Ron declares he is working on a new Monkey Island

Do you think these curtains are animated? A crucial question, I dare say:

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Holy saturation overload

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I think that the fabric contains iron dust and that the curtain is attracted by the magnetic parrot.

Jokes apart, yes, I think they are animated. Mainly because of this:

Where are the extra people coming from? More art?

Ron: It’s definitely more art; there’s a few more programmers… there might be like one more programmer. But most of it’s art. Just a lot more artists, a lot more animators than we had on Thimbleweed Park .

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It’s weird for me that people are saying that the game looks more childish than the previous one.
I think they nailed the dark aura from the Gilbert’s games.
Like, for example… if we compare Mêlée Island from MI1, MI1 SE, and Return, I feel like the one from Return is the darkest yet.

Of course, it’s only my opinion. I understand people not liking it.

I however think the animation will be great, from what I’ve seen from the teaser. So I’m sure the screenshot are not completely representative of what we will see.

I’m also getting tired of people fighting on FB. I understand people being excited or disappointed. I just don’t get why some have to be so aggressive about it.

This is why I like this forum – we don’t have to agree with everything, but we stay polite no matter what.

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… thinking it was an April’s fool joke. I remember thinking “ Surely after 5 years they couldn’t still make another one? And one that looks like an actual cartoon at that??
Awesome!!”
And then I tried to download those images to a floppy disk to take back home, which took a couple of sessions due to their immense size and the incredible speed of the internet back then.

A couple of them, yes. But I don’t think she’s in there; neither is Carla. I spotted Tami and Ron, Dave, Tim…

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Something I said on Facebook… Just wanted to share…

There is one part in the AG’s interview that I found intriguing.

"I’ve seen speculation online where people think this will slot in between Monkey Island 2 and Monkey Island 3, but then Murray, a character from the third game, is in the teaser. So how does the chronology work? When is it set?

Ron: How would you describe it, Dave? It’s kind of amorphous. It’s undefinable in a lot of ways.

Dave: And possibly not important, ultimately. Trying to assign specific numbers to the stories will become hard at some point."

We know the game will start right after MI2, at the amusement park.

Would it be possible that, in the park, Guybrush gets split in two for some reason, like, I don’t know, while going through the hall of mirrors… his reflection becomes alive because of a Voodoo spell or something.

Then, one the two Guybrush escapes and becomes the Guybrush from Curse, Escape and Tales.

The other Guybrush stays in the park, as a prisoner, for a long time. Then he finally escapes… and realizes that everything changed while he was in the park. People are much older and, mostly, there is another Guybrush living adventures and married to Elaine.

So basically, the game would be, at the same time, a sequel of MI2 and a sequel of Tales. It would be MI3a for one Guybrush and MI6 for the other one.

This would match the « Curse is still canon » and « the chronology being amorphous ».

It might be a stretch, it’s just a theory… Maybe they did something different but with a similar intention.

Ron and Dave are famous for their crazy universes and twists, so it could be possible.

What do you think?

And again, it’s just a silly theory, to have fun. I’m not saying I know exactly how the game is gonna be. I might be completely wrong. :slightly_smiling_face:

The upcoming Disney movie Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness will show us how there is a universe where CMI events happened, and how there is another universe, where CMI events never occured, but RMI events did :grin:

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After the game was announced, I speculated it will be a first person shooter :upside_down_face:

Discussion about the art style reminded me of a scene in Jeeves and Wooster where Corcoran’s rich uncle sees his painting for the first time :smiley:

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In regards to the art style; I wonder if Ron and co might consider adding a completely optional ‘low-res mode’ for those who prefer pixel art. One of the many things which I loved about Thimbleweed Park was the customisability options that it offered players, so it would be neat to see Return to Monkey Island offer a similar experience in player choice. A lot of the criticism of the art style which I’ve read online is due to the high-res backgrounds looking “too clean” and lacking in detail. That’s always been one of the advantages of lower resolution 2D backgrounds; it adds artificial detail to the scene.

I did a quick mock up of what a low-res filter may look like when applied to Return to Monkey Island (via pixelation and adding noise), along with the original screenshots for comparison…

Link.

Ultimately, I’m sure the game will be great regardless and that people will generally warm to the established art style, but I thought I’d put this theoretical optional low-res concept out there as a suggestion.

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Considering what Ron and Dave said in those Interviews, I don’t think they will add a feature like that.

I totally get that people might have dreamed about something else. I can only speak for me. I don’t make these games nor did I back then. It was Ron and his Team. They did it with state of the Art Grafiks. And it was awesome. I trust them do deliver again, something awesome.
Who am I to tell them how they have to do it? It’s not my vision they are working, it’s theirs.

If you want to have it super low res, I think if you set your Monitor to 640x480 you get that too ^^

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The aspect that I don’t understand is this strong dichotomy that I’ve observed all around: either jurassic low-res pixel art or modern geometric flat style.

There are a lot of different art styles to choose from and to create, but the authors intentionally discarded art styles similar to the one used for the previous installments of the franchise, as Ron said:

one of the things that I was looking for in the art for this game was to do something that hadn’t really been done before. The pixel art had been done before—we’re now thirty-five years from the last pixel art game version of it—[ The Curse of Monkey Island ] had its art style, [ Escape from Monkey Island ] had its own art style, [ Tales of Monkey Island ] had its own art style. So you really look at these games, and there have been more non-pixel games than there have been pixel games, at this point in time. And I wanted to embrace something new, and to try something new for the art style, and kind of continue that tradition, almost, of reexamining what the art was for [ Monkey Island ].

So, to me it seems that nobody asked the question “Which art style would convey that special dirty atmosphere of a pirate world?” because, to the authors, innovating was more important.

Random MI2 picture, because I like it.

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Is 640x480 super lo-res? Since when? :sweat_smile:

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Also, IMO you should only pick the art style after you have the script, i.e. a list of all the animations, cut scenes and puzzles. So you can do reasoning like “this scene would be too hard to paint and animate traditionally, better change style”. Instead, from the interview, it sounds like they decided the art style before everything else, as a matter of principle, not as practical considerations.

I also agree that “pixel art vs geometric style” is a false dicothomy. We could have had Peter Chan paintings like the original MI2 paintings, without the need to downscale them and retouch them. How cool would it have been? :slight_smile:

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I’m sorry, I meant 320X256 of course :smiley:

By the way, the flat geometric style has been already used in Lucas adventure games and back then nobody complained:

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Oh, right, Peter Chan. I almost forgot how important his contribution was to MI2.

I wouldn’t mind a Melee Island drawn in this style:

Source.

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wow, a very eclectic artist…

I’m repeating it like a mantra. MI2 was too much ahead of its time. As I wrote in the other thread, the handpainted backgrounds by peter chan and or steve purcell would have been my choice for RMI

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I admit that I would have prefered a different art style, too. An optional pixel art mode would also have been great. But I don’t complain.
When it comes to visual preferences, the opinions always differ very much.
It still looks like a LucasArts game - and not like one of the worse ones.
By the way, Melee Island seems to be recreated very true to original. Just think about how it was done in EMI.

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