By Alec Meer on June 30th, 2010 at 10:36 pm.
I’m currently recovering from what East Coast Rail laughably calls a train journey from Newcastle to London, but is in fact three hours of sweatbox hell on a locomotive where they’ve taken the time to install wifi but felt air conditioning was an obscene luxury. I was in Newcastle for the GameHorizon conference, which is very much a business thing, but was also attended by the likes of Mark Rein, Charles Cecil and, the man I’m about to quote at length, Peter Molyneux. Here’s what he thinks of his own back catalogue.
P-Mol was there ostensibly to talk up Microsoft’s Kinect motion wotsit for Xbox (which he cutely kept calling ‘Kinext’) and Fable 3, but he also took the audience on a whistlestop tour of Lionhead and Bullfrog’s achievements to date in order to explain how his thinking’s shifted over the years. In an nutshell – the man’s all about accessiblity now, having been down the road of over-complication several times. He had a lot of interesting things to say about genesis of some of 90s PC gaming’s best-loved titles – and also some stuff that kinda hurts. And, this after all being Peter Molyneux, some stuff you may well dispute.
My notes are little incomplete due to hand-based exhaustion as a result of two days of wall-to-wall typing, so forgive the sometimes staccato turns of phrase. Here’s the bulk of it, though.
Populous
“The thing about Populous, it was a complete and utter accident, born out of my own incompetence as a programmer. I couldn’t do wallhugging so I get the user to build the land for me.
The industry in 1989 was very similar to what the social space is now. A lot of calls for innovation but a lot of titles looked the same, a lot of me-too licenses. It was only when you threw something very different into the mix like Populous that you realised that, even though these huge gold rushes are going on, people still want change and innovation. Populous kind of came out of nowhere for me and everyone, and I think that changed things a little bit.
At one point in 1989 Populous accounted for a third of EA’s revenue. They were a lot smaller then, admittedly.”
Powermonger
“Not such a successful product, because I took innovation down this route where introduced too much complexity to what was going on. People wanted the simplicity of Populous. I blame the complexity on Jez San and David Braben. We met down the pub during an interview, and we talking about programming. Everything they wrote was in machine code. I didn’t have a clue what they were talking about because I wrote Populous in c. They said “c’s not a proper language, you’re not a proper games indusry person, you should write in assembly language.” So I wrote Powermonger in assembly code, and it was too complicated.”
Populous 2
“I really didn’t dedicate myself to it. It’s very interesting how in those days doing sequels was really really frowned upon. Back in the 1990s, you had to stand up to the press and say “I’m doing a sequel”, and they’d say it was just cashing in. How different that it is today, where you have to totally embrace your sequels and franchises. You have to love them and see them blossom and grow.”
Syndicate
With Populous 2, I felt slightly ashamed that I was doing a sequel, so immediately after doing Populous 2 there came Syndicate. People still ask me about Syndicate today, I think it was one of the first free-roaming games, and again it was us turning round saying ‘hey, why don’t we be innovational?” Actually I think the reason people liked Syndicate was it was one of the first games with a minigun, certainly the first game with a minigun where you can kill innocent people. I think people really loved that idea of just destroying things. It was reasonably successful.”
Magic Carpet
Full of innovation, but the interesting one was…
Theme Park
“On all formats back in the day, it sold about 15m copies which is a huge amount. But here’s the funny thing about it, what ‘s so interesting about it today. Everybody hated developing Theme Park. EA tried to close down it, they said “why you don’t you do another game with miniguns, can’t you shoot babies this time?” Most importantly the team who was making it loathed it – we had one day of strikes where people were refusing to work on it. “Can’t we have a sniper on top of the rollercoaster that takes out the people in the theme park?”
So I said why are we tring to make a game for boys who want to kill things? Can’t we make something softer? Can’t we try something different?”
HiOctane
[only sold 300,000 copies - it was made in six and half weeks when Bullfrog realised they couldn't meet their original deadline for Dungeon Keeper, but still had to get a game out]
Dungeon Keeper
“I look at that and again a little bit too complex I think, but I think the spirit of it was right. I loved the idea of turning things on their head; it’s interesting when we come back to where things are today, turning things on their head, I think there’s a huge opportunity.”
Black & White
“Hugely contentious. In those days there was a huge appetite for new stuff, something that hadn’t existed before. B&W became this pr and hype monster, one of the first games to have fansites. We didn’t have communities as we do now. This terrible disastrous thing happened because of that. In my normal idiotic way, I had gone out to E3 with just 3 bits of paper and spoken to journalists. So Fansites took the design of B&W and started inventing it for themselves. One site would say wouldn’t it be great if one of the monsters was a giant blueberry, then another site would say they’d actually seen the giant blueberry. This terrifying wave of hype built up around it.
It was overcooked on innovation. Not only was it trying to be an iconless interface which was ahead of its time, it combed your PC to find who you are, so if you were playing after midnight it would whisper your name on the speakers. “Peeeeeeter…” Why did we put that in, man? That was just craaazy.” [Also says something about the game being hooked up to 300 global weather stations so that the in-game weather would reflect what it was like where you lived] – “which kinda meant for 60% of our playing population, it was just grey all the time. It was this mad idea, why we did [the weather thing] I don’t know.”
