Loom sequel speculation

[Zaxx]

9 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

There's a new niggles in the Double Fine remasters that irk me to this day, but on the whole they're amazing. The Grim Fandango Remaster in particular is worth it for the new controls alone -- but add the massively improved music and WOW, it's more or less perfect. Schafer promised a "Criterion Edition" level remaster. He talked about getting the symbol on Velasco's cap correct, for example... That's extremely detailed. Except they didn't touch the texture on Velasco's cap. In fact they didn't touch quite a few textures.

 

And sometimes when they did change them, they added silly mistakes. They removed the originally intended numpad tank controls for some reason. And they also changed the beautiful transition before the end credits. Plus there's a few bugs (I have a list somewhere.) They also massively lowered the available number of save slots (due to a PS4 limitation, but contractually it had to be implemented on the PC version, too -- because the PC version couldn't be better than the PS version), which is unbearable for a huge game like Grim that you might want to explore.

 

Still, overall it was VAST improvement, and definitely the version everyone should play... just not quite Criterion Edition level.

 

Full Throttle also had some oddities introduced (some character designs were changed, some background animations were lost, and there were some strange choices during the animations). Plus the background on the road animations were altered so they didn't match the rest of the game. And whoever was in charge of uprezzing the fonts did not have a very good eye. Still, again, the improved music was worth the price of admission. Watching the intro sequence on my big TV with the music blaring in HD gave me goosebumps.

 

The Day of the Tentacle Remaster was probably the most faithful overall. Very nicely done, although I wish they didn't have music playing in the menus. It drove me insane after a while.

 

Of course all of this is just because I'm an uber fan. 99% of people will just enjoy the DF Remasters, and so they should. They're fantastic.

 

(But I still have dreams of modding them for to my own taste just to scratch that uber fan itch.)

I don't think this has anything to do with you being a fan but rather with the fact that Double Fine is a bit... wonky when it comes to the technical aspect of their games especially. They used to loooove having 30 fps hard locks in their games (The Cave is still suffering from that... as a side scroller), sometimes weird bugs pop up (for example in FT Remastered I have some weird audio bug that always happens on the old mine road and just corrupts the music track) and sometimes their PC ports can even miss some random features. For example I fired up Brütal Legend last week for the sake of some nostalgia and the PC version still doesn't have fur on animals, they are just naked and I'm like why?  Their games are usually great but it's such an old company for their stuff to still have these easily reproducible bugs and shortcomings.

 

Anyway Brütal Legend remaster when? BL2 should be a thing too, they should just make it a pure RTS.

[Zaxx]

2 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

It does make you wonder what a triple A adventure game would look like.

I think the Supermassive Games titles are good indications of that and yeah, not a fan... but I will still play The Quarry because I'm not above virtual Lance Henriksen and virtual Laura Palmer's mom from Twin Peaks.

Edited April 27, 2022 by Zaxx

[Groggoccino]

9 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

Welcome back to the forums!

 

Thank you very much. I'm a longtime visitor, but actually a first-time poster. 🙂 

 

9 hours ago, elTee said:

Given that this a Loom thread, I must say I agree with this. Loom particularly has always struck me as absolutely state of the art for when it came out, from the astonishing dithered EGA art to the extraordinary level of detail put into the package. It does not look cheap or thrown together, it feels like the product of an enormously wealthy company throwing all of their resources at a project. None of the later games quite had that same feeling to me. 

 

Not that I'm an expert on this (far from it), but it is my understanding that LucasArts games as a whole were perceived this way back in the day, even within the industry. Not too long ago, I read a recent interview with a Sierra alumni (I think it was Josh Mandel), and he mentioned that Sierra staff used to be a bit jealous of LucasArts because of their no-expenses-spared, blockbuster-like approach. I also seem to remember reading (citation needed, though) that one of the reasons which led Blizzard to cancel the Warcraft adventure game was that, after seeing how technically impressive The Curse of Monkey Island was, they felt their own game felt too cheap by comparison.

 

It's kind of crazy to think about it nowadays, but there was a very brief period in videogame history in which adventure games as a whole could not only go toe-to-toe with the "big guys", but were actually early adopters of many technologies. I mean, some of these adventure games had massive scripts which were fully voiced by professional voice actors (with very decent sound quality), in a time when other major franchises, belonging to other major genres, still only included some sporadic, barely-comprehensible synthesized voice samples. And didn't Creative bundle the CD version of The Secret of Monkey Island to promote one of their Sound Blaster cards?

 

Anyway, more on topic: since we are discussing the prospect of a potential Loom remaster/sequel, I think this extract from a 2017 interview with Brian Moriarty might be of interest (it kind of relates to what I mentioned in my previous post, too):

 

Quote

Would you ever like to see Loom remastered with updated graphics?

