So, your argument is "The art is terrible and he must have known it was terrible and possibly made it terrible intentionally for some sort of complex culture-war publicity reason because the only other possibility is that he's actually offended by people telling him he's a terrible person and and idiot and a moron and only capable of producing absolute garbage because no person today would be offended by that because I guess it happens a lot because internet"?

Honestly, I'm trying to say something about this argument that falls within the site's guidelines for discussion and I can't really figure out a way to.

the first four words of your attempted paraphrase of my post, or anything like them, do not exist in my post in any form. while reading my post you hallucinated that I was "one of them" and disapproved of the game's art style.

to clarify: I don't have any strong opinions about the art style of Return to Monkey Island, and while I have some thoughts about it, that entire line of discussion is uninteresting to me. I see no reason for the art style to have been chosen other than that those involved in making the game think it's a good fit for the game they're making. and it probably is! so please, if you're going to continue to engage with me on this topic, update your mental model of me and the position I'm taking on this, because you seem to have made some faulty assumptions, unsubstantiated by what I've posted here.

however, it should be obvious to anyone that the art style is both a departure from the original games, and their later sequels, and that it's such a stylistic departure that backlash should be fully expected. if Ron Gilbert really, truly did not expect backlash on the reveal of the art style, then either he is ridiculously naïve compared to how I would expect him to be, given his career and previous works... or the reveal and subsequent response, in which we all meant to feel warm and fuzzy and sympathetic to a legendary game designer who had anonymous fuckwads write mean things about him and his game on the Internet, was expected, and planned as part of making a broader audience care about a point-and-click adventure game being released in 2022, at a time where great lengths must be taken to get anyone to care about any game you make at all, as there's way too many options for not just games to play but places to give one's attention in general.

what do you think the net effects of this entire saga are going to be? do you think more people know and/or care about the release of this upcoming game, a game which is of a genre that is broadly (back) in decline (after a brief resurgence a decade or so ago), as a result of this debacle?

and almost more importantly: what was it about my post that made you think I disliked the art style of Return to Monkey Island? because it wasn't the words that said as much, because those words don't exist—yet something made you think I think the art style is bad! it might be useful to analyze what led you to this incorrect assumption.

So what I did is look up all the Monkey Island games. There are essentially 7. The Secret of, LeChuck's Revenge, The Curse of, Escape from, Tales of, and Special Editions of The Secret of and LeChuck's Revenge.

And I went look up screenshots of every game.

Consistency does not exist. The Secret of and LeChuck's Revenge are pretty similar, The Curse of looks very Dragon's Lair-esque/Don Bluthy, Escape from looks kind of ass to be honest. It's very "early 3D" and did not age well. Tales of is also 3D and is ok-ish. The remakes are also 3D, but also different from both Escape and Tales of.

And the character design of Guywood changes from the first two, to the third, to the fourth to the sidestory, to the Special Editions.

So any argument based on "consistency" is a red herring for something else. Consistency has not been a hallmark of this series, graphics-wise. This series has more departures than LAX.

I agree with everything you've written here 100%, and this is why I actually think the art style they've chosen for this new game is interesting in a tentatively good way, despite me having basically zero grounds upon which to judge art in general. they eschewed the sort of overwrought cartoon whimsy of the later games and Special Editions, and found an art style that allows much of the same level of expression you'd get from pixel art, while not being pixel art, if that makes sense. it's certainly a bold choice, but it kind of had to be, right?

this is why I never said anything about "consistency" and why I am empathetic to the plight of having to figure out how a Monkey Island game in 2022 should look, because as you discovered it somewhat surprisingly (for someone unfamiliar with the series) doesn't "draw itself" like one would expect for a revival of a retro franchise.

all of this reasoning is exactly why I don't understand why Internet backlash to the art style reveal was so allegedly unforeseen—it was a real "damned if you make it look like any of the old games, damned if you make it look completely different"-type situation.

I can't recall any real backlash about any of the other games though.

That's the issue. Just about every game looks different, but not until this one do people "care".

It literally has no real basis to base its look off of.

> however, it should be obvious to anyone that the art style is both a departure from the original games, and their later sequels, and that it's such a stylistic departure that backlash should be fully expected.

This here seems to be you talking about consistency. Saying that it doesn't match the older games. Well, which older game should it match? If anything, it not matching any of the older games would be more stylistically appropriate than matching any of the older games.

I never played the old Monkey Island games in their day because for some reason my dad had pretty much the rest of the SCUMM catalog except for Monkey Island and LOOM. but if I understand correctly, the transition to 3D wasn't as criticized because everyone was trying to figure out how to make games look good in 3D at that point, plus Ron Gilbert had left LucasArts at that point in time, so those games weren't as appreciated as the first two. the Remastered version of the first game was certainly met with mixed opinions though.

