(Spoilers) Getting the best ending in the game

Yeah, and it’s also a pretty safe bet to follow it because people really, really like the Hero’s Journey.

Going through it, Monkey Island hits almost all of the beats of the Hero’s Journey…

The Call to Adventure: “I want to be a mighty pirate”
Supernatural Aid: Voodoo Priestess
Crossing the First Threshold: Bridge Troll
The Road of Trials: The Three Trials
The Meeting with the Goddess: Elaine
Atonement with the Father: LeChuck
Apotheosis: Finding LeChuck’s ghost ship
The Ultimate Boon: Defeating LeChuck
Master of Two Worlds: Guybrush and Elaine together at the end

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Yes and trope- and characterwise you pretty much can put Star Wars and Monkey Island next to each other and see all the paralells.

Thanks for sharing the details, “The Hero with a Thousand Faces” has been on my to read list pretty much since the dawn of men.

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Another very, very popular story template that is often used is the “Lester Dent Formula” (Lester Dent was a popular pulp fiction writer in the 1920s-50s)… always fun trying to spot if a writer has been using any of these kinds of templates!

I´d like to point out for anyone following this discussion that I absolutly don´t think that this a bad thing. Not even a sign of uncreativity, there is a ton of different and exicting things you can do with these basic templates. I think of it like with music where there is so much you can do just with variatons of 8 notes that you can pick from.
It´s just these are things that work and I don´t immediatly call out a writer who obviously reaches for these premises conciously or unconciously. Constructing something interesting out these things is still a lot harder than it looks.

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Also, even if a writer has never heard of these templates before, they will still often use them subconsciously, because they are just so common and pervasive in stories.
It’s often best to know these templates so that you are at least aware when you’re using them, and to know when to use them or when to subvert or avoid them.

The music analogy is good because everyone uses the incredibly common major and minor scales… and every so often you might want to use something a bit more exotic, but you still normally need to know them and how they work.

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I´ve been thinking music mainly because of the Stairway To Heaven trail and how ridicioulous that was to anyone with even a basic understanding of music (it was like three consecutive notes and everything else was totally different). And I´m confident that the basic plot templates in fiction have been brought up in plagiarism trials before.

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I did need to let TWP’s ending sink in for a while, but then concluded that it fit the game and its tone. It also didn’t come as much of a surprise for me since there was more and more foreshadowing. The fact that this ending doesn’t go out with a bang, but that you basically play it through, getting individual endings and some kind of closure for each character and then eventually venture into the wireframe world, made the big difference which made it a satisfying experience for me.

MI2’s ending totally hit me by surprise. I had really grown attached to the game universe and characters over the course of two games and the possible interpretation in the lines of “And then I woke up and it was all just a dream” was really hard to swallow for me at first. Meanwhile, I’ve grown to accept it by considering it an open and ambiguous ending leading up to a so-far unrealised sequel. But back then I wasn’t aware that Monkey Island was envisioned by Ron as a trilogy, and even though I saw the ambiguities such as Guybrush not being aware of what had happened, the glow in Chuckie’s eyes and Elaine’s cutscene, I still took everything as “final”. Honestly, even nowadays I would still feel too emotionally attached to the atmosphere, world and characters of MI to be “taken out of the ride” and see all of it collapse in the very end. :wink: Not to say that I didn’t grow attached to TWP’s atmosphere and characters, but the level of (self-)awareness and “acceptance” the game’s characters eventually had, made me emphatize as well, and the difference that I still had a chance to walk around freely and eventually decide when to “pull the plug” instead of forcefully taken out of the setting, made the ending work out and feel self-containted for me. This is what most distinguishes it from MI2’s ending in my opinion.

While I think your approach and some of the ideas are interesting, the thing about suggesting “more elegant ways to pull of this kind of ending” is that it can easily come across as the kind of criticism the devs might take offense in. Even though, as @RonGilbert explained, endings change as you write, I can’t imagine at all that the devs put not enough thought into the way the game ends or the level of “meta-ness”. The ending it has is exactly how they decided according to their own reasoning. Of course, I only know about the game’s development from reading the blog posts, but those really give me the impression that nothing in this game is random, coincidental or not well thought out. Even in case the ending has only been decided on late in the development process, in my opinion it does match the theme of what was happening. However, it would be interesting to know how many changes the devs still made to the game afterwards?

Wow, this is really interesting to know! As I have written above, for a long time I found MI2’s ending to be quite drastic as I hadn’t seen it coming at all and later during the numerous re-plays found just a few hints that I would see as what I have called “foreshadowing” earlier, the most I can remember now being the tunnel locations, closed SOMI street and “lost parents” in the final chapter, which are only vague, especially when I compare it to TWP. Did you want MI2’s ending to have exactly that effect or, given that you hadn’t been driven by panic and had more time before shipping, would you still have made more changes to the game to reflect or foreshadow the events of the ending, as in TWP? Was there actually anything you have concluded or wanted to do differently as a game developer from the controversy surrounding MI2’s ending and you were now applying during the development of TWP, or would too much consideration for “streamlining” make you feel like having too little liberties as a creator?

