Zeusthecat

The Big LucasArts Playthrough

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I keep wondering if DOTT might be held back with some intention to give it the HD facelift treatment, since its got to be one of the most in demand titles in the library.

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What I would love is that this is a precursor to new games being made.  A revival, a remake, a reboot, whatever.  I very much doubt that it will happen, but I'd love to see it.

 

Really I just want another Dig game.

If it's licensing to the original creators (or most of 'em) like Tales of Monkey Island or Grim Fandango remaster, I would be cool with that, but I doubt any kind of sales at this point would influence that enough.

 

I sure wouldn't want that special edition team coming back with their outsourcing mentality. Too much rush work and art direction issues.

 

I keep wondering if DOTT might be held back with some intention to give it the HD facelift treatment, since its got to be one of the most in demand titles in the library.

If I recall it was started at some point, but that HD team is long dead by now. If I recall everyone was laid off shortly after Lucidity failed.

 

Is it just that you don't want the disc version of Day of the Tentacle, Miffy? (Although Ebay shows just a loose disc of that game is now $30 and up. Sheesh.)

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I sure wouldn't want that special edition team coming back with their outsourcing mentality. Too much rush work and art direction issues.

 

To be fair, the "outsourcing mentality" was more about the paucity of money LEC gave the humble remake project.

 

I think we've discussed this before, but a member of the ill-conceived "indie" team at LucasArts (which I guess existed from around 2009-2011) took to Reddit several years back to offer the grunts' side of the story.  I'm reprinting the whole shebang, bolding the relevant part.

 

LucasArts that produced all these great titles is of course no more (the ghost of it carries on in Double Fine - and does wonderful things that most people sadly don't seem to care about). The company gets completely rebuilt every few years so what I have to say only applies to my generation (the Darrell years?), though there are certainly some common themes that continue to plague the studio.

 

The amazing history of LEC still attracts some of the best talent, the biggest Star Wars geeks and the most machiavellian managers. The studio has and always had a tremendous potential to create something really wonderful but it always somehow slips through its bony fingers. If I knew exactly why I'd shoot an email to George today :).

 

I joined LEC to work on an awesome original IP. It was just after Jim Ward left the building so things were on a shaky ground but the project was really something else and I truly believed that this might finally be the company's opportunity to step out from the shadow of its past. The team was top notch, the concept was solid, we had really good writers and already had playable prototypes for the main gameplay elements. The only rub at that point was political pressure to use the internal engine & tools (used by TFU and another doomed project at the time) that was slightly unwieldy and came with a lot of political baggage as some of the tools were shared with ILM. Making even trivial changes meant countless meetings where everyone involved had to put their stamp on any decision made. It wasn't really jiving with our agile way of doing things but we were making some good progress on that front too.

 

Then came Darrell Rodriguez. One of the many things I learnt at LucasArts was that a new exec really has very little incentive to make a success of projects started by his predecessor. They also like to lay people off. I wonder if the board made the decision to fire a bunch of people already and simply found a president that would be willing to execute it or if it's like the first rule of MBA. We lost half of our (already small) team to that round of layoffs but we soldiered on, really believing in the product and we worked our asses of to prove to the new management that it is worth doing. When we finally did the pitch to enter preproduction, we got a glowing review of everything we've created. It was a unique product, we proved we can make it fun and we were in a good position to get the production pipeline in place. Even George himself was allegedly excited by it (but that could just be our leads trying to keep our spirits up). Then the finance guys chimed it with their sales projections. Back then the management wizards predicted that we would be shipping right at the end of the console cycle and the spreadsheets clearly showed that original IP released at the end of a console cycle doesn't make money. The axe fell.

 

In the ensuing weeks of 'WTF are we going to do now?', a bunch of us (with Craig Derrick leading the charge) started skunkworks-type work on the 'Heritage' project - trying to bring back the old adventure games. We got enough momentum that this eventually became an official thing and our tiny team took on the job of remaking one of the most beloved point & click games. Terrifying doesn't even begin to describe it :).

 

Our team just did not have the resources to produce all the art in Monkey Island so we needed to outsource it to someone who could. Picking a contractor is another one of those things that whips up all the wrong management types into an orgy of chest beating and territory marking. This one went all the way to the top and we were forced to use LucasArts Singapore for the job. Note that the president of LucasFilm is from Singapore with strong ties to the country (and its government). So LEC Singapore did all of the character art while we did the backgrounds (and all the coding) - which I hope helps to explain some of the jarring aesthetics of the first game. Their decision to use a 3D model instead of hand painted art for Guybrush made me very, very sad - but we really could do nothing about it if we wanted this project to ship. To add insult to injury, they clearly didn't put their best people on the project and they ended up being pretty expensive - helping to burn through our budget that much faster.

