said:

He’s saying he’s excited that the art director of Knights and Bikes is involved, not that he’s super pumped the game is getting made without him.

Not sure if serious ... sarcasm detector possibly malfunctioning ... 

[b00dles]

Tim also really wasn't as much involved with original monkey Island - in comparison to the later lucasarts point n clicks anyway. 

[Lorfarius]

Curse gets so much hate but its full of some great funny moments. Seeing as they didn't have the original team involved its amazing what they came up with. Ass Creed 4 had its sea chanties but some of us were trimming the sails and roaming the sea back in the 90's 🤣

 

 

[schmojo]

16 hours ago, b00dles said:

Tim also really wasn't as much involved with original monkey Island - in comparison to the later lucasarts point n clicks anyway. 

 

From a quick Google, him and Dave Grossman wrote the majority of the dialogue as Assistant Directors, and changed the trajectory from a serious game to a comedy one.

 

That's a fair old contribution.

[b00dles]

4 hours ago, schmojo said:

 

From a quick Google, him and Dave Grossman wrote the majority of the dialogue as Assistant Directors, and changed the trajectory from a serious game to a comedy one.

 

That's a fair old contribution.

That's odd, I'm fairly sure on the commentary on one of the remakes he even says himself that on the first one he was very young and was essentially another writer along with a load of others at lucasarts.

 

Or maybe it was more the coding side of it he did.

 

Or maybe I've totally misremembered the whole thing. 

[MidWalian]

Nice interview. Contains details on where the game will start, returning characters, some locations etc.

 

[K]

The new art style is interesting; it reminds me a lot of Day of the Tentacle, with all the exaggerated angles and jagged lines. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t prefer the style of the Thimbleweed Park backgrounds to this - those pixel art backgrounds look absolutely gorgeous, and evoke the era perfectly. I’m replaying the special edition of the first game at the moment, and I much prefer the original graphics to the remastered ones. 
 

But at the same time, the new look is quite nice, and I get why they wanted to move on from the original and make an actual sequel rather than a pastiche of the kind of game they might have made in the nineties. 

[Wiper]

What's interesting with Thimbleweed Park is that it's specifically evoking a mix of pre-Monkey Island 2 Lucasarts aesthetics: the pixel-art backgrounds (and, indeed, the fact that Mark Ferrari was involved) are very Monkey Island 1, while the character designs are very Maniac Mansion. Just, in both cases, at significantly higher resolutions (and minus palette limitations). I think it's really well executed, and a great way to evoke a broad era of Lucasarts adventure games, as a way to take what is a completely new game and setting and make it feel like a 'classic' Lucasarts adventure.

 

By contrast, Return to Monkey Island choosing to take its own visual path makes it feel like a 'true' sequel to me, and actually puts it in line with the series as a whole: it's worth remembering that every MI game has diverged from the previous one visually (ignoring the Telltale series). Though Ron refers to MI2 as a 'pixel art' game, that only really applies to its foreground sprites: its backgrounds were very much not, being instead scanned in paintings, giving it a very different visual feel to MI1. Compare e.g. the crisp pixel-art Mêlée Town of Secret:

 

To the busy, painterly Woodtick of Revenge:

 

The difference in style is a bit less obvious when both are shrunk to postage stamp size on modern monitors, but I hope the distinction is still fairly evident! And I'm sure nobody here needs reminding of how different Curse and Escape looked. So, to me, the fact that this is a Monkey Island with a new visual identity makes all the more a 'true' Monkey Island game: each previous game tried something different, so it's only right that this one should too!

[James Lyon]

They're definitely aware of the reception to the style according to that interview:

 

Quote

Ron: I really hope people like it. There’s been a little bit of backlash because it’s not pixel art, and at some level that makes me sad, because we’ve spent two years with an incredible team making an incredible game that looks incredible, and it is a little bit sad to hear that. But I don’t think we’re going to let people down.

 

I'm willing to accept it if they're happy with the style. I guess if I need another adventure game in the MI2 style, I can always dig out a copy of Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer!

[Wiper]

5 minutes ago, James Lyon said:

I can always dig out a copy of Touché: The Adventures of the Fifth Musketeer!

 

 

In this house we accept only one fifth musketeer, and his name is Albert.

[Thor]

Lol, pixel art fanatics are the worst.

 

[schmojo]

I have no idea how the world makes any progress at all when even the most incremental changes face people complaining that it's not how it used to be.

 

We're going to see the evolution of MI from (most of) the brains that started the whole thing. They want to try something slightly different creatively. Trust them, they know what they want to do.

 

People should want to see their creative favourites do new things. Completely new things too, not just incredibly minor detours like this one.

[Benny]

Reminds me of the Neanderthal reaction to Wind Waker. Resulting in the look of Twilight Princess, which was so brown it was like they wanted to make a point.

[b00dles]

I'd much rather have a monkey Island sequel text adventure if Ron was making it than the best pixel art possible written and created by the telltale writers. 

I also think the art looks good as it is, can't wait all round. 

[smac]

Wind Waker was beautiful. Bursting with colour and charm, vibrant animation and sheer joy.

 

Fuck those guys.

[K]

I dunno - there’s nothing wrong with being a bit disappointed the new Monkey Island isn’t being done in pixel art, surely? It’s a valid art style in its own right, and wouldn’t have to be a pure replication of the look of the first two games. Pixel art is a broad church, there’s plenty of different approaches within that overarching style. The new look of the game is quite nice, but I would have preferred something that was more closely based on the originals. 