…and yeah, asking Ron Gilbert this question feels almost as taboo as walking up the library staircase or finding chainsaw gas in Maniac Mansion, but after I have done both of that in TWP, I might as well dare… Ron, could you please tell us more about this inital crappy ending to MI2? :slight_smile:

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You will probably tar and feather me for the following, but I can’t resist to answer. :wink:

Yes, but then you have to revise the whole story. And in these cases the writer has an ending in mind, even if it changed at some point.

Or let me say it in other words: The writer has to stay focused on a goal and he has to make sure that all parts of the story are leading towards this goal. (This prevents him from unnecessary and boring subplots, by the way.)

In my (own!) perception the murder takes two thirds of the game. Solving the murder is the part of the story that I remember the most. So to me(!) it seemed important. I know that the murder was only a “hook” (don’t know a proper English word for that :)). So why haven’t you kept the murder part short(er) and extended the story on the will, the factory, Ray and Reyes “true” stories, …? For example you could have cut two of the tron machines, so Willy is arrested faster - and we all know that a fast solution of a murder is (very) suspicious. :slight_smile: Or let the player do the murder in a way that the player knows clearly that he is the murderer - in this case the agents could investigate against the player - that would be very interesting to play - Ok, Ok, now I’m brainstorming … :slight_smile:

And here comes the part where you can bring in the tar and the feathers (if you haven’t done that already): :wink:

Maybe this is the reason why a lot of people hated the end of MI2? :slight_smile: In this case it would be another example of why you should have an end in mind when starting a story…

Yes, I agree with you. It’s a creative process. And sometimes you have to throw away the end. But the rest of the novel/story has to fit. I know that from my own experience: Every time I changed the ending of one of my stories, my readers don’t liked them - even if I was convinced that the new ending would be better. I had some of theses stories buried in a drawer (and not published). After a few years I read them again and I must admit: The readers were right. The new endings doesn’t fit to the rest of the story. That is one of the reasons I have an end in mind when I start a new story - and with these stories I had only positive reactions. :slight_smile:

There are several techniques to keep you on the right track - @Paul mentioned the Hero’s Journey. You don’t have to use these things. But then you have to be a very good writer or you need a lot of luck. :slight_smile:

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Am I the only one who liked the endings from TWP and MI2? :slight_smile:

I think the ending of TWP was unique and, yes, fresh. I know no other adventure or film or book that has a similar ending. (Hints are welcome. :))

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I’m fascinated by this process that involves a continuous reshaping of the story.

From one point of view it seems the most natural creative process possible, on the other hand it seems to me that the writer must educate himself not to be attached to the first ideas that he had, and reaching this goal seems more the result of a (less emotional) disciplined methodology. Or maybe the bits that were discarded were less loved than the ones that substituted them.

You have already shown some of the rooms that you cut from TWP in your very interesting blog post “Cutting” but it was focused on rooms while I was interested to know which parts of the original story you discarded and changed along the road?

I liked the MI2 ending because I perceived it simply as a cliffhanger.

I didn’t have any problems with the ending of Thimbleweed Park, because it was clear well before that point that it would have been probably a mix between a “Trapped in TV Land” an “All Just a Dream” ending, which are quite common tropes in movies, books and games.

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It’s just not the way the creative process works. I don’t know how to convince you otherwise. But it’s the way it happens.

I’m not saying you start with no idea where it ends, but I’m saying you let things go where they need to go once you start writing. You would be crazy not to. And yes, when you change things, you go back and rewrite and rewrite what happen before. Or sometimes you throw out entire sections you write before. It’s how it works.

Creating something is messy and sloppy and drives you fucking crazy. It’s not a straight line. You write and rewrite and fix and edit and edit and edit.

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You call that solving? You did a very bad job, Columbo would turn in his grave! :stuck_out_tongue:

#FreeWilly

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Well if JRR Tolkien is to be believed he wrote The Lord Of The Rings without a script or even an basic outline and absolutly no idea how exactly it would end until he was more than halfway through with writing the actual book. Now you could argue that it really has a lot of endings some of which are rather predictable and that there is tons of tangents really many many landscape descriptions and that Tolkien wasn´t really an author but a linguist who wrote stories to have context for his made up languages…but then again I hear that book turned out to be rather poplular.