 

As we got closer to the finish line, other departments realized that this may be a success and did their best to position themselves to claim as much of it as they could. Despite their best efforts to 'help', we managed to ship the thing and I hope we got at least a handful of kids exposed to the glory of 90s adventure gaming. The reward was to move all the development of Monkey 2 to Singapore.

 

Finally, Darrell got the sack and the new management finally killed our little team that dared to dream :). All the tech developed internally was shelved and the studio is now all Unreal (coincidentally, the new president is a co-founder of Epic China). Many smart engineers left as wrestling with Unreal isn't all that much fun, especially when you're making yet another Star Wars game.

 

I suspect that the whole mess is due to power struggles way above my pay grade. Maybe someday one of the presidents will speak out and shed some light on what was really going on in the boardroom. There is certainly a conflict between what George seems to want (industry leading game studio making ground breaking, culture shaping games) and what the board demands (stop bleeding cash!). This leads to swings between grand plans (e.g. TFU2 was meant to be awesome) and quick cash grabs (e.g. what TFU2 shipped as). The constant churn of presidents isn't helping things either.

 

The continuing lack of success is definitely not due to lack of talent in the studio. Nobody sets out to pour years of their lives into a mediocre Star Wars game. Maybe one day the good guys will finally win but I'm no longer up for that particular rollercoaster ride.

 

I should have used a throwaway, now George's ninjas will surely get me...

 

Looking forward, I wonder at what frequency GOG will roll out the games they've scored?  I'm quite hopeful we'll see the games we want, even if it's over the long-term.  The key news here is that GOG and, earlier, Double Fine (through Sony) have been able to communicate with the  right foks at Disney.  Anything is possible now.

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What a saddening story. It's perhaps of little consolation to that guy that MI2's special edition actually ended up being pretty good compared to its predecessor, although that could have just been because dividing work between teams like that is very challenging and often saps morale out of everyone — I guess a more focused effort from Singapore worked out reasonably well.

I think it's safe to say that virtually anything Disney does with the LucasArts licenses is a step up from what LucasArts itself did with them. It's splendid to see re-releases and remasters actually being done right. Or at least, put into capable hands.

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I think we've discussed this before, but a member of the ill-conceived "indie" team at LucasArts (which I guess existed from around 2009-2011) took to Reddit several years back to offer the grunts' side of the story.  I'm reprinting the whole shebang, bolding the relevant part.

Yeah you had linked that before, that's sort of what I was referring to. I was hoping you'd link again. :)

 

But really I guess even though it sucks for everyone involved who wanted it to do well and wanted to have jobs in house, I feel like maybe a lot of heartache would have been spared had it not been started with that business model in mind in the first place. Pretty much the same happened with Gameloft Shanghai doing Earthworm Jim HD. Just an inconsistent mess that maybe didn't need to be produced.

 

And my biggest complaint with the SEs is just the use of 3D models for all of the character animations (Besides the general hideousness of the first). Since it was farmed out to what I'm thinking what was a large outsource house with high turnover and rotating team members that aren't dedicated for the whole project (even though it's LA Singapore, same happens Ubisoft Shanghai and so on), you can't get anyone who is just good at a certain character and instead have to do this weird prerendered sprite stuff that doesn't do much justice to the original but is a cheapo sacrifice to keep everyone on model.

 

That and they cut the frames in half from Steve Purcell's resurrection animation. Couldn't keep up with ol' Steve P. Animating that part in sprites like that back in the early 90s would have been so much difficult than tracing the frames in a painterly Photoshop style now.

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they cut the frames in half from Steve Purcell's resurrection animation. Couldn't keep up with ol' Steve P. Animating that part in sprites like that back in the early 90s would have been so much difficult than tracing the frames in a painterly Photoshop style now.

 

I don't quite understand this. Why couldn't they match the number of frames? Just too much effort?

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My beef was that they failed, somehow, to keep the vertical scrolling effect in classic mode (when Guybrush looks down at the map off the edge of the cliff, when Guybrush is floating down to the bottom of the sea).  It was a minor innovation at the time, and it's gone.

 

These productions were compromised, but they weren't hack jobs, either.  I'm happy to have them.  The music alone justifies both projects, in my opinion, and the voice acting is high quality even if inevitably weird in effect. Plus the background art in MI2:SE is legitimately good.

 

Actually, the asking price of both games combined is worth the concept art that came with MI2:SE.

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It is of course infinitely wishful thinking, but I constantly dream of what MI2:SE would've been like if they'd just straight up put Purcell's original background art in there.. *sigh*

 

monkey2se_concept_02.jpg

 

Instead of this, admittedly still much better effort compared to the first Special Edition.. They sort of blindly follow Purcell's crazy shapes without actually understanding them, somehow.. I don't know. It's hard to describe what bothers me about it. They definitely upped their game compared to the team who did the first one, but they're still making some of the same mistakes, I feel..