Fable
“We made the transition then. We were smart at spotting the end of the PC, I could just see it tailing off, so we made the transition to Fable. It was reasonably smart idea to take a complex genre like rpg and try and make it more accessible.”
Black and White 2, The Movies
“We then had a little bit of a disaster with Black & White [2], sold a million but it was, y’know, that PC was really going downhill. The same with The Movies: nice idea, overcomplicated. Then this huge success that was Fable 2.”
Ow. Also: hmmm. The end of the PC? The vast bulk of the GameHorizon conference focused on how consoles were living on borrowed time, and social network games and MMOs were taking over. He’s trying to make that kind of stuff work on console, but I can’t help but feel it’s closing the stable door after the megabucks horse has bolted. Bolted all over our browsers. And of course there’s Steam. This old box really isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Retail game sales may be down, but as a barometer of technological and gaming progress, and an opportunity for forward-looking devs to make vast sums of money that don’t depend on the wobbly fortunes and noose-tight licensing of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo, it’s evergreen.
And so he went to console, and console alone. He’s turned his attention to Kinect, and to the new wave of social games and microtransactions. Fable 3, rather surprisingly also due on PC, will be available as episodes, and feature purchasable in-game items, and, well, most of the buzzwords you can imagine. He describes it as now being an action-adventure rather than an RPG, which I suspect will get more than a few back ups. I’ve largely enjoyed the Fable series to date – though I know many don’t – so I’m happy to reserve judgement. Kinect, well, we’ll see. Not really feeling it myself, I have to say. I’m curious to see what Lionhead do manage to wring out of it however as, at the very least, Molyneux’s studios have always been interesting even when they’re getting it wrong.
Coming back to PC now though aren’t you, you splitters? Etc.
30/06/2010 at 22:42 Rohit says:
They made HiOctane? Damn.
30/06/2010 at 22:53 Sic says:
I’m not entirely sure I played the full game. The demo was pretty cool, though.
30/06/2010 at 23:37 Eamo says:
I really liked HiOctane. The very strange thing about it however was that the game was in no way synced to an internal clock. So rather than vehicles moving, for example 10 meters per second they moved 1 meter per frame with the result that on a fast PC it was ridiculously, unplayably fast and on a low end PC it was ridiculously, unplayably slow which I suspect is why it got a lot of pretty bad reviews. As racing games go however it looked very good for its day.
01/07/2010 at 01:05 sebmojo says:
There’s a hilarious interview at the time where a journalist suggests that HiOctane was ‘a bit rubbish’. Mr Mol doesn’t really demur but points out how quickly they did it. Journalist: “So, rubbish, but fast rubbish under pressure?” PM: “Yeah, I guess. No, wait, what? No! Shut up!”
“Fast rubbish under pressure” has stuck with me ever since.
01/07/2010 at 13:06 somnolentsurfer says:
Didn’t Magic Carpet suffer from the same issue? Or was it just that the 486sx 25 on which I originally played it was massively underpowered, and the by comparison seemingly unplayably fast speed I struggled with on a Pentium III when I revisited years later how it was supposed to be all along?
30/06/2010 at 22:49 goodgimp says:
I really can’t stand this guy. If he believes the PC platform is “dead”, then please dear God, let us PC fans play possum until he forgets about us completely.
30/06/2010 at 22:55 Moni says:
He didn’t say the PC was dead, it was just going downhill at one point.
30/06/2010 at 23:09 Nick says:
“We were smart at spotting the end of the PC”
?
01/07/2010 at 17:17 Deadend says:
End of the PC as the end of the PC as the industry leader where the big sales, big tech, big idea games are. Which is true in terms of the market. Lionhead makes Blockbuster games, the PC hasn’t really had many Blockbuster games this decade, compared to the consoles which seem to have a BIG NEW THING, every 2 weeks, which often ends up on PC as well.
30/06/2010 at 22:49 Skinlo says:
Hmm, I didn’t mind Peter before, but now he called PC gaming dead, I don’t like him anymroe.
30/06/2010 at 23:03 Malawi Frontier Guard says:
Look how smart he thinks he is. Smart smart smart.
01/07/2010 at 02:18 bob_d says:
Look at the yearly PC games sales numbers since 2001… After years of rising sales, 2000-2001 marked the point where sales actually started *going down.* They’ve continued the death spiral ever since. For someone who had been making ever-more complex and expensive games for more than a decade at that point, it surely looked like the death of the PC from a commercial point of view, because in many ways it was. The rest of the industry is only now figuring that out.
01/07/2010 at 06:55 Thants says:
[citation required]
01/07/2010 at 09:04 Rinox says:
@ Bob_d
Those sales numbers don’t include digital distrubution which started taking flight slightly later. So using the PC sales numbers of the last 10 years to prove a point is always dangerous.
01/07/2010 at 09:35 The Sombrero Kid says:
60% of activisions revenue is from pc
xbox live has 10 million subscribers steam (only 1 of the pc’s many platforms) has 11 million regular users
xbox 360 install base 28 million pc install base 250 million gaming PC’s
hows that for some stats biznatch!
