It seems to me that you are using “idea”, “plot” and “secret” interchangeably, as if they were synonyms.
It’s my impression that Ron has disclosed only his original idea for the plot of MI3a. From my perspective, the secret is simply some information about the island that nobody knows, which makes it just a detail of the story.
Not necessarily, because I can’t rule out that the secret has already been shown to the players, even if it hasn’t been identified as such in the first two games.
For example, the secret could simply be “Monkey Island is the gate to hell”, which is something at least inferable from what happened in MI1.
That’s how I read it. This is his first post after closing his site because of the backlash, and he’s clearing up things that people may have expectations about.
Though most of his post seems to suggest he didn’t really have any details about anything for the game other than that one-line summary, and that all the details were going to be created and changed and developed if/when he made the game.
Right. That was actually my initial impression. Here, Ron is only talking about the original plot, the original ending, not about the secret.
But then, when he said he had abandoned that ending, this resonated with our previous discussion on whether he might have changed the original secret during development. And in my mind the concept of “ending” and of “secret” merged. But there is no reason to confuse the two.
So far all we know is that he changed the original ending.
I agree, but the secret is not a detail that needs to be defined for the plot of MI3a, having it been already defined when Ron worked on the first two games…
…assuming that Ron hasn’t changed it along the years.
I don’t even think that he was describing the ending. I think the equivalent would be if Ron had left Lucasfilm Games/LucasArts after the first Monkey Island game and talked about which vague ideas he’d had for a sequel and simply said “I didn’t have many ideas. Just that the notion that Guybrush would hunt for a fabled treasure and wind up within the now zombified LeChuck’s hidden fortress”.
One thing I found intriguing about Ron’s blog post is this sentence…
“Guybrush chases the demon pirate LeChuck…”
Note that he described LeChuck as a demon pirate. I guess that answers what form LeChuck would have taken in that original Monkey Island 3a. Whether or not Ron retains that concept for Return to Monkey Island remains to be seen, given that The Curse of Monkey Island already had a demon form for LeChuck.
Seems to lend credence to the secret being that Monkey Island has a passageway to hell. Pretty much only the ‘uncivilized’ yet civilized cannibals knew about and had access to the passage and the means to traverse it.
I have just read an article that comments on Ron’s last post, adding that “With this, we already know that Ron will not change the art style of Return to Monkey Island” (source), as if that could have been an option.
“Dear Ron, you have betrayed us and I therefore demand that you completely change the art style at this, the 11th hour of development, in order to cater to me and my personal tastes.”~ Anne E. Fann
Kind of, yes. There is Stan. There is Hell. There is a courthouse. There is favorite characters dying. LeChuck being really evil. With Ron as “visiting professor of Monkeyology” having contributed to the story arc of Tales and Dave Grossman acting as design director- I don’t get why you haven’t played Tales?
If you haven’t played Escape, skip it by all means.
There’s one thing I like and one I dislike about this idea. And Star Wars can be a good example.
Whenever something gets expanded, it inevitably becomes focused always on the same few characters, instead of the universe. Star Wars, however, does both. The movies are all about the Skywalker family, but then you had videogames like Jedi Knight which just told stories kinda unrelated to the main plot but set in the same universe.
And I’d love to see more of that.
Now, Monkey Island may not be the perfect example - take out Guybrush and LeChuck, and it’s “just” a golden age of piracy setting. So I suppose we’d need a strong tie-in with the main plot. But… a Herman Toothrot game? I’d play the out of it.
That’s a nice idea - but I’m not sure, if the characters in Monkey Island would work in their own games. The “supporting actors” in Monkey Island are very unique characters. For example Stan is funny in his annoying art. But playing him in his own game would drive me mad. Similar with Herman: He is a very interesting character, but I don’t think that a game with him as the main actor would/could work.
Why? Characters with limitations in their behavior have historically made good games.
I remember some good text adventures where you can only smell, others where you can only alter reality by changing a letter of object names, others (Lost Pig) where you can’t correctly interpret what you see…