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Yea, that's exactly how I felt - all the meta-humour fit nicely into game and didn't seem out of place. I was surprised as I didn't think I'd really be into it that much, but by a few hours in I was really immersed in the story and invested in the characters.

Or he wanted to share his love for the Mission Impossible franchise.

I mean, Dave Grossman helped make Tales. He was in charge of the writing and design department at the studio that made it. He’s probably aware of what’s in it. Yeah probably. It’s mostly standalone but has some post-game narrative stuff that could be a spoiler.

Re: verbs. I played a little bit of Delores, and the context-menu system is pretty snappy, but most hotspots can only be looked at so it's effectively a menu with one item. Sometimes two. If I see an object that looks like it can be picked up, I'd prefer to try and fail, rather than be prevented from even trying. This means either you write a lot of tailored responses, or rely on canned responses. It's annoying, but I think it contributes to the "never know until you try" aspect of solving these games. I designed a game interface with a menu that always had at least three options per hotspot-- eye, hand, and mouth. Like CMI, the exact verbs changed based on context. Rather than being able to talk to inanimate objects, most items had a "look at" and a "talk about", which meant writing both Sierra-style popup descriptions AND an in-character spoken line. Might've been descriptive overkill.

That zone is going to get a whole lot more Twilight Zone-y now. 🤷‍♂️

When I talk context sensitive verbs I less mean taking a number of verbs and reducing that and making those context sensitive and more mean playing with what verbs are available to you in a given situation. Thimbleweed played with this, with one character having a different list of verbs to the others, and MI1+2 both did this as a joke, for one scene. But I don't know any game that has REALLY played with the potential of this. What if I perform an action that gives me a new verb, but perhaps only for a short while, and the puzzle is about how to get the verb and go to the right place and use it. Like, here's a gross example: Guybrush has a drink at a bar, and it gives him a 'burp' verb which only lasts for 30 seconds. So you have to have the drink, then find the thing you need to burp at, and do that before you lose the verb. Or what if I get a pirate hook again for a short segment of the game, and during that time I have a 'hang from' 'pierce' and 'slash' verb in my repertroire that can all be used to solve different puzzles during that segment. Or what if there's a specific scene where i have to perform in front of a crowd and all my verbs change to facilitate the performance and the puzzle is about trying to do the performance correctly with the given verbs. Or what if there's a puzzle where a voodoo spell is used on Guybrush that either MAXIMISES or MINIMISES his capabilities (Talk to becomes Yell At or Whisper to, Push becomes Shove or Prod, Look at becomes Analyse or Make Lazy Assumptions about, Walk becomes Run or Limp) and you have to use these changed verbs to solve different puzzles while you're under these effects Y'know, stuff that really makes verbs part of the FUN of the game, rather than just a necessary means to interaction. At least, that's the sort of thing I might be thinking about if I was a veteran adventure game developer who had expressed the idea in the past that verbs weren't very interesting, has a history of messing with verbs for fun and gameplay reasons, and stated that I'd like to rethink how people interact with adventure game. It's possible (probable, in fact) they've done something completely different to this but it's fun to consider, at least, what the possibilities could be.

I'd be surprised (pleasantly) if the Elaine controlling segment made it, considering how early it was. Also ... if I were Ron, I'd have been tempted to edit that out of the post if it actually ended up happening - leave it as a surprise. The thing that stuck out to me was the comment about the UI. He's mentioned having done interesting things with the UI in a couple of places. It makes me think that what we're going to get is not going to be like the old school SCUMM interface (unsurprisingly) but also isn't going to be like CMI, or even MI2:SE (which I think is the best version of that kind of thing). It makes me think they've really thought about what a verb is. Here's my out-there guess: In the new interface, the verbs available to you change, based on the context. And the context might be where you are, what you're doing at the moment, and maybe even what you know. This introduces a whole vector of puzzles that you can do, because you're not just limited to the same 3-9 verbs that are used in all screens but you can add and drop verbs as needed. It also means you can tell jokes with this part of the UI. Remember how fun it was when all your verbs change in MI1 before you touch the parrot? Imagine that, but stretched across a whole game where verbs can change from context to context for both puzzling and humourous reasons. Personally, I agree with Ron here. The status quo isn't great. And part of that is that verbs aren't very compelling. Basically, when it comes down to it, everything is just use. They are, as Ron has said in the past, cruft. I once went through the entire walkthrough of DOTT, a 1993 adventure game, and even back then there were only 3 or 4 actions in the whole game that couldn't be solved by 'walk to' 'use' 'talk' and your inventory items. Several years ago I had a sort of epiphany while thinking about a set of adventure game puzzles I was designing: inventory items are verbs. When you say 'use banana picker with bananas' all you're really saying is 'banana pick those bananas'. But inventory items are SUPERverbs. You can do all sorts of things with them you can't ordinarily do with regular ol verbs. You can gain them, and lose them, exchange them for something else, they can have a quantity (pieces of eight), they can change over time (mug of grog) and you can combine them together to make new stuff, and that ultimately makes them more FUN to play with than verbs as they traditionally exist in adventure games. If Ron and Dave have designed a new UI which brings some of the flexibility of inventory items to the world of verbs, they might have found a way to make them relevant again. Of course none of this actually addresses how the interface might actually look/respond. For that, I have no guesses.