5 ms·
After 40 years of adventure games, Ron Gilbert pivots to outrunning Death
- HelloUsername 11mo agoAh, too bad to hear his upcoming game is cancelled!
- abnercoimbre 11mo agoDo we know why it was?
- kg 11mo agoThe publishing and investment climate https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ron-gilbert-cancels-rpg-project-due-to-lack-of-support-and-funding https://www.gamesindustry.biz/ron-gilbert-cancels-rpg-projec... It's pretty tough getting a game funded right now.
- willmadden 11mo agoIt's self-inflicted. The big studios are beyond terrible. The games are more about social conditioning than entertainment. See Clair Obscur. They got funding from the State of France and the French National Centre for Cinema, and the game is 100x better than the slop the big studios publish.
- samiwami 11mo agoSocial conditioning? Clair Obscur is good and was very unique, but is not 100x than “the slop big studios publish”.
- UpsideDownRide 11mo agoInfinity times better coukd be a better hyperbole, very goos game versus no good. Dividing by zero gets you infinity instead of just 100
- ido 11mo ago"Let's just all make Clair Obscur/Minecraft/Blue Prince" is not a repeatable strategy (every indie dev is trying to make good games). How much did it cost to make the Beatles' albums? A piano, drums, a couple of guitars and salaries for 4 guys? Why don't the big studios today with all their money just hire another Beatles? Same reason why Ubisoft isn't just making another Balatro. Industrializing culture isn't (yet?) a solved problem.
- recursivecaveat 11mo agoOn the other hand I'm kind of shocked that the big gaming studios never seem to be fast followers. It feels like we've been through multiple waves of Balatro-likes from indie developers already. Where is the Ubisoft Lethal Company or something? You'd think having a studio full of experienced developers with tons of tech they could hop on trends quickly. It seems like they think it's beneath them or something though. Or maybe they're just structurally incapable of moving quickly. It did take 11 years and like 4 redesigns to make Skull & Bones after all.
- ido 11mo agoThe more people you add the slower you get, not faster. Large companies are nutorously slow moving (and particularly slow to change directions) vs small upstarts.
- baud147258 11mo agoyeah, but at this point it's weird they just don't grab a studio, give them a funding for 2 years and say them 'copy the latest indie trends with a tad more polish' and let them cook to see what comes out.
- willmadden 11mo agoYes, it is 100x better than the slop the big studios publish. Enter: parasitic storytelling https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE
- andrepd 11mo agoYour mention of "social conditioning" a propos of nothing gives you away like the "three fingers" in Inglorious Basterds. I would highly suggest not basing your entire personality and opinions on a slack-jawed streamer's meandering rant delivered from his RGB gaming chair for 5 hours straight.
- willmadden 11mo agoHere, educate yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFxu3Q71NvE
- andrepd 11mo agoJesus fucking christ
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- schnebbau 11mo agoHe can't be trusted after fumbling the ending of Return to Monkey Island.
- donogh 11mo agoIn his defence, Monkey Island is Ron’s creation and the ending is probably what he always intended. It felt like a fitting conclusion to me that neatly tied a bow on the whole saga.
- simpetre 11mo agoHe's also been creating absurdist controversial endings to adventure games for a long time before Return to Monkey Island (SoMI2, Thimbleweed Park)...
- turtlebro 11mo agoI thought the ending was lovely as well. We get sincerity, but seems some people can't go to sleep without an epic boss fight and some dramatic reveal of the "secret". This was the better way to do it and for me the best point and click ever made.
- davidivadavid 11mo agoSo instead you get a sophomoric meta-ending that has absolutely no originality and shits on decades of storytelling? The ending is trash and an insult to the fans' intelligence because the author can't accept he's "just" writing adventure fiction, as if that's beneath him and instead needs to make some philosophical point about the nature of aging, thereby completely stepping out of his skill set. Go read Proust, Ron Gilbert, and leave that silly ambition to rest.
- hnal943 11mo agoBut that's Ron. He's a Portland Gen X Socialist. Irony and cynicism are the only things he knows.
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- p2detar 11mo agoIt’s not. It’s about an older RPG. https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@grumpygamer/115657740122347206 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@grumpygamer/1156577401223472...
- acomjean 11mo agoHis website is pretty fun. https://grumpygamer.com/ https://grumpygamer.com/ He also blogged the development of tumbleweed park https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html https://blog.thimbleweedpark.com/archives.html
- kentm 11mo agoHe mentions living through the dialog fast and says that the takeaway is that people don’t care about the story. However, I wonder if his players just read very fast. I grew up on JRPGs and read through dialog quickly, to the point that people around me don’t believe that I could possibly be following the story. But that’s just how fast I can read game dialog.
- hyfgfh 11mo agoTwo words: Disco Elysium Maybe you need VA too
- vidarh 11mo agoI'm sure some do, but also I know some don't, because I typically don't. There are (rare) exceptions, but most game dialogue is predictable and boring, and so after the first couple of screens I will just hammer whichever button to skip the dialogue as fast as I can, repeatedly, until the dialogue is gone whenever it pops up.