Twin Peaks and Breaking Bad where both very far into their respective airing airing histories when they figured out how they would wrap up. Twin Peaks got their murderer due to the fact that their set decorator was accidently visible in an early episode and so they had to intigrate him and Breaking Bad got a resolve for an arc because a fan remembered an early episode and reminded the writers about it, so they resolved it that way.

Stephen King keeps quoting his friend John Irving who says he likes to write the endings first and then find out how to get there. To that King always adds that he finds that boring and does never start with a clear ending in mind. It´s just not his approach. Personally I have read most of King´s early books. On the other hand while I´m sure Iriving is a fine author, I read the Cider House Rules and that was about it.

What´s my point? I don´t know I didn´t plan to have one when I started writing this post. The End.

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I agree.

Citing buzz and excitement, you made me think at a related phenomenon that happens when a new product is put on the market.

I’m referring to the “hype cycle”, that begins whenever a new product is announced and then produced and marketed. While the cycle has been created to describe technologies, it can sometimes be applied to several kind of different products.

In this case the hype cycle could be applied to the experiences of both the developers and the players of a videogame. Here it is:

The “peak of inflated expectations” is probably the most dangerous psychological phenomenon for a developer. :stuck_out_tongue:

There is also a “law” that says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.”, that in my opinion can be used in this case for Thimbleweed Park as well. This “law” should tell the developers that some kinds of projects require time to be fully appreciated and purchased. :slight_smile:

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Shhh, be careful I´m not sure charts are a very popular thing here:

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That’s new to me.

I think that one point of your post could be that writing a good story or a successful book/series is not necessarily the consequence of a formal writing method and that each author has to find his own creative process, which includes not having a process at all.

Yeah, I remember that post. For Ron: that’s not a chart. It’s a red wiggle.

I’m a bit confused why you quoted me here, as this was something I had written in response to @Bluddy’s thoughts about an “elegant way to pull off this kind of ending, without getting excessively meta”.

If it wasn’t clear, I liked the ending from TWP! I just needed to let it sink in at first - which is not a bad thing at all. As a matter of fact I think it’s great if a book, movie or computer game keeps you thinking and engaged even after its ending. And the same goes even more for Monkey 2. Even though I found the ending unexpected, I’m still not sure what I really think about it. In order to figure that out, it would be the best to simply wait for MI3a, then I’ll see the big picture and where the ending of MI2 fits in. Imagine the Star Wars series ending with Empire! Although that’s the best movie, it doesn’t provide a satisfying end to the saga, does it? :wink:

Well I can´t exactly say I love the endings of Monkey Island 2 and Thimbleweed Park, I have no serious problems with them either way. I´m not even sure if some stories always need great endings. Sometimes I just enjoy a good story and then it has to end somehow. Just think of all those games that have multiple endings. Yes everyone can choose his or her favourite ending but people then get curious what the authors consider “canon”. It´s really hard to please everybody if you have said everything and then just need things to wrap up and end somehow, sometimes I really couldn´t care less if the whole picture was generally satisfying. Or to speak in the mighty words of the Simpsons:

Homer: Save a guy’s life, and what do you get? Nothing! Worse than nothing! Just a big, scary rock!

Bart: Hey, don’t knock the head, man.

Marge: Homer, you don’t do things like that to be rewarded! The moral of the story is that a good deed is its own reward!

Bart: But we got a reward, the head is cool!

Marge: Well, then maybe the moral is, no good deed goes unrewarded.

Homer: Wait a minute! If I hadn’t written that nasty letter we wouldn’t have gotten anything.

Marge: Mmmm… then I guess the moral is, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

Lisa: Maybe there is no moral, Mom.

Homer: Exactly! It’s just a bunch of stuff that happened.

Marge: But it certainly was a memorable few days.

Homer: Amen to that.

all credit goes to George Meyer the writer of this classic episode.

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[quote=“Someone, post:49, topic:714, full:true”]Am I the only one who liked the endings from TWP and MI2? :slight_smile:

I think the ending of TWP was unique and, yes, fresh. I know no other adventure or film or book that has a similar ending. (Hints are welcome. :))
[/quote]

Yes, you’re the only one who liked the endings to those games, and so am I.

I only had one problem with the ending to Monkey Island 2, and it’s a problem that would take quite a while to reveal itself. To me, the ending was a clear cliffhanger, and as the “inevitable” Monkey Island 3 became less and less likely, that’s when I started getting disappointed. It would be like if the Star Wars movies ended with Empire Strikes Back. LucasArts eventually did make a third Monkey Island game, and while I generally liked it, the game really didn’t feel like a proper sequel to Monkey Island 2. I still enjoy Monkey Island 2 in its entirety, but the ending always reminds me that Guybrush’s fate is perpetually trapped in limbo due to the realities of real-world business and IP law.