I've seen people claim that the jungle bits in Episode1 were intended to make the game's area seem larger than it actually is, in particular by turning it into a maze consisting of the same screens over and over if you dare to enter without one of 'em maps.
For me this was a hommage to the classic LA games of old, Zak and Monkey Island in particular and it provided the source material for some pretty fun map puzzling to boot on tops. Still, it got me thinking about the format at hand. Now if you're being honest, your average Monkey Island island has never had
that many places you could explore. This ain't Morrowind or something. Still after seeing how there are a total of two buildings you could enter in Flotsam's settlement, I'm wondering if it's actually possible to portray something like say Woodtick given ToMI's build. And still offering some bits of island to explore on tops. All off a sudden it seems like 1991 all over again - where every bits of art, sound and animation was surely something really hard fought for - and the Amiga version of MI2 still shipped on a whopping 7 discs or something. That's got to hurt.
Constraints are everywhere, except if you're working on a Blizzard game it seems. Sometimes constraints prove to be a plus, in particular if a team of artists has learned to build within the confines of those constraints rather than desperately trying to pave their way around them. Something that Telltale are surely used to be doing given their schedules at hand - Flotsam is a pretty tight place with a good deal of stuff to do for a reason. Yeah, well, as said, it still got me pondering a bit.