- latexr 11mo agoFortunately, these days it seems more common that games highlight important pieces of information in the dialogue, so you at least get the important keywords. I used to be very much into the story in video games, but at a certain point the overwhelming majority have become so generic and dull that I no longer bother. The biggest offenders are the ones who throw an insane amount of exposition at you before you even start playing. I remember one where I was pressing “A” furiously for minutes, with no way to skip, before anything even happened. I eventually quit the game and ended up returning it without experiencing any gameplay. A great example of how to do this right is CrossCode. It throws you directly into the action and shows you “this is how the game is going to feel” from the get go. Then it pulls back and gives you the story and a tutorial before carrying on. It was super effective on me. Because in the first few minutes I immediately got a taste for what was to come and liked it, I became much more interested and patient in experiencing the story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossCode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CrossCode
- dbalatero 11mo agoThis title freaked me out... I thought he was dying. Glad to hear it's just a new game!
- BLKNSLVR 11mo agoFirst I thought he was dying, then I thought he was committing all his resources into extending human life / reaching the singularity (like Kurzweil) Then I read the article :)
- tomaskafka 11mo agoI thought worse - that he became another longevity dudebro. Phew :).
- dbalatero 11mo agoDamn, that truly would be worse.
- raverbashing 11mo agoWell, we all are. Slowly
- quitit 11mo agoExcept the bots.
- Trufa 11mo agoI thought he was joining Bryan Johnson
- cliffordc 11mo agoI thought he was in a new episode of Family Guy
- szczepano 11mo agohis new game link https://store.steampowered.com/app/3773590/Death_by_Scrolling/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/3773590/Death_by_Scrollin...
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago> while Gilbert said he enjoyed Vampire Survivors, he added that the game’s style was “a little too much ‘ADHD’ for me. I look at those games and it’s like, wow, I feel like I’m playing a slot machine at some level. The flashing and upgrades and this and that… it’s a little too much.” Vampire Survivors was designed by a guy whose job was coding slot machines.
- egypturnash 11mo agoDang, that explains so much about it.
- philipallstar 11mo ago> After hiring an artist and designer and spending roughly a year tinkering with that idea, though, Gilbert said he eventually realized his three-person team was never going to be able to realize his grand vision. This seems spectacularly obvious. No retrospect required.
- s_dev 11mo agoDisco Elysium seems to have revived the point and click genre. People are getting nostalgic for the GameCube with the new 'GabeCube' and with Dawn of War IV and Medieval III being announced there seems to be a renaissance of RTS games happening. For all the bad news percolating in the world at the moment these are some of the good notes I choose to dwell on. I wish Ron Gilbert well in contributing to this epsilon in the gaming world.
- hvs 11mo agoDisco Elysium is truly a wonderful game for adventure/rpg fans. I have a small fraction of the time I had as a younger man to play games so I have to be very selective with my choices and Disco Elysium has taken up a large portion of that time for the past few months.
- jeffwask 11mo agoYeah, great game it's just a shame the publisher screwed over the dev team.
- lkramer 11mo agoWell, he did. He made Monkey Island 5 and he was part of the Kickstarter wave which I think is what truly revived the nostalgia for older games (first by being tangentially involved with Broken Age, and later by making Thimbleweed Park). I think the headline, and to some extend the article is wildly misleading. Ron Gilbert have never limited himself to Adventure games. After he left LucasArts, he made educational games and was a producer for Total Annihilation. He also made Death Spank and The Cave.
- velcrovan 11mo agoDisco Elysium has been out for several years now and nothing else like it has yet been released. So I wouldn't say it's revived anything, just that it's proved that it's still possible to do something amazing in the genre. I like to say Disco Elysium is one of my top five books I've ever read.
- aidenn0 11mo agoI'm kind of sad we miss out on RG's take on an action RPG.
- nonethewiser 11mo ago>While Gilbert said he’s always harbored these kinds of anti-capitalist feelings “at some level,” he said that “certainly recent events and recent things have gotten me more and more jumping on the ‘Eat the Rich’ bandwagon.” Though he didn’t detail which “recent events” drove that realization, he did say that “billionaires and all this stuff… I think are just causing more harm than good.” This is very amusing to me. Gilbert must be quite rich [0], yet there is a very large difference between his wealth and the wealth of a billionaire. In fact, the wealth inequality between himself and Bezos, for example, is waaay higher than between a poor person and himself. Perhaps why he identifies more with the latter. But where is the more important disparity? It's between a poor person and himself. He seems to feel like he is not rich. Or does he want to be eaten? Everyone but 1 person can complain about the richer people. But at the end of the day, low absolute wealth and not the degree of difference is what matters. [0] - There is not public information on his personal wealth but he was a titan in the industry for 40 years and founded a company that sold for $76M. From that deal salary, royalties and with a moderate amount of interest, he's probably easily at $10-30M. That, or perhaps he's terrible with money.
- MattRix 11mo agoYou can be a beneficiary of a system and still complain about that system. On top of that, billionaires who take over media companies and lobby politicians have much more power than a millionaire like Ron. Their ability to make things worse is on a completely different level.
- nonethewiser 11mo agoAbsolutely you can. But what does Gilbert expect to happen to his wealth?
- sd9 11mo agoIt’s ok to believe and advocate for something that reduces your individual ability to accumulate capital.