Ron Gilbert won’t post about the new Monkey Island anymore following online abuse

theverge.com:

This week, we finally saw the first gameplay trailer of Return to Monkey Island, a follow-up to the first and second Monkey Island games that’s headed up by Ron Gilbert. Much of the game’s rollout has been delightful — an apparent April Fools’ joke by Gilbert about a new Monkey Island game turned out to be a real announcement. But there’s been some sour discourse following the new trailer, and on his personal blog, Gilbert said he won’t be posting about Return to Monkey Island anymore (via Eurogamer).

“I’m shutting down comments,” Gilbert said in a post featuring the new trailer. “People are just being mean and I’m having to delete personal attack comments. It’s an amazing game and everyone on the team is very proud of it. Play it or don’t play it but don’t ruin it for everyone else. I won’t be posting anymore about the game. The joy of sharing has been driven from me.”

Bang up job, everybody. (I've seen a lot of passionate but polite/polite-adjacent discussion going on, but the comments on Ron's blog were a total shitshow.) pic.twitter.com/BUBoPdU1fS

From what I’ve seen, most of the negative comments have been focused on Return to Monkey Island’s art direction. The original games used pixel art, but the new game opts for a more cartoony look. In an April interview with The Verge, Gilbert said that was an intentional decision:

So it isn’t pixel art, and that was a discussion that Dave [Grossman] and I had early on about “should it be a pixel art game? Should it not be a pixel art game?” Ultimately, we thought that we just had a lot more freedom and flexibility to not make it a pixel art game. I think people are going to be very happy with the art once they see it and once they see it moving and the animation. We have