> Well, which older game should it match?

I already explained that I agree with you that this is the exact problem they faced when coming up with a look for the game. if they had picked any of the different styles, there would have been fans and detractors both. arguably, if they wanted to minimize backlash at the expense of everything else (such as broad marketability), they would have painstakingly recreated the art style of the first two games, with its weird disconnect between the cartoonish character sprites and full-screen realistic-looking closeup shots intact. so they did the almost certainly right thing and figured out a new style. but just because they chose the correct course of action doesn't mean that it wasn't going to frustrate just about everyone who looks at it and says to themselves, "well Monkey Island looks like many different things to be but it doesn't look like that." as a comparative example, see the reaction to the art style of the remaster of The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening. I haven't played it but I think it looks great—much like the Return to Monkey Island art style, it found a way to split the difference in making a new graphical style that still retains some of the "vagueness" of the old, hardware-limited style, while looking unique and good. as you can imagine, even though the Zelda franchise has had its fair share of totally different art styles over the years, there were many people who felt like this particular style doesn't jive with their franchise preconceptions. (I'm kind of at a loss for why I'm fully explaining all of this... this all seems pretty self-evident, for self-evident reasons.)

It really feels like you're defending the backlash though. As if it was a foregone conclusion.

But why? They've done this exact thing N times before, this is just the N+1 iteration of it.

You also keep positing alternatives they could have done and claiming that those alternatives would have been better. But it's all based off of your conjecture. You claim it's self-evident, but it's only self-evident in the way that is evident to yourself.

The backlash seems out of proportion to what was done.

> They've done this exact thing N times before, this is just the N+1 iteration of it.

I think what you might be missing is that "they" has been a different group of people each time since the original two games—this is the first Ron Gilbert Monkey Island game since LeChuck's Revenge. I believe Gilbert has also said that he's disregarding everything in Monkey Island "lore" that he wasn't around for the writing of. because of all of this, the franchise has a general identity problem, including a visual identity problem. most people who are excited to play Return to Monkey Island are not coming from a place of "well most of the rest of the games looked different from one another, let's see something new!" I think most people expected the franchise to either maintain its new "Remastered" look, or look closer to the original two games. personally I'm glad they chose neither!

the backlash only seems disproportionate due to reporting on it. "New Game In Franchise Looks Different From Old Games In Franchise, Many Anonymous Internet Users Vocally Upset About This, Like Everything Else, As Per Usual" doesn't really have the same emotional galvanization effect, see?

Except that the graphical style isn't even that dissimilar from MI1 and MI2 once you account for the obvious difference in resolution and detail. It's a lot less cartoonish than, e.g. Day of the Tentacle where Gilbert was also involved, that came out not long after MI2. So I'm really not getting what the complaints are about. MI1 and MI2 were never trying to look anywhere near photo-realistic, so what's the alternative those complainers have in mind?

fullscreen character closeups in the VGA release of the first game at least (never played the second one! keep meaning to) were most certainly more realistic-looking than anything else in the series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_of_Monkey_Island#/m...

but again I agree that the new style is actually a neat compromise between the old cartoony pixel art character sprites and something totally different, without going down the full-cartoon-whismy route that the later titles and Remastered games took. part of the charm of the first game is how expressive the characters without being too over-the-top cartoony like DoTT or Sam & Max. the new style looks like it should be able to recapture this feeling quite well!

again, the complaints are stupid, but should have been very easy to expect, because pleasing everyone—especially when it comes to nostalgia—is basically impossible.

One might argue that you need realism in a character closeup more than anywhere else, to avoid falling into the uncanny valley. But even then, these are not trying to be actually photorealistic. They could be described as painting-like, not unlike so many other scenes in 1980s and early-1990s games.

yeah, I just always assumed it was showing off the 256-color capabilities of VGA for that version—the original CGA art is more cartoony-looking.

  > tl;dr I can't understand getting mad at the Internet for being the Internet 
  > in 2022, it will never get better, if anything it will only get worse [...]

If I may provide an alternate tl;dr to your comment: "People are being absolute rude, disrespectful assholes; which is absolutely fine. Ron Gilbert asked for this abuse by making things. The real issue is that he disabled comments on his own blog, where people should be firmly allowed and encouraged to shit on his work."

There would have been some degree of angry backlash to any art style that wasn't a meticulous recreation of MI 1 and 2 (a decision that would have also been criticized, but probably much more politely). I don't know why it's supposedly predictable that this particular art style would receive this degree of hostility.