 

If by “remastering” you mean simply converting the original low-resolution 16-color art to high-resolution 24-bit color, my answer is a loud “No.”

Nearly every creative decision regarding the dramatic scope and presentation of Loom was influenced by the severe technical restrictions imposed by the available hardware. Adding more pixels and colors would only serve to emphasize those restrictions. The 256-color “upgrades” of Loom produced after the original EGA release clearly demonstrate this. They not only make the original design seem unduly antiquated, but also manage to obfuscate specific experience goals by adding superfluous colors and detail. The version currently being sold on Steam and other online stores is an abomination. It’s based on the 256-color CD “talkie” edition from 1992, in which nearly a third of the original dialog is missing. The horror. The horror.

 

If I was asked to “remaster” Loom, I would leave the original 16-color art and animation untouched, using hard-edged upscaling (with aspect-ratio correction) to fit HD monitors. The big upgrade would be the sound design, which I would re-imagine from scratch, using fully-voiced characters, ambient surround and Tchaikovsky’s score played by a real orchestra, presented in Dolby Atmos.

 

A few lines of dialog might be trimmed. I was a bit verbose in a couple of scenes.

 

If I could actually RE-DESIGN Loom for modern PCs, the result would bear little resemblance to the original game. It would look like Kubo and the Two Strings, and play like conducting a symphony.

 

 

[Huz]

6 hours ago, Groggoccino said:

(Quoting Brian Moriarty)

The version currently being sold on Steam and other online stores is an abomination. It’s based on the 256-color CD “talkie” edition from 1992, in which nearly a third of the original dialog is missing. The horror. The horror.

 

Haha. I played through Loom for the first time just last week, and I'm sorry to say I couldn't see why it's held in such high regard. But that was the Steam version, and the quote above might explain it! It sounds like I need to play it again in... shudder... EGA.

[Udvarnoky]

Loom EGA, in addition to being the only acceptable version, is gorgeous.

[Zaxx]

Yeah, if you can somehow get used to everyone looking like as if they have suffered some extreme and I mean extreme sunburns to the point that you'd want to donate to the nearest skin cancer foundation then you'll like Loom very much in EGA. Mark Ferrari's focus on dithering makes the image look interesting and it gives off an illusion of detail that is lost in VGA (even though VGA has all them colors).

[ThunderPeel2001]

8 hours ago, Groggoccino said:

 

Thank you very much. I'm a longtime visitor, but actually a first-time poster

 

Welcome! Thanks for those thoughts and for sharing that Moriarty quote. So interesting! Glad I know which version to play should I ever revisit Loom again.

12 hours ago, Zaxx said:

Double Fine is a bit... wonky when it comes to the technical aspect of their games

 

They can have issues sometimes, but Psychonauts 2 was incredibly polished from beginning to end. They really pulled out all the stops!

[Lagomorph01]

5 hours ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

They can have issues sometimes, but Psychonauts 2 was incredibly polished from beginning to end. They really pulled out all the stops!

Was it though? It’s a lovely game which I enjoyed playing, but it also reïntroduced me to ‘the invisible wall’. A 3D platforming staple I haven’t seen since the early 2000’s. I do agree that it was probably the most polished Double Fine game to date (that’s not a remaster), but comparing it to say Super Mario Odyssey clearly shows it’s weaknesses.

 

Back on topic, I would love to see a Brian Moriarty led Loom total remake. I’m wondering what he’d make of it, (and at the same time if the project ever came to fruïtion and if it’d still resemble Loom. If you read about the way he worked on the Dig, I wonder if he’d ever be able to finish a game with a whole team attached.)

[ThunderPeel2001]

5 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

Was it though? It’s a lovely game which I enjoyed playing, but it also reïntroduced me to ‘the invisible wall’. A 3D platforming staple I haven’t seen since the early 2000’s. I do agree that it was probably the most polished Double Fine game to date (that’s not a remaster), but comparing it to say Super Mario Odyssey clearly shows it’s weaknesses.

I thought it was utterly flawless. Far less glitchy than other games I was playing at the time (Mass Effect Remastered being the one that leaps to mind). The whole experience felt massively polished to me. I didn’t see a single bug. I was really impressed with just how gorgeous and slick it all was. 
 

I haven’t played SMO. 

Edited April 28, 2022 by ThunderPeel2001

[Zaxx]

9 hours ago, Lagomorph01 said:

It’s a lovely game which I enjoyed playing, but it also reïntroduced me to ‘the invisible wall’. A 3D platforming staple I haven’t seen since the early 2000’s.

