New short interview by CNET.
No additional details were given about the game, but some Ron’s answers are interesting.
For example, Ron has defined the ending of MI2 “a huge cliff hanger” and also:
While Return to Monkey Island does start right after Monkey 2 ends, it’s not a “sequel” to Monkey 2 either.
It also says, “Return to Monkey Island is set for release towards the end of this year.”
Mmm, that seems to rule out summer, unless it’s just conjecture on the writer’s part.
Oh, I missed that! That’s useful to know.
Was Monkey 2 a sequel to Monkey 1 actually? Ok, it’s titled “Monkey Island 2”, but it has a story of its own. 
Well, both. MI2 has its own story, but comes after MI1, so it can be considered a sequel (and the fact that Guybrush is telling the same tale about LeChuck to the pirates in the intro, it’s because… it’s a sequel 
)
Well, all other/most of the other MI games are introducing LeChuck and/or the story in a similar way. They don’t start from scratch.
NEW interview, this time with Rex Crowle, the art director of RtMI!
Finally, a (NEW) interview to Ron and Dave for German fans!
(but unfortunately almost the entire article is behind a paywall 
)
If anybody has a subscription to the magazine and wants to report in the main RtMI discussion the juicy bits, that would be much appreciated. 
Added in this post 17 days later because Discourse says so:
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NEW German article by Gamestar, in which Executive Producer Craig Derrick provides new information about languages:
I found Ron’s answer to this question interesting (Google Translate).
GamersGlobal: Finally, I would like to know if you particularly like any of the characters in Return to Monkey Island and if so, why. Except Guybrush, please!
Ron Gilbert: To me it’s not a single character, it’s Chuck’s crew. In the last few games it was more of an abstract group - there was Le Chuck, and then his crew. But for Return to Monkey Island, we took the time to bring it to life. It’s now real characters you interact with, you solve puzzles related to them. This is my pick: Chuck’s crew, which is actually made up of people.
It seems that a new wave of interviews, in different languages, has been unleashed!
Multiplayer.it has chosen to mix personal commentary and the classic back-and-forth interview format:
I have a hunch that other interviews will appear soon.
Oh, wow… even Le Monde! 
Here are some more.
[Translated to English with Google Translate]
[Translated to English with Google Translate]
The graphic style in particular is controversial among fans.
Ron Gilbert : Everything we do will polarize the fans, including the puzzles, the story, the user interface and the art style. A game like Monkey Island has stuck in people’s memories for so long that everyone has a very personal idea of it. Any change to it will split opinions, we knew that from the start of development.
It was therefore particularly important to us that we believe in our game. And we do, we are all convinced of “Return to Monkey Island”. We love the graphic style, we love the interface and we love the story. This belief ultimately creates a good game that hopefully others will like too.
Kickstarter games and early access games often implement feedback from active players. If you’d followed the fan community’s preferences for Return to Monkey Island so strictly, the finished game might have looked different.
Ron Gilbert : Don’t let a community body develop a game, it can only go wrong. Everyone has different opinions, different skills and their own perception. Games designed by communities can only end in chaos. But that doesn’t mean you should ignore people. We also did a lot of playtesting for Return to Monkey Island, so we invited people in and listened to their feedback. We then made design decisions on that basis.
There’s a wonderful “Simpsons” episode in which Homer is asked to design a car. It illustrates perfectly: You need someone who has a vision. But this vision should also be able to be modified based on feedback and data. You certainly can’t develop a game in a vacuum, but you also can’t just leave the game design in the hands of the community and say “do it!”
OzzieMonkey: “I’ve taken the liberty of writing out text for a video interview with Ron that was done by Rock, Paper Shotgun but was locked by a paywall. There’s some further detail of the hint system and confirmation of how it works as a mechanic within the fantasy of the game world as well as hints to what the story is (he’s still vague enough about it but it’s a great tease)”
So Ron, what has it been like for you returning to this world?
It’s been a lot of fun! It’s been 30 years since I really immersed myself in that world and it’s a lot of fun to sort of get back to it. I was a little worried at the beginning about what that was going to be like, but it is just like a comfortable glove at some point, you know when I started working on it with Dave, we just fell into it so quickly.
Awesome! So what can you tell us about the story?
Well, the story is…we kinda call it unfinished business. You know Guybrush, in the first game even though it’s called The Secret of Monkey Island, he never actually found the secret, so this game is really about him finding the real secret to Monkey Island, and I think it’s also unfinished business for Dave and me as designers, because we never disclosed what the secret was, and you know Monkey Island 2 ended on this bizarre cliffhanger, so for us it’s unfinished business and for Guybrush it’s unfinished business.
Yeah we were talking before about this huge cliffhanger at the end of 2, so where in the Monkey Island timeline does this land?
So the game starts right after Monkey Island 2 ends…and then it just gets bizarre from there.
Can you explain what kind of bizarre things we’re gonna see?
No, you’ll have to buy the game (laughs)
I love that! So one thing that was talked about on the panel was this idea of puzzle creation and adventure games are known for their challenging puzzles. Will Return to Monkey Island follow in its predecessor’s footsteps, or what kind of puzzles are we gonna see, what should we expect?
Well it’s definitely a point and click game. There’s a type of puzzle that really inhabits a point and click adventure, so we’re definitely doing that. I think that times have changed, players have changed, we’re different people, we’ve changed, and I think adventure games need to change with that. And it’s not about making thongs simpler, but I think it’s how you design puzzles. You need to be a bit clearer about things with people, and there are people who don’t know point and click, don’t know Monkey Island, and you need to kinda ease people into that stuff. One thing we’ve added to the game is a hintbook, so if you are stuck you can look at the hintbook. I mean these days, when you get stuck on a puzzle, you don’t puzzle theough it for a month and talk to your friends about it, you just run to Google. We didn’t want people to leave our game to do that, so we added a hintbook, and it’s part of the fantasy of the game, it’s actually a physical object that Guybrush has in his inventory. And you have to go get the hintbook, it’s not something that’s just given to you. So we hope that people who do want hints use our hint system, because we can be very clever about the hints, we know where you are and what things you’ve tried, so we can give you hints that are very tailored to the specific issue that you have.
As someone who’s had a relationship with Monkey Island for so long, how has your approach changed from the older games to the new one? What’s different?
I think creatively, design and story-wise, not much has changed at all. We start with a high concept for the thing, down to the individual parts of the game, then below that the character arcs and below that the puzzles. We’ve always done that with games and I don’t think that part has really changed.
Only confirmations, but it’s a nice interview:
Editor’s note: This article is careful not to spoil a single puzzle, joke, or unannounced character reveal. One plot-specific reveal, which Gilbert and Grossman were happy to announce, lands near the end of the article.
Photo © Sam Machkovech / Art Technica
What is the big revelation about the plot? I’ve only seen a meta revelation, namely that we are going to discover the original 1990 secret!