[Thor]

Counter argument: Modern pixel art is wanky as fuck, and beloved only by hipsters.

 

edit: Specified modern pixel art.

[Benny]

Not aimed at posters here, but in general I've long since moved past the: "I want X to look like this" or "I hope X game includes this" thinking these days. I want designers or filmmakers to make what they want to make and to be potentially surprised and delighted by whatever they decide or come up with.

 

It happens all the time: "here's this thing we made!" 

"Meh, it's not like how I  want it."

 

Well, good for you. It's just exhausting being surrounded by assassins of joy at every juncture.

[Nick R]

I don't think the backgrounds are a drastically new style for the series. To me they look like an extension of the style used in SE, but with more wonky perspective/fewer parallel lines (particularly in the locksmith shop screenshot).

 

 

Amiga (via MobyGames):

 

 

DOS (via MobyGames):

 

 

SE (I couldn't find any screenshots of this street so this is my phone screenshot of someone's YouTube walkthrough):

 

 

Return:

 

 

 

As for the character designs: the ones shown so far definitely seem more stylised than anything in the series before - e.g. the shopkeeper in the window in the above screenshot.

 

But it's too soon to judge the look of the characters without seeing more of them in motion! I'll reserve judgement until I've seen how Guybrush looks walking around. But I will admit that the animation of the musician skeleton in the teaser trailer worried me a bit by having some of that Flash game/hinged puppet look.

 

But that's preferable to the approach taken by the SE versions of 1 and 2. Part of the reason I didn't like playing them in the new graphics mode was because of the mismatch - high-fidelity characters overlaid on top of the original animations/walking direction camera angles/distance scaling. (I was also less keen on the redrawn close-up still character portraits.)

[S0L]

When we were making Sonic Transformed I wanted to do a System 16 styled OutRun level where we built the track out of forward facing sprites/billboards, we tried it and whilst I loved it, there was concensus from the art guys that they weren't happy and it looked 'bad'.

 

Ditto when I ran a pixel filter over the credits, I liked the chunky CRT pixel look but they all felt it looked like a rendering error.

 

What I took from it is that for those of us who remembered the games the first time around, we'd 'get it' but if this was the first time you encountered that style you'd be 'WTF is this!'.

 

From the trailer I quite like how they've found a mix here of the old and the new, as folks have said above its a definite choice and I think despite the fact this is a game targeted at fans of the originals, I like they've found a style that works for them.

 

Like others, I'd have loved to seen something more VGA style personally too, but I'm an antique. For me if the writing is as sharp as the originals and the puzzles fun, I can live with it.

 

Otherwise they've likely made the right choice as they also need to make sure it's approachable to a new audience as much as fans of the old games.

[Anne Summers]

I feel like Thimbleweed Park used pixel art as it was deliberately a retro-style throwback, whereas this clearly isn't - and I'm actually quite happy about that . I love it when they bring iconic things from my childhood back into my life, but they don't all have to be done in a way that's designed to evoke nostalgia or whatever. 

 

If you think about it MI has always pushed its graphical technology forward with every new release. 

[dr_manhattan^]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with prefering pixel art.

 

People who think there is are the worst.

 

I do think this new style is a good fit however. 

 

I just loved the look of the first two games which to my eye seemed to strive for realism in style in general.  The proportions of the characters were realistic, which makes it different to Thimbleweed Park and Monkey Island 3.

[gizmo1990]

Well, I'm still waiting for the demake. 

[PikaStu]

I initially liked the pixel art of Thimbleweed Park, but imo they ruined the VGA style by having some background / scaled objects using smaller pixels. It broke the illusion of playing an old LucasArts game. 

[layten]

https://www.eurogamer.net/ron-gilbert-and-dave-grossman-reveal-their-one-monkey-island-regret

Fuck that puzzle. I was stuck there for ages until I did the ol' point'n'click special of use every inventory item on every object in the hope something works trick.

[b00dles]

34 minutes ago, layten said:

https://www.eurogamer.net/ron-gilbert-and-dave-grossman-reveal-their-one-monkey-island-regret

Fuck that puzzle. I was stuck there for ages until I did the ol' point'n'click special of use every inventory item on every object in the hope something works trick.

The thing that threw me was the fact I think I was young and didn't really know what a monkey wrench was anyway and the picture of it didn't make it clear (to me) that he was rigid enough to act like any sort of tool that I could use on a thing. He did "freeze" in that position in the game and that's how you stick it in your pocket but I never understood that it was meant to be soild enough for what you needed to do. 

 

I think the spitting contest confused me for even longer due to the fact you needed to do three (or maybe 4 ?) different things on top of each other to win. I spent fucking ages on the different dialogue options related to prepping your spit, I thought that was more of the solution than just plain cheating like moving the flags. Especially as you don't distract the crowd and I thought they'd notice and/ or care but they don't. 

 

I still bloody love it and it's way better than 95% of the genre in case anyone is going to react like I've made some sort of post saying monkey Island is completely terrible and your mum is fat.

[moosegrinder]

Quote

Meanwhile, Gilbert has also responded to fans unhappy with Return to Monkey Island's art style, stating "Return to Monkey Island may not be the art style you wanted or were expecting but it's the art style I wanted".

 

God, I love how curmudgeonly he is.