Ron Gilbert Designing Story-Heavy RPG

Game designer Ron Gilbert, creator of classic PC adventures The Secret of Monkey Island, Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge, and Maniac Mansion, as well as the producer of Chris Taylor's Total Annihilation, was interviewed by Gamasutra this weekend, and the industry veteran revealed some early details of his current project. Following a few years of absence from the daily grind of game development, Gilbert is now working on a roleplaying game with "large world exploration" heavily infused with strong storytelling and adventure elements.

RG: I do have a kind of very story-heavy, story-based kind of RPG game that I'm currently designing, but I'm still looking for a publisher willing to publish it. So I continue to work on it until I find somebody, but there's a lot of what you talk about here, you know, very heavily story-based, a lot of sensibilities of adventure games mixed with some of the action fun RPG elements. ... So what you've got is the kind of large world exploration that you have in an RPG that you don't really have with an adventure game. You've got the action, some light combat, you know, Diablo-style combat going on with it, but it is also infused with really good adventure-game-style puzzles and adventure-style sensibilities to the storytelling.