02/07/2010 at 00:43 bob_d says:
@ Thants: Google it. Various industry sales trackers all point in the same downwards direction, though as Rinox points out, they don’t track download sales. Digital distribution may more than double the box sales numbers, but the PC game is still in competition with consoles, online game item sales, MMO subscriptions, and phone games that weren’t part (or at least a significant part) of the market even 10 years ago.
@ Rinox: You are correct, but the most optimistic guestimates (with *more* downloads than box sales) I’ve seen on digital distribution still don’t put the sales numbers on much of an upwards curve. A modest upwards slope would still be bad, though: game development costs have always been on an fairly steep upward climb, and while game sales were on the same slope, things were fine. The “expected costs” and “potential revenue” lines for AAA titles are in the process of actually crossing over right now, so even a best selling game can lose money, which is pretty much the first time in the industry’s history that this is true. What this means is the entire funding model for the industry is in the final stages of the process of breaking.
@Sombrero Kid: “60% of activisions revenue is from pc”
Translation: World of Warcraft is keeping Activision afloat. This is actually bad for the industry as a whole, as MMOs are the cost-efficient time sinks of the gaming world. That means WoW players aren’t buying as many games as they otherwise would, nor spending as much money on games overall as they otherwise would. WoW dominates the PC sales charts when a new expansion comes out, and there was a month or two last year where the top half of the top-10 sales chart was Blizzard games (none of which were new, and two of them were 9 year old games). That is NOT a good sign for PC game sales.
“xbox live has 10 million subscribers… steam…”
Unfortunately those numbers don’t say *anything* about how many games people are buying, nor how much money they’re spending on those games.
“xbox 360 install base…”
The Xbox and (especially) PS3 install bases are actually pretty bad compared to the previous generation of console sales and especially to console game development costs right now. Developers are having to make games cross-platform just to make their money back. Just because the PC is doing poorly doesn’t mean the console isn’t *also* doing poorly…
“…pc install base 250 million…”
250 million is how many PCs were *sold last year,* but that includes business machines (which traditionally is the majority) and low end netbooks and computers bought purely for web-surfing; higher-end “gaming machines” for home use have actually made up a smaller minority of sales than usual in the last year or two. Plus, what does “gaming machine” even mean, when freaking *Apple* owns 90%+ of the high-end PC market at the moment (n the US at least)? Again this says nothing about how people use their computers or what games they buy (they could all be playing Farmville).
30/06/2010 at 22:53 Nick says:
Yeah, I’m sure that was why B&W 2 and The Movies didn’t sell well. Oh well, Fable and onwards are all arse anyway so beyond some interesting ideas (which rarely get implemented well) I think its him that went downhill. Smart at spotting the end of the PC.. riiiiiiight.
01/07/2010 at 09:26 myros says:
Exactly what I thought reading that. The Movies being little more than an average game had nothing to do with it being ‘to complex’.
Ive noticed that with a lot of statements Molyneux makes, he seems to exist in his own little temporal universe where cause and effect are whatever he decides they are.
Interesting character anyway.
01/07/2010 at 10:49 Idle Threats & Bad Poetry says:
I own the movies. I still do on Steam, but I’ll never play it again.
Maybe by complex he meant “tried to be two different things at the same time.” While it was trying to be a game and a machinima studio, it was only mediocre at implementing both things. Some players just really wanted to make movies, but the unlocking-through-gameplay mechanic REALLY got in the way of that, not to mention other aspects of gameplay, like movie star fatigue. On the other hand, it was sort of a movie themed “Sims” game, which wasn’t bad but wasn’t wonderful either.
01/07/2010 at 11:28 RagingLion says:
For the record, I really loved Black and White 2.
01/07/2010 at 17:35 Bremze says:
I really liked B&W even with it’s numerous faults, but absolutely hated the sequel. It simply ripped out most of the stuff, that made B&W good and then replaced it with even more tedious micromanagement, which was already bad enough in the first game.
02/07/2010 at 18:00 disperse says:
@Bremze
I agree. I loved the idea of B&W but the execution left a lot to be desired. The “iconless interface” was horrible; the movement was like being a paraplegic dragging yourself across a glass table. And the parts I liked (interaction with your creature and villagers in a sandbox) were overshadowed by the parts I didn’t (RTS, crappy fighting game).
30/06/2010 at 22:53 westyfield says:
“HiOctane
[only sold 300,000 copies - it was made in six and half weeks when Bullfrog realised they couldn't meet their original deadline for Dungeon Keeper, but still had to get a game out]”
Does this sort of thing happen a lot? It was a bit of a ‘woah, wait, what?’ moment when I read that.
01/07/2010 at 03:48 TenjouUtena says:
It used too, at least. Contracts with publishers usually listed games and deadlines, but not _specific titles_, so development companies would &$@! out stuff to stay in contract and continue to get funding.
In fact, according to myth and legend or whatnot, studios would buy almost complete games from other studios to ‘release’ them.
30/06/2010 at 22:54 Mike says:
How can such an awesome guy be so unawesome towards PC:P
30/06/2010 at 22:54 Moni says:
Aww, nothing about Magic Carpet?
