Thoughts on visual style?
What does everyone think of the direction Monkey Island is taking? In a gaming industry full of sequels, I see this as another dead horse. The series really should have ended after MI2 or even MI3. MI 4 was the bastard child of the series and sadly I see more MI 4 in this game in terms of visual style than anything else. I absolutely loathed the 3d style of MI4. Does every game try and see how much they can screw up Guybrush? I absolutely hate the way he looks. I'm not sure where there was a need for another game in this series. Sure many players fondly think of the series and wish games could be made like the good old days but.... not like this... not like this?!
From the trailer I see that Dom is aboard for voice which is nice but Lechuck just seems....off.
I don't really approve of what I've seen but I'm just one person. There are countless others which are already singing praise so I'm sure you'll be able to turn a profit. Just my 2 cents.
From the trailer I see that Dom is aboard for voice which is nice but Lechuck just seems....off.
I don't really approve of what I've seen but I'm just one person. There are countless others which are already singing praise so I'm sure you'll be able to turn a profit. Just my 2 cents.
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I personally like the art and visual style of MI2 the best by far, but I'm also a realist in that a for-profit company is not going to make a game in that style (from a graphics or SCUMM standpoint) again. While the visuals at first look most like MI4, just from the previews and previous Telltale games I expect it will be far superior to MI4 in pretty much every possible way.
That said, MI4 definitely had its moments...it didn't completely fall apart for me until the whole Monkey Kombat crap at the end.
So, I'm wary.
One other thing I'm wary of is something that I've not seen in Telltale's Wallace and Gromit, and also way back in MI4, and that's cinematic transitions.
Remember, if you will, back when LeChuck's ship arrived in MI1. The scene was scrollable, so you came out of the bar, and walked across - giving us a cinematic reveal of the ghost ship sitting in the harbour.
In Monkey Island 2, we had the greatest transition scene of them all - the approach to the Voodoo Lady's house. The journey through the swamp as the music dynamically grew or shrank depending which way you were paddling, the in-key flair when the jaw brought you up and the cross-fade between the outer room and the inner room - amazing. No, incredible.
In Monkey Island 4, when the Scumm bar changes, we just get plonked straight at the scene - effectively blowing all its cinematic tension and reveal, because there was none.
And in Wallace & Gromit, we now just have stilted cuts again between shots, and even between locations. Travelling from West Wallaby Street to town is a jump cut - as if they're just changing camera angle, when it really needed some kind of a transition to mentally tell us that we're changing locales.
I only hope that the new Monkey Island games don't suffer this same shot cut fate.
1. I'm not entirely sure that Guybrush looks like Guybrush, or LeChuck like LeChuck. (Elaine looks a bit too young, too.) Moreover, I'm not sure if this is possible to do on the Telltale engine.
2. Beautifully stylized artwork doesn't age. I think the Telltale engine worked really well for Strong Bad, Wallace and Gromit and Sam and Max, but I'm not sure it works for Bone or Monkey Island. I think those two particular franchises need some filter to make it more cartoony. I know 3D is much easier to work with, so if I was developing something like Monkey Island I would put some basic placeholder art (in 3D) and when the game was good enough and everything was where you needed it to be, I'd replace it with beautifully drawn 2D paintings, giving you the advantages of 3D with the power and timeless stylization of a good 2D painting. Think of a Vampyre Story, only on an episodic scale. Two examples of games that haven't aged a single day due to their stylization are Grim Fandango and Curse of Monkey Island.
3. This one is inevitable, but there's going to be that lack of freedom. What I mean is that because the games are episodic by nature and thus small in size, the feel that there's a lot going on in the world - the large islands/freedom - is going to go away. And I'm thinking you can fix that with the art style. I haven't got a single clue on whether this has happened or not (I will once the game hits the servers, ho ho!).
Anyways I'm still really, really excited for this game, but maybe (for the future) Telltale should try figuring out a way to make a small episodic game that, at the same time, has that stylized Monkey Island look without compromising size too much. I wouldn't mind experiencing Monkey Island as some sort of compromise between the staple Telltale style and CMI (Monkey 1 + 2, as beautiful as they were, just didn't have the technology to make their art-styles timeless).
Just my (somewhat baseless) thoughts.
Well Guybrush looked very young and bland in the first two games, and to some part in the fourth, I did not like the beanstalk look of guybrush of the third game however.
After all guybrush is supposed to be so young that no one takes him seriously being a pirate and all. (One of the reasons why he tried to grow a beard in the second part)
Actually from what I have seen guybrush looked older in this part than in the others!