Just because bullying is common doesn't mean people should get used to it

what alternative course of action do you suggest instead? I don't understand why you think people should continue to be surprised by wholly predictable reactions contingent upon inherently flawed human behavior.

hopefully your solution isn't simple moral posturing that Things Should Be Better, because that might feel good to say but as a solution it's pretty obviously untenable.

regardless: either Ron Gilbert is, somehow—even after DeathSpank(!)—hopelessly naïve with regards to the state of anonymous shit-flinging on the Internet in 2022, or all of this moralizing and othering of Toxic Entitled Gamers (which we've definitely never seen deployed before!) is part of the PR plan for this game, to make people feel sympathy/empathy for a celebrated, legendary game designer being forced to read mean words on the Internet about something he made, as though this is some great moral travesty of our times and not just the baseline level of Internet interaction one should expect by now. again: why is any of this a huge surprise to anyone involved? why is Ron Gilbert taking any of this personally instead of just taking the tack of "lol well this is what I wanted to make so fuck off if you don't like it"?

either way, sad state of affairs, especially given that I'm looking forward to the game's release regardless. hopefully the lesson everyone learns from this is that people act like fuckwads on the Internet and there really isn't anything you can do about it aside from refraining from looking at it... which is a lesson I thought we all learned a long time ago.

presumably the last time he made a game people weren't such huge dicks about it... no big deal but modern gamers cause a chilling effect in the industry by behaving this way, inevitably. Creative professionals /don't/ have to get used to being punching bags.. they're exactly the type to take their toys and go home. That's what happens when you do something for love (and take a pay cut to do it).

The hateful gamers will just have to continue to enjoy loveless games made by companies who know that a 100mm budget is table stakes to protect them from their customers. The passionate makers will find something else to love; that's their power.

the current top comment in this comments section is also decrying the Entitled, Toxic Gamers that are the cause of all that is Bad and Wrong in the world of video games today—have you ever noticed how convenient of a recurring boogeyman this is?

"gamers are the worst, they suck and are terrible. no, not you, of course—you're not a gamer, you're a Cultured Video Game Enjoyer, just like me, the writer of this Kotaku article. you and I are different from these vile and horrible "gamers", who aren't being misogynist or racist today but you just know any day now they'll be back to doing that too. how we hate them! now anyway, the latest vile act that these abject villains have done is make Ron Gilbert sad by writing mean words about an unreleased video game based upon trailer footage, on the Internet. imagine! being mean to Ron Gilbert, celebrated adventure game designer! the nerve of these gamers. how we hate them! now, Cultured Video Game Enjoyer, what do you think about the art style of Return to Monkey Island? do you love it? answer carefully, because the only people who don't love it are those people we hate, those untermenschen 'gamers'! now answer: how great is Return to Monkey Island's art style?"

don't you find the rise of this kind of rhetoric over the past 15 years or so, and all of the moralizing it entails, to be at the very least curious? "othering" a broad, diverse population of people by strawmanning them as though they were a political party or something, generalizing based upon anonymous Internet comments, an eternal beast of a boogeyman who is always lurking in the shadows just out of sight, only to emerge in the public consciousness now and again as the driving force of moral outrage that you should definitely feel very strongly about, because as we all know there is no greater evil in the world than typing mean words into an Internet-connected text field and clicking "Submit", right? and it always seems to happen whenever somebody wants their personal and/or game's profile to be raised, whenever it sure would be nice for all involved if more sympathetic Cultured Video Game Enjoyers would point more of their eyeballs at the person and/or product being promoted, on grounds of moralizing against the uncultured gamer swine, and above all, proving that you're not one of them.

idk for me after 15 years of this shit it's pretty old by now and that kind of appeal-to-emotion persuasion doesn't faze me in the slightest anymore. some people said some mean words on the Internet to a guy who's going to release a video game later this year, and it made the guy sad. that's a bummer, but I just can't bring myself to get worked up in the way the Video Game Journalism Industry wants me to—I'm kind of done being emotionally manipulated by everyone in that sphere. I don't need to "identify as" either a "gamer" or a Cultured Video Game Enjoyer to enjoy video games, so it's not hard to reject the attempted pseudo-political cultural bifurcation here by rejecting the whole dichotomy and saying "lol video games amirite"—and I recommend others do the same!

I dunno why you think demanding that people can't feel hurt on the internet is any less overbearing than condemning people who are mean on the internet.

I'm not sure where I issued such a demand, but, it should be obvious that it is easier to learn to deal with the existence of negative Internet shitposting than it is to try to morally posture it into nonexistence, despite the latter feeling good.

You're confusing disgust with surprise. One can predict abuse and also not enjoy it and decide to close the comments down after you get too much of it.