30/06/2010 at 22:55 Nick says:
Yeah, that was really ahead of its time with its terrain deformation and so on, great fun too, shame about the sequel.
30/06/2010 at 22:56 Alec Meer says:
He did say a couple of lines, but for some reason my notes just say “MagicCarp” at that point. Just couldn’t type fast enough, basically.
30/06/2010 at 23:14 Alec Meer says:
Just been through almost inaudible recording, and in fact he says almost nothing about it. I’ve dropped his reference into the quotes above anyway.
01/07/2010 at 00:06 Omroth says:
Magic Carpet certainly my favorite of the lot. I read somewhere he didn’t do much design on it – that could be why he isn’t talking much about it.
30/06/2010 at 22:54 Nick says:
Also his comments on why he thinks some of the Bullfrog classics sold well illustrate the fact he just doesn’t get it.
30/06/2010 at 22:59 edosan says:
Peter should really let Blizzard know that The End of the PC came and went so long ago — they should know about that.
01/07/2010 at 00:16 RC-1290'Dreadnought' says:
He isn’t talking about something that happened or is happening, he is talking about the cataclysmic event that will remove all personal computers from the world, somewhere next year.
30/06/2010 at 23:00 Amarth says:
@Nick: What was wrong with Magic Carpet 2?
30/06/2010 at 23:08 Nick says:
I dunno, I just found it kind of boring compared to the first one, never really been able to put my finger on exactly why, I just didn’t enjoy it anywhere near as much. Plus the final boss was a really boring slog.
30/06/2010 at 23:01 jackflash says:
PC didn’t go downhill. Molyneux did.
30/06/2010 at 23:52 Dominic White says:
Last I checked, he was raking in the cash hand over fist. He’s head of Microsoft Games Studios Europe now, or something, and the Fable series have been his biggest selling games by far.
He’s moved away from niche PC gaming, and into being ridiculously popular. The level of denial from the internet is amusing.
01/07/2010 at 00:05 Mr Labbes says:
Fable is not in any way inventive, though. It’s fun, and I enjoyed playing it, but Mr Molyneux is not the kind of creative genius he thinks he is.
Also, Milo and Kate.
01/07/2010 at 02:04 Nick says:
Dominic, considering the marketplace has exploded in size since his last successful “niche PC game” its hardly surprising the Fable series has sold more, now is it?
01/07/2010 at 03:08 Manley Pointer says:
Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper: brilliant, creative games. From the way Molyneux discusses them, you can tell he has no idea what made them good. Fable & Fable II are half-interesting implementations of ideas that have been around a long time in RPGs. He “went downhill” when he decided to play it safe and take fewer risks. He harms the industry in general by posing as a creative force, when he’s really only interested in delivering generic products and trumpeting his own genius. He’s a marketing man, not a creative man.
01/07/2010 at 14:11 jackflash says:
Dominic, I wasn’t referring to the amount of money he makes.
02/07/2010 at 23:02 Jimbo says:
Actually, I suspect Populous sold more copies than Fable 1 or 2 (internet seems to agree) – and obviously on a fraction of the budget. I wouldn’t be surprised if Theme Park sales were up there too.
Fable sells well, but not *that* well.
30/06/2010 at 23:10 Dominus says:
Peter did some great titles back in the days, but know all that matters to him are money.
30/06/2010 at 23:14 Bruce Rambo says:
Dungeon Keeper? Too complex? What :(
I loved that game and its sequel. I’m still disappointed we never got a third installment, although I’ll admit I wasn’t a fan of the way they tried to make it story based …
30/06/2010 at 23:15 Mitza says:
I used to love this guy, but he managed to turn that admiration into ignorance. Funny thing is, I can forgive him for the hype he (and not the fansites, Peter) created around Black&White but he forever lost me at Milo. Watched that presentation and just wanted to slap some sense into him.
30/06/2010 at 23:20 Jimbo says:
Bullfrog were just incredible. In 5 years around ’90 they put out Populous, Syndicate, Magic Carpet and Theme Park (amongst others). In the last 5 years, Lionhead have made Fable.
Honestly, a little bit depressing what the industry has forced Molyneux to become in order to remain successful. His studios have very closely mirrored the overall state of the industry, I’ll say that much. The audience wants the same game over and over again, so that’s what the industry gives them. I don’t dislike Fable, it’s just that a man of Molyneux’s obvious and proven talent should not be wasting his legacy repeatedly making the same game. Especially a game as vanilla as Fable.
I’m a little surprised we haven’t heard about some kind of Black & White / Kinect game yet. That interface was absolutely ahead of its time and almost seems like it could have been built with Kinect in mind. The Kinectimals stuff also looks like it was lifted straight out of Black & White – I was half expecting the girl to start slapping Skittles across the face.
01/07/2010 at 01:26 Robin says:
Molyneux as gaming’s Ben Elton?
I think he made his own decisions rather than being railroaded into anything by the climate of the industry. Like Will Wright, he’s found a benefactor who wants something innovative and mainstream but can’t articulate what that is, and with a great deal of spectacle and showmanship delivers something that ticks the necessary boxes.