MI1 and MI2 are the definitive monkey islands. the other two were good, but were non-Ron Gilbert and just took big liberties with the style and concept. i've never been thrilled with the tall lanky guybrush and the squatty lechuck, i wish they'd stay true to the track and proportions that the first two were clearly leading. they had obvious comedy to them, but they weren't full blown disney cartoons, there was a lot of dark atmospheric imagery and the characters and scenery were drawn with precision and detail and proportion, not big silly caricatures.
Not that it's a bad thing.
http://files.telltalegames.com/monkeyisland/talesofmi_mightypirate.jpg
The ship in the background looks downright horrible, the lighting is plain, the colors are washed out, character models look like plastic toys. Sorry Telltale, look at other adventure games on the market, you'll notice the difference.
Even MI4 looked better, at least the backgrounds were nicely rendered.
HUGE disappointment.
The backgrounds in EMI where still photos of a rendered environment. Difference.
The graphics TellTale uses always had few polygons.
As a graphic adventure lover, I don't mind so much.
But, in this case, I have to consider that you're not far from the truth.
Let me explain, companies which still make graphic adventures have forgotten one important thing: when the old glories were released, they were competitive under every P.O.V. including graphics.
Now, since this is a GREAT day for me, which I will remember for a long time (thanks again TellTale!), I can't be disappointed.
But it is true that TOMI graphics already look old.
I absolutely love the character meshes (expecially Guybrush), but I admit that, as I saw the ship in the background, I thought something like "What the hell, that looks ugly."
For now, be happy for things as they are, this is a great day.
I hope they're going to improve the graphics in the future, to be competitive again.
I still think the new Guybrush looks outstanding in both 2D and 3D, though.
I know they don't use pre-rendered or drawn backgrounds, but if they're using 3D, they need to do this RIGHT. If they can't do it properly, why deliver us a mediocre-looking game? To make money on people's nostalgia and release one rushed product after another?
You know, look at games being recently released... Also made by small studios that are probably much more poor than Telltale.
For example? The Book of Unwritten Tales:
http://www.pcgames.de/aid,654761/The-Book-of-Unwritten-Tales-Neue-Screenshots-zum-skurrilen-Adventure/PC/Bildergalerie/?menu=browser&mode=normal&entity_id=-1&image_id=870998&browsersize=fullscreen
Vampyre Story:
http://www.gamershell.com/static/screenshots/7818/278329_full.jpg
So Blonde:
http://games.softpedia.com/screenshots/8-5195_2.jpg
PS: The backgrounds in the screenshots you posted really look just the same as I am used by other telltale games.
Especially that Vampire Story is amazing, god i love that game, just that one screenshot there, it has so much detail, so much depth
But, I have nothing against still backgrounds...
Agreed, but the writing and puzzle design were horrible.
I mean, look at Monkey Island 4. Even that looks ten times better. Though I never liked its style the backgrounds and characters are way better designed and more detailed.
And about that hardware-demand-argument: Today even a three-year-old computer should be able to render MI4's backgrounds in real-time at a decent speed without breaking a sweat.
My recurring wet dream is a resurrection of Threepwood and LeChuck in the style of LeChuck's Revenge. Its character designs don't suffer these wacky looks - which in my eyes even lessens the impact of Monkey's wacky verbal humour - and its backgrounds create a rich spectrum of moods. Not only from wacky to wacky - but from wacky to gloomy to graceful.
I see you are blind indeed good sir.
I really like the animation so far, too.
But showing the perhaps worst set of the whole game really doesn't count.
´http://www.tentakelvilla.de/mi4/mi4.html
It was the first screenshot that came up in google. And it was mainly for the claim that the characters in EMI were 10 times more detailed which is undoubtly wrong.
http://www.adventuregamers.com/article/id,135
Btw, all of you who compare ToMI graphics to MI4 should really play that game again
I really dislike this one for instance. I hope that this is not a final game screenshot.
http://www.adventuregamers.com/images/db/10150.jpg
I would have hoped for a somehow different style or more complexity&life in a scene. Is the style influenced in a way of what the Wii is able to hardware wise (polygon or texture wise)?
This is a screenshot i like.
http://www.adventuregamers.com/images/db/10147.jpg
In this screenshot, Guybrush looks ok, but the vessel is really awful...
More polygons needed, Telltale! Smooth things up!
But again the question to TTG: If this is limited due to the Wii, will there be a version for the PC with higher texture resolution for instance?