Adventure Gamers - Forums

Maybe not interfered, just came up with some directions how the game should look like to appeal to a broader audience when signing a contract. Ron spent years and years planning the third game, I will never believe that this is how he imagined it to be. A lot of changes should’ve been made in the process, and that might indeed explain Ron’s frustration with the fan reaction.

Doom - 21 May 2023 06:02 PM

Maybe not interfered, just came up with some directions how the game should look like to appeal to a broader audience when signing a contract. Ron spent years and years planning the third game, I will never believe that this is how he imagined it to be. A lot of changes should’ve been made in the process, and that might indeed explain Ron’s frustration with the fan reaction.

I would imagine Ron’s idea of how his 3rd MI game “should” be changed quite a bit over the years with him and how technology evolved. I’m sure, when he originally penned down “Guybrush goes to hell”, the game would have looked something like MI2, but maybe in higher resolution. But with time, as tech changed, he perhaps even entertained an idea of using 3D, but when he finally got the change of doing it, the question became actually real: How do I want the game to look? How do I want it to play?

As Ron said himself, Ron that made Return is not the same man who made the previous MI games. A lot of time has gone by a lot has changed, not only in tech but with him as well.  No old man is the same their younger self was.

I could be horribly wrong here and, if so, apologies in advance to DM81, but that post resonates as being created by Chat GPT.

DM81 - 22 May 2023 07:06 AM

Jabod - 22 May 2023 05:24 AM

I could be horribly wrong here and, if so, apologies in advance to DM81, but that post resonates as being created by Chat GPT.

Yeah, I knew that it sound odd, sorry about that. The fact is I’m not a native english speaker, and I originally wrote that post in italian, then translated.

No need for the apology DM81. Translating from your native tongue (Italian) definitely explains how it reads. I have no doubt that if I did something in reverse (English to Italian in this case) it would come across in much the same way.

It wasn’t a criticism by the way as I’ve been thinking of using Chat GPT to “create” something, just not here though. It would be an interesting intellectual exercise for me to see what would be given “birth” to particularly if I chose to base it on human psychology - results potentially scary  

Can’t pass comment on the rest of your post(s) as I’ve not played the game yet, although I will

Jdawg445 - 21 May 2023 07:24 PM

I just think sometimes creators lose touch of what the audience wants, and sometimes with the audience they don’t even know what they want.

tomimt - 22 May 2023 02:19 AM

As Ron said himself, Ron that made Return is not the same man who made the previous MI games. A lot of time has gone by a lot has changed, not only in tech but with him as well.  No old man is the same their younger self was.

People change, I agree, one can’t step twice in the same river as a number of returning developers proved, and why I’m also skeptical about Gabriel Knight 4. Only I’d argue it’s different with Gilbert as he never really stopped making games. Thimbleweed Park was released just 5 years prior (even less time between the projects since the development of Return started somewhere in 2020) and was very similar to the first MI games and Gilbert’s design philosophy (big open world, complex puzzle structure that made it feel like one giant puzzle and, at the same time, “a living and throbbing world” as DM81 said). Return felt like it was made by a different team with different audience in mind. Which is even stranger since it was obviously conceived as a nostalgic trip, not as an opportunity to relaunch the series for the new auditory, or it wouldn’t cite itself so much. It’s like they rushed to rewrite the original script to make the game appeal to everyone and ended with random pieces loosely glued together.

Doom - 22 May 2023 11:08 AM

Which is even stranger since it was obviously conceived as a nostalgic trip, not as an opportunity to relaunch the series for the new auditory, or it wouldn’t cite itself so much. It’s like they rushed to rewrite the original script to make the game appeal to everyone and ended with random pieces loosely glued together.

Well, as we can only go by what Ron has said himself, TP was a retro throwback because people had been begging for one from him for ages and after he had done it, he had no particular reason to do the same again after he got it out from his system. He has often said that he doesn’t do retro games, he just does games.

As for his original MI3 script, he has said it often enough, there was no written script, only a small incomplete synopsis, if even that. He left Lucas Arts long before MI3 was actually in production.

Yet he made Delores. The Cave was also based on a 20-year-old concept and appealed to Maniac Mansion, and before that he spent some 10 years producing kids-friendly adventures in style of LucasArts cartoon games. Gilbert said many different things throughout years. In 2004, for example, he stated in an interview that the whole trilogy was originally conceived as one big game, but was then split into three parts. And that’s how the first two games felt indeed. Even if there was no written script, he spent so many years talking about MI3 and how hard he tried to get the license back to produce the “real” third game that I doubt there was no plan of MI3 at least in his head, ready to be put into work.