01/07/2010 at 01:43 Archonsod says:
I’m not sure Molyneux deserves all the credit for Bullfrog’s success. I mean Muckyfoot was also ex-Bullfrog, and what little they produced (Urban Chaos, Startopia) is still head and shoulders over anything Lionhead have produced.
30/06/2010 at 23:21 BigJonno says:
He may waffle on at times, but I’ve yet to play a Molyneux game I didn’t enjoy and I’ll still take him over ten generic FPS designers any day.
30/06/2010 at 23:22 godwin says:
BTW, speaking of Populous, and ‘god games’ etc. I just saw this, don’t think it was reported during E3
http://kotaku.com/5574590/someone-talented-is-making-video-games-best-volcano
It doesn’t mention PC, but Eric Chahi says yes in an interview
http://www.facebook.com/notes/project-dust/qa-with-project-dust-creative-director-eric-chahi/125651140808038
01/07/2010 at 14:16 jackflash says:
Done by the creator of Out of this World? Sold.
30/06/2010 at 23:25 The Great Wayne says:
Haha… Hahahahahaha. End of the PC, good one.
The guy seems he could use some sort of humilty. Or just stop taking drugs.
30/06/2010 at 23:28 Frankie The Patrician[PF] says:
Amiga players: PC is DEAD!
PS1 players: PC is DEAD!
PS2 players: PC is DEAD!
N64 players: PC is DEAD!
XBOX players: PC is DEAD
XBOX360 players: PC is DEAD!
PS3 players: PC is DEAD!
etc. etc.
And I laugh every bloody time. Srsly, they are like Augustinus Aurelius expecting the second coming of Jesus Christ..
01/07/2010 at 01:27 Antsy says:
So true. I remember being told that when I splashed out on a Pentium 2 400. PC Gaming will continue as long as PCs are sitting in people’s homes. Also, I’ve NEVER been asked to get off the PC because Generic Soap Girly Bollocks Reality Makeover Programme #23422 is about to start.
So, there’s that….
01/07/2010 at 10:43 Ravenger says:
One of the primary advantages! My PC is MY PC. I don’t have to stop playing my PC games to let my wife and kids watch the brainless tat that passes for TV these days.
One of the reasons I rarely play my Wii (despite having some good games on it) is that it’s on the main TV downstairs, so I have to almost ask permission to play it. So I don’t even bother.
30/06/2010 at 23:32 Auspex says:
Strange that he didn’t mention his inventing of the dog.
I suppose he was only talking about games though.
30/06/2010 at 23:35 Tei says:
The people like Molyneus created art and science, and are now doomed to make Fable 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 , 9 , 10 , 11, 12, 13, 14,… tills his mortal body dead, and beyond. He has done more in the PC in 4 weeks, that he will do in his whole life in the consoles.
But he is a cool dude, and has made some of my favorite games, so thanks for that :-)
30/06/2010 at 23:36 Jimbo says:
Gaming moving from consoles to Facebook is not a victory.
30/06/2010 at 23:37 Freud says:
The last game that had his name on it which I really enjoyed was Syndicate. Dungeon Keeper was of course an awesome idea but turned out to be rather boring to play. Everything since I haven’t been close to finishing since they were so boring.
Granted, I haven’t played Fable II and it might be awesome. Fable was horrible though so I suspect not.
30/06/2010 at 23:38 Freud says:
Sorry, missed Magic Carpet II. That one I also enjoyed quite a bit.
30/06/2010 at 23:37 Monkeybreadman says:
Maybe he was referring to an unreleased fantasy fishing simulator
30/06/2010 at 23:39 Monkeybreadman says:
REPLY BUTTON HATES ME.
That was to Alec and his MagicCarp reference
01/07/2010 at 00:01 Mr Labbes says:
I hear Milo and Kate has fish who read your movements and emotions and can react accordingly. It’s quite impressive, the Kinect.
30/06/2010 at 23:48 Ricc says:
Well, if he said “The viability of making PC games the way we used to is dead.” then I’d probably believe him. He certainly didn’t abandon the platform for no reason. I’m still glad that Fable 3 will also be on the PC. Maybe not for this one, but the next Lionhead game, anyways.
30/06/2010 at 23:49 Sinnerman says:
I really enjoyed Syndicate and Theme Park on the Amiga but I can’t be doing with games like Fable at all. Not even sure what it is supposed to be. A bad Zelda game with farting simulator attached? It’s probably for the kids though and I shouldn’t judge it.
30/06/2010 at 23:49 Ed says:
So he blamed PowerMonger’s failings on David Braben and Jez San being elitist (pardon the pun) about the language (C) that he used to write Populous.
What a load of twaddle – it’s not as if the language the game is written in has any bearing on the game’s design – in fact writing a game in Assembler would in most cases likely reduce the scope for complex gameplay on account of it being bastard hard to write and debug.
Also, it’s not like he was under any obligation to write it in ASM. He chose to do so.
My opinion of the man has lessened. I suspect I shall be writing more comments in this thread…
01/07/2010 at 00:56 Stijn says:
You know… that remark might’ve been tongue-in-cheek.