 

MI2SE2.jpg

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I don't quite understand this. Why couldn't they match the number of frames? Just too much effort?

Yeah it looks like they just halved them or just skipped some selections. It's disappointingly stiff. There's no reason why not, just probably too much full screen drawing that they didn't budget and did not have a 3D model to base it on. It's kind of a lot of time to waste on one small part, I'm sure. Possibly I read the animation took up a full floppy or half of one in the original game? Maybe you wrote that at some point Udvarnoky?

I get the feeling Steve Purcell had the tendency to go overboard in his animations back then, but in a good way, like the final death scene in Secret of Monkey Island or the over the top Bishop death scene in Loom.

 

My beef was that they failed, somehow, to keep the vertical scrolling effect in classic mode (when Guybrush looks down at the map off the edge of the cliff, when Guybrush is floating down to the bottom of the sea).  It was a minor innovation at the time, and it's gone.

I didn't notice that. That sucks. 

It is of course infinitely wishful thinking, but I constantly dream of what MI2:SE would've been like if they'd just straight up put Purcell's original background art in there.. *sigh*

 

It's funny, I know that the painterly strokes are kind of an abstraction because of final low resolution scans they'd become, but I think it would be really awesome to have that sort of painted water look lightly animated on that background. Maybe too stylish for the game? But I would love to see it.

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I remember Bill Tiller suggesting that Chan and Purcell's original marker drawings were simply too small to come out looking good in HD.  I don't know though...I would have liked to see them try.  It seems uncharitable to not acknowledge that this looks damn good though.

 

550w_gaming_monkeyisland2remake_5.jpg

 

 


 I didn't notice that. That sucks.  

 

What's funny is that the concept art gallery they include proudly displays the original, tall art for the cliff scene.  And the real kicker: Gilbert innocently discusses the feature in the commentary!

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Man that's one of the things I was really happy about, the recording of commentary. I'm so glad they sprung to pay for that. I wish there was a way to get all three guys in the room for full commentary on the first two Monkey Islands.

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I wish they would release everything they recorded.  I'm sure only a small fraction was actually used.  There's about fifteen minutes worth of video of the session on Youtube.

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Do you think they recorded more? 15 minutes only?! I felt like it was at least an hours worth but it looks like it was incredibly incorrect.

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The sum total in the game might be more, but not much.  The stuff I'm talking about includes a smidge of miscellaneous BS-ing by the guys.

 

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Oh I misunderstood, I thought you mean the game only had 15 minutes total. I've never seen these videos before, thanks. Yeah I bet there's way more then.

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Just figured I'd pop back in here to say how great Psychonauts is. I'm about 12 hours in and it has just been wonderful. As I've come to expect from a Tim Schafer game, the voice acting, dialog, and music are all pretty stellar but I'm a little surprised to find that the gameplay also has a very satisfying feel to it (I wasn't sure what to expect control-wise after experiencing the tank controls in GF). I just finished the milk man segment and the Mexican themed charging bull segment and after doing those, I pretty much want to have babies with this game. 

 

The milk man area was a surprisingly difficult puzzle to solve and I found myself stumped a couple of times as I tried to find the right items to get into each of the restricted zones. But even being stuck, the layout of the world was so unique that I found it quite enjoyable to just run around and experiment with different items and abilities until I figured out what I needed to do. I ended up getting through it in the end by sheer accident when I tried to light a mailbox on fire and ended up catching a keypad on fire, causing a guy to come out who I then had to use my remote vision ability on to see the password he entered into the keypad.

 

But I think my favorite area of the game so far has been the bull charging zone. The music, the neon, and the overall theme of that area came together in such an outstanding way and made for a beautiful experience. This game just oozes style and I love it.

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No but I think that might be the next area I do. One of the guys I work with has been encouraging me to play this game for awhile now and he mentioned that that is his favorite part too.

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The board game level is probably my favourite. I think the only levels that I actually dislike are the disco themed level, in the mind of one of the camp teachers, and the one with the stage and changing backdrops.

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God I seriously felt like I wanted to vomit after the disco level because of the motion sickness I got trying to collect all of that shit to 100%. Ugh. I don't even think I've felt motion sickness in a video game before either.

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Wow I love the disco level 'cause bouncin' 'round on that dang ball is so fun. D:

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Yeah I enjoyed the disco level, but I did pretty much just blast through it. I think that all of Psychonauts' levels are great fun to experience, but they mostly don't hold up to endless exploration to collect everything. I couldn't really bring myself to do it.

I did love thoroughly exploring Whispering Pines Rock between stages though, as the characters were continuously doing new things. It made the overworld feel far less static and boring than most games'.

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Yeah, I also liked the Disco level. One thing I don't like so much though is how a bunch of shitty animals show up to catch me on fire at night time. I liked it better when I could just freely explore the whole camp area without having to worry about that stuff.

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