Well to be fair you most likely haven't seen any other 3D platforming staples since the early 2000s because the genre is quite dead.  And sure, Nintendo is still making these games but they have the benefit of countless years of iteration and the fact that a Mario game can be even more abstract than a Psychonauts and when level design gets to be like that you won't really notice invisible walls and such. Double Fine on the other hand is kind of a jack of all trades, master of none developer were mechanical depth and polish usually takes a backseat to world building. It's not like how for example id Software is second to none at making FPS because that's the only thing they've done since the early 90s.

 

I still remember how hard it was for me to get into playing Psychonauts after Prince of Persia The Sands of Time because gameplay wise Psychonauts was a huge step back but the writing and the insane world building still pulled me through. The same goes for Brütal Legend that is all things considered pretty bad at being a third person hack n slash / RTS hybrid (it definitely is better at the RTS though) but it has the most awesome and brütal world going for it. In a sense I think these shortcomings in gameplay design was what always made their bigger games not do that well.

 

I've yet to play Psychonauts 2 but it's nice that I've only heard good things about it and it seems pretty obvious that the switch to Unreal (and maybe all that Microsoft QA) benefitted the game's technical quality.

Edited April 28, 2022 by Zaxx

[ThunderPeel2001]

Bear in mind that Mario is Nintendo's flagship game. They literally use that franchise to sell hardware, they have a lot of money and a very good reason to spend lots of it... They have a lot more resource available to them than Double Fine. That said, honestly for me Psychonauts 2 was one of the most polished gaming experiences I've ever had. I just loved it from top to bottom. (And am sad DF didn't get any BAFTAs despite so many nominations.)

 

I'm still hoping they take the Psychonauts 2 engine and remake the first game with that level of polish one day.

 

So anyway... any more news about Loom?

Edited April 28, 2022 by ThunderPeel2001

[TimeGentleman]

20 minutes ago, ThunderPeel2001 said:

So anyway... any more news about Loom?

 

Andy Kelly ignored my reply to that tweet, asking if he had secret news. So I'm taking that as a super-double-confirmation!

[Jake]

I’ve heard they’re making Loom 2 and 3 back to back! (Source)

[OzzieMonkey]

12 hours ago, Jake said:

I’ve heard they’re making Loom 2 and 3 back to back! (Source)

Rude! I clicked that link several times until I realised I'd been duped  

[Glokidd]

Got me too... well played sir, well played indeed 😀

[s-island]

So, about that Loom rumour, eh?

[Rum Rogers]

Wow, sorry to add noise (feel free to delete the post after you read it) but as a regular Mojo reader and forum user I just felt a bit uncomfortable, it really does look like mentioning some things will only trigger a lot of aggressive and hostile behavior. I think you can trust me as I never, ever had any kind of argument with anyone here and I'm quite the peaceful dude. It just comes up as an attitude that leads users to think "wait, am I allowed to post this here without stepping on someone's toes?", like we're all walking on thin ice.
You have every right to just reply "OK get the hell away if you don't like it", but I don't think it's wise or appropriate to just kick out those who politely make a point.

Edited May 9, 2022 by Rum Rogers
typo

[elTee]

Not sure what's happened here, but people have already been warned about certain topics of conversation that are not up for debate. That does not mean people aren't allowed to make a thread about differences between MI2 versions if they want to.

[ATMcashpoint]

29 minutes ago, elTee said:

Not sure what's happened here, but people have already been warned about certain topics of conversation that are not up for debate. That does not mean people aren't allowed to make a thread about differences between MI2 versions if they want to.

I asked Zaarin where we could talk about such things. (Admittedly, perhaps more harshly in the heat of the moment than I would have done with a cooler head, for which I apologize.) Nonetheless, he deleted my post.

Edited May 9, 2022 by ATMcashpoint

[s-island]

When I looked into this thread, I thought I'd be reading about Loom. Instead I found another discussion about political correctness in Mi2 and people talking about pretend nazis. The last few posts were people trying to continually get the last word in, which only served to aggravate the others. I deleted all of that to get things back on track because I honestly thought you would all take the hint and move on. I'm sorry for overestimating you.

[ThunderPeel2001]

I think it's fine to make a post about differences between versions of the game. It was a very interesting discovery about the removal of the word "midget", for example. I never knew that. I just think it was put in the wrong thread? No idea why it was added to this Loom one.

[s-island]

Yeah, that's no problem.

[elTee]

This is what I told ATM yesterday when he contacted me to complain about things I wasn't responsible for. Unfortunately, he was too upset. Acting on the basis that his imaginary thread about MI2 differences was imaginarily deleted, I think he said he wasn't coming back. 

[TimeGentleman]

Well anyway, here's a 2015 post-mortem of the first Loom with Brian Moriarty. At the end he says there are three companies he'd trust to make the sequel - Telltale, Double Fine, and Wadjet Eye Games.
 

 

 

[ThunderPeel2001]

31 minutes ago, elTee said:

I think he said he wasn't coming back

 

Well that would be a shame