01/07/2010 at 00:01 Dave L. says:
“it combed your PC to find who you are, so if you were playing after midnight it would whisper your name on the speakers. “Peeeeeeter…” Wait, what? I’m quite certain that Black & White never did anything remotely like this. Was he so out of touch with the development of that game that he thinks features got in that never existed?
01/07/2010 at 00:10 Ed says:
It did, you know.
It had a database of player names voice-overed by the same person who whispered “deaaaaath”.
Utterly pointless, of course.
01/07/2010 at 00:17 Salt says:
Black and White did indeed whisper your name. It was pretty rare, and your name had to be on a list of those that they’d recorded, and the game had to manage to find out what your name is (it may have just gone off what you named your profile when you started the game.)
B&W was full of so much innovation. Most of it didn’t really work, but I loved seeing it all.
01/07/2010 at 10:04 Ovno says:
Definately, used to whisper “Deeeaaaaatttthhhhh and Riiiccchhharrrddd” used to freak me right out especially as no one believed me….
01/07/2010 at 11:37 Rinox says:
Also, in Dungeon Keeper, the game would announce “IT IS WITCHING HOUR” at midnight and (iirc) make it cheaper to cast some spells for a while. Fit the game so perfectly!!
01/07/2010 at 11:48 Boldoran says:
I can verify it did. And man did it freak me out. It happend out of the blue and I did not belive my ears so I turned to my brother who was sitting right next to me at the time and asked him if the game just called me by name.
Fortunatly he heard it too and so I did not have to question my sanity.
01/07/2010 at 00:08 Andy_Panthro says:
I’ve always viewed Peter Molyneux as a sort of Jekyll and Hyde character.
He talks big, he makes good presentations and he seems to still have good ideas in his head. However, it seems that those ideas aren’t fully realised in his games these days. Perhaps it’s because there are too many people involved in making games, and too many compromises are made.
01/07/2010 at 00:13 Shagittarius says:
Molyneux designs games the same way Mr. Garrison designs cars.
01/07/2010 at 00:27 Ed says:
Ah but Mr. Garrison didn’t hype up emergent properties of the cars he designs – and Mr. Garrison had legitimate cause to blame others for the failing of his products.
The interfaces are pretty much the same, though.
01/07/2010 at 00:20 Ted Brown says:
I think it’s fair to say that Peter might not mean “the PC is dead” as a platform, but that its interface (mouse and keyboard) is too complex, and limits the potential audience. Consoles, on the other hand, have a simplified interface, which plays well to his game design goals. Consoles, in other words, are more mainstream, and I think that’s where he wants to be.
01/07/2010 at 00:26 somnolentsurfer says:
With the possible exception of the touch screen, the mouse is the single simplest input method yet devised.
01/07/2010 at 01:14 Ted Brown says:
Sure, a mouse is elegant. But it’s made for selecting and moving things. In game terms, you’re pretty much talking strategy games, which are not mainstream. You have to add a keyboard to really flesh out a PC’s control possibilities.
Do you know of a traditional, console-style action game (like, say, Fable II) that uses just a mouse?
01/07/2010 at 01:40 pkt-zer0 says:
Does Silver count?
01/07/2010 at 01:55 Archonsod says:
The Sims can be played with only the mouse, and it’s hard to think of a game that could be more mainstream.
Though the real question is whether the keyboard is a necessity or a convenience. You could probably play most games with the mouse alone, but since most people have two hands and a keyboard you’d want to take advantage of it even though it’s not necessary (see pretty much every RTS game).
01/07/2010 at 02:05 karthik says:
I find the keyboard and mouse setup much easier and more intuitive than a controller.
I think it’s just an issue of what you were introduced to first.
01/07/2010 at 07:05 Thants says:
The idea that mainstream games are made for people who think the mouse and keyboard are too complex is very depressing.
01/07/2010 at 10:52 Reiver says:
I feel that so many console games work around the limitations of the controller and end up with a less than perfect interface. So much is context sensitive but that’s very limiting as it results in a lot of frustration as a open the window and slide in stealthily can, with a dodgy detection, become a smash the window and alert everyone (Splinter Cell) or a jump to a ledge can become a leap of faith (ass Creed 2). Not that a keyboard is perfect but i find that in PC games the fault lies with me more than the controls.
01/07/2010 at 14:17 Jad says:
For someone who just stepped out of some Stone-Age Amazonian tribe, a console controller might be less intimidating than a mouse & keyboard, yes. But anyone who has used an electronic device more complex than a television has used a mouse and keyboard, and probably for thousands of hours. My grandmother knows how to use a mouse & keyboard. She can probably type at a higher WPM than me, she was a secretary after all. She has never picked up a controller as far as I know. Ask her where the WASD keys are, she’ll know without looking. Which one is the triangle button on a Playstation controller? What the heck is a “right bumper” on the Xbox?
01/07/2010 at 00:24 somnolentsurfer says:
Did he talk about Creation at all? I remember being well psyched about that for a time.
01/07/2010 at 00:25 Xercies says:
I quite like him and i haven’t found fault in any of his games that he made(though I never got into the hype of Black and Whit, and Fab;e so i guess that colours my impressions a bit) but i do think he has sold out a bit to much to the all seeing eye of microsoft and he seems to be just making fable sequels which is a wasted talent really for him since he should be making really innovative games. Damn you microsoft!