Delores was a tech demo though. It wasn’t initially even meant to be released, but as it turned out better than they expected, they threw it out to the wild as a freebie. And as for Cave, I can only assume that while the concept was old, the design of it wasn’t. I doubt he sat down thinking how I could make Cave like I would have done it in the past. Even if the concept itself is old, the game itself was based on modern design concepts.

Something initially conceived as a bigger whole doesn’t always mean all of the original concepts would have ended up in. Just like with everything else, things change when you actually start doing them. things you thought would work end up being dull, so you cut them out and re-write stuff as needed. Sometimes reasons are technical, sometimes they are just finding out that your initial idea wasn’t as good as you thought.

The way Ron ended Return, I honestly do believe that was his original idea from way back. He had said often enough that the secret would be terribly disappointing for many but as a whole, Return fits very well on the whole anachronistic nature of Ron’s MI games.

tomimt - 22 May 2023 04:08 PM

Delores was a tech demo though. It wasn’t initially even meant to be released, but as it turned out better than they expected, they threw it out to the wild as a freebie. And as for Cave, I can only assume that while the concept was old, the design of it wasn’t. I doubt he sat down thinking how I could make Cave like I would have done it in the past. Even if the concept itself is old, the game itself was based on modern design concepts.

Something initially conceived as a bigger whole doesn’t always mean all of the original concepts would have ended up in. Just like with everything else, things change when you actually start doing them. things you thought would work end up being dull, so you cut them out and re-write stuff as needed. Sometimes reasons are technical, sometimes they are just finding out that your initial idea wasn’t as good as you thought.

The way Ron ended Return, I honestly do believe that was his original idea from way back. He had said often enough that the secret would be terribly disappointing for many but as a whole, Return fits very well on the whole anachronistic nature of Ron’s MI games.

I still don’t know what the secret is. So not so much disappointed as confused.

Everyone else seems to know (but they don’t talk about it), so maybe secrets are meant to remain secret.

*shrug*

It wasn’t like that with MI2. People talked about the details and “what if this”, “what if that”. It was clear what the ending meant, or could have meant. I haven’t seen any of that kind of discussion around RtMI.

To me it was the opposite, Secret felt more like a parody on the pirate/adventure genres while Monkey Island 2 featured a fully immersive world, a less sketchy plot and characters that acted like real inhabitants, not just random stereotypes put there for laughs. It always felt amazing to me how they managed to release it in just one year after MI1 — a bigger and better game with a whole new plot, new locations, new pirate cliches. Maybe because it was in fact part of the original production?

And the ending, while it broke all possible walls, was a breath of fresh air back then and didn’t took me away from the world, especially since the game made it look like it was LeChuck’s magic. Thimbleweed and Monkey 5, on the other hand, certainly pushed it too far, and the only excuse I see is that they happened 30 years after MI2 when people could talk about nostalgia and “Gilbert’s style”. Why I have doubts it was his original intention to end the trilogy just by repeating same trope all over again. It just wouldn’t have worked if the game was released straight after Revenge.

I agree on CMI though, I grew up to enjoy it for this particular reason, that it doesn’t take you away from it’s universe, even though it feels less like a Monkey Island game to me and more like a completely original license. But I still find it spiritually closer to Gilbert’s vision than his late installment.

Doom - 22 May 2023 07:54 PM

Why I have doubts it was his original intention to end the trilogy just by repeating same trope all over again. It just wouldn’t have worked if the game was released straight after Revenge.

It kinda does though. After Revenge people were expecting an in-universe explanation to who Guybrush and LeChuck were. RtMI appears to subvert expectations again and do a meta-meta-ending where the whole thing is just Guybrush telling a story to his kid. No one expected that. Where all the other characters fit in (besides Elaine maybe) is kind of irrelevant after that.

I think people like to take the opportunity to use the line of “Ron never planned this” to criticise the game, but MI2 probably wasn’t planned from the start of MI1 either.

But anyway, the ending didn’t really factor in to my enjoyment of the game, which wasn’t all that high. It was a decent game but probably the least enjoyable of the franchise.

Irrelevant characters and universe is not exactly the best selling points, and that’s how the game often felt to me starting with that so-called Boybrush. But there’s certainly enough place for speculation, especially since Gilbert enjoys trolling his audience inside and outside of his games. What’s done is done, let’s see what Ron will come up with next.

Here’s Gilbert’s most recent panel btw from a LudoNarraCon event where he talks about past and present game design. He mentions how much of the script in MI 1-2 was improvised and immediately added to the game because it was quick and easy unlike these days.