01/07/2010 at 00:41 Pijama says:
For all his brilliance, he is becoming quite an arsehole.
01/07/2010 at 01:10 Dominic White says:
To be fair, his ‘fans’ have been baying for his blood and making angry, backhanded comments pretty much incessantly since Black & White.
01/07/2010 at 00:44 unclebulgaria says:
Syndicate is why I own a PC. I played on a mate’s computer for about an hour then spent four hours on a Sunday night working out how I could research miniguns – budget, forecast, the works.
I spent the next six months badgering my parents into getting me a PC – which was then delivered with a copy of Colonization to boot!
I cannot ever remember being so happy. Peter and Sid wasted my mid-teens – and it was glorious.
01/07/2010 at 00:46 Postal says:
What does it say about this man that he is so negative about his work? He really didn’t have much of anything positive to say and I think that’s puzzling. I have very fond memories of Populous, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper etc… Even if the games did have problems, they were still great. Why does he see all these games through such a dark prism? These games weren’t overcomplicated! That’s pure craziness. Dungeon Keeper was genius. If he thinks PC gaming is dying, that his games were too complicated, and that the future is with console titles that are a safe bet rather than innovative and daring… it means he has rationalized selling out to the point where he sees his past triumphs as failures. That is some powerful rationalization.
01/07/2010 at 00:46 Schwolop says:
It absolutely did do this, and I remember being completely freaked out by it the first time. And the weather thing was awesome! And the winamp dancing bear plugin. And the smiley face footprints on April Fools’ Day. And the fact that some programmer spent hours writing vibration code for a mouse that <1% of their audience owned.
Black and White was an amazing game with hundreds of flaws that I couldn't care less about. The ideas Peter thinks were stupid and pointless now are some of the things I remember the most. I've long said my biggest disappointment with Fable 1 was realizing when the citizens first called me "Chicken-chaser" that it wasn't actually anything to do with all the chickens I'd been kicking. Seriously. How hard would it be to choose a title based on statistics of what the character had been doing recently? About a few hour's worth of programming hard? If that?
01/07/2010 at 01:00 rmyroberts says:
If he considers The Movies “too complex”, then I really don’t want to see what he’ll come up with next… though admittedly I never really cared about or played most of his games, now that I look back through them.
It didn’t have a lot of replay value, but I don’t think excessive complexity is something you could blame it for. Anyone who’s played any RTS before should be able to figure it out. I thought the floorplan interface for managing stars and employees was pretty clever, and the game as a whole was pretty fun and had good production values.
Unless he means “too complex” as in “too ambitious” (heh!) or “too much stuff to code” (as in the make-your-own movie feature, etc.)… but I don’t think the game shipped with unfinished features or anything, at least none that I can recall.
01/07/2010 at 01:09 roBurky says:
That bit about the making of Theme Park is very depressing.
01/07/2010 at 07:17 Tei says:
Theme Park is 100% psychological terrorism. Wen a children is lost (pathfinding problems with your design) he start cryiing, and YOU CANT STOP IT, and IT GOES AND GOES AND GOES.
We are wired in a way, that earing a baby children activate all the alerts, and press all the buttons ( Ask any newbie parent ).
01/07/2010 at 01:14 Psychopomp says:
Considering he’s gone on record lately saying that Fable 2 was too complex, not really surprised that he thought his best stuff was too much.
01/07/2010 at 01:18 BooleanBob says:
*reinstalls Theme Hospital*
01/07/2010 at 12:57 pulseezar says:
I think that was one of the first playstation games I bought. Bloaty Head, King Complex, 3rd degree sideburns…loved it!
01/07/2010 at 01:39 Billy says:
I went to GameHorizon last year and State of Interpendence (supposedly indie oriented) this year, they’re interesting conferences but always left a bad taste in my mouth because the whole conference is about games as a business. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s very much a business oriented conference and you expect to hear talks from Playfish and IP consulting firms and whatnot, but when listening to people like Molyneux, the Oliver twins and so on (although Charles Cecil was a real exception) talk, it’s very much about creating games with the most stable and profitable financial results.
This is a completely unfounded opinion, but I always get the feeling that the years of the endless strain of development and securing finance has either jaded or sucked the creativity out of them. Both with Lionhead’s attachment to Kinect and Blitz’ attachment to 3D tech, they seem like they want to do something innovative but are looking for completely external sources to draw from.
Every conference and session lately seems to be about accessibility*, microtransactions and social gaming, with the whole justification for doing these games being entirely financial but with a sense of puppetmastery over the consumer, like they’re cattle we should herd around until they run out of milk. Every game is a product of what consumers are perceived to pay for, with design revolving around psychology over design-craft (or art or whatever you want to call it). There’s also a disregard for where morals lie in the process of designing games with this sort of predatory attitude, it’s like a subject everyone ignores or laughs off because you can just call it ‘business savvy’.
Don’t get me wrong, i’m not implying all games should be made with no consumer in mind and obviously there’s an implicit relationship between obtaining funding, publishing, etc, and creating games which have very high chances of making significant profit. It just seems like (and maybe this is just my young person’s personal view that’s out of step with the rest of the industry) that lately it’s getting a bit overboard and that’s half the reason for the surge in independent development, specifically people leaving big companies to work on their dream ideas. It seems like another of many crossroads for games where it hasn’t been decided whether the current games industry (not games as a whole) is a creative medium or a tool of business and advertising (including advertising for virtual items that you sell).
* Accessibility in this case refers to making interaction with the game simpler, not making concessions for the physically impaired. The problem with making interaction simpler is that preserving the depth of possibilities becomes (on a case by base basis) increasingly impossible the more the interface is simplified.
01/07/2010 at 02:02 Archonsod says:
It’s generally the way with most creative industries once the money moves in. Back when gaming was a niche market companies were largely ran by people who were gamers themselves, and understood their market. Now it’s big business companies are largely ran by businessmen who don’t understand the market. As with music, film and TV they’ll pump out highly successful clones for a few years, until the market moves on and they bomb because there’s nobody left who has any idea of how to be successful anymore. And then the cycle begins again …
01/07/2010 at 10:09 Tarqon says:
Wow, I think you nailed it. Sounds like the gaming industry is becoming the film industry.
01/07/2010 at 01:46 Bassism says:
He may have made some of my favourite games in all of history, but that has definitely changed by now.
You can’t just blame your failures on games being “too complex”, the PC dying, or by saying “He did it.” DK was a success precisely because it was a complex game, which was also gifted with a great interface. Black and White 2 failed because it forgot the things that made the first one engaging (probably in the never ending search for simplicity.
Anyway, I’m terribly disappointed by the fact that some of the greatest PC developers, having made some of the greatest, most complex games ever, have now decided that greater simplicity and streamlining is the way of the future. Yes, greater accessibility is great. But accessible does not necessarily equal simple. That’s just the easiest way of going about it.
Ah well, there is plenty of new talent in the world that isn’t afraid of trying something new.
01/07/2010 at 02:05 Archonsod says:
It depends who’s saying it I think. When someone like Sid Meier talks about simplicity he usually means “cutting out the clutter to get the player back to the core elements of the game”. When Molyneux says it he means “cutting down the core of the game so we can include more clutter”.
01/07/2010 at 14:37 Optimaximal says:
I suppose it depends how you look at it. When you consider how ground-breaking & complex some of their games were, simplification is the only way to go, especially if you need to sell it these days.
Take Civilisation – Civ V adds visual hexes because its visually & mechanically simpler than trying to explain the numpad system from Civ IV, even though most take it for granted.
I also didn’t find Black & White engaging at all, pretty much because the interface was simple yet broken – it seemed like it was solely designed for that 3D Game Orb controller or whatever it was that came out around the same time.
01/07/2010 at 01:57 dave says:
Twat.
PC games rely on complexity and its what we crave. Not everybody is your “Yahtzee” Croshaw tard.
I want arcane twiddley bits and depth not “linear shooter 79″
For a guy who had a hand in some of gamings most illustrious moments i am dissapoint.
01/07/2010 at 02:04 Thiefsie says:
PM has fallen so far from grace it is depressing. He hasn’t made a decent game in years, although Fable was passable. He’s completely changed tack from innovative interesting gaming developer to boring faddish twit developer, who bemoans 90% of his past work which is widely regarded at the least as highly influential…. fable/movies… not much so.
01/07/2010 at 02:25 beatoangelico says:
Molyneux hasn’t done a thing right in 10 years and we are still dumb enough to listen to him.
01/07/2010 at 03:20 WiPa says:
Why did nobody tell me PC is dead?
Later guys, i’m going to buy Kinect.
01/07/2010 at 03:48 Vinraith says:
He was good for the Populous games and Dungeon Keepe. Shame he’s been tailing off and going downhill for the last decade. All this discussion of past greats being “too complex” is an immediate flag that he won’t be making anything interesting in the foreseeable future.
01/07/2010 at 12:23 Adam Whitehead says:
This reminds of when Relic said they could only make HOMEWORLD 3 if they simplified it, as the original, fairly simple and intuitive interface, was ‘too complex’ for most people to handle these days. Shocking.
01/07/2010 at 14:38 Optimaximal says:
Homeworld blew most peoples minds because they couldn’t handle the 3D space on a 2D monitor…
01/07/2010 at 15:46 ChaK_ says:
I thought homeworld 3 we in developpement, somewhere :’(
you broke my dream
01/07/2010 at 18:26 Bruce Rambo says:
I’m not sure why anyone would think Homeworld was too complex – apart from perhaps two maps that were on the z-axis, there was very little NEED to work in the full three dimensions.
Of course, you got massive benefits by doing so as armour was directional…
Most modern games that claim to be fully 3D are far from it. None have come close to matching Homeworld, even games that are vaguely similar (Sins of a Solar Empire/Sword of the Stars/etc)
If you want a game that used 3D space that WAS too complex for most people, look at Nexus. The primary reason for that was the interface being shite. A Homeworld style movement disk/plane would have made it much more responsive and accessible. Of course, nobody ever played that game…
01/07/2010 at 04:10 Pijama says:
Considering that I know a fair share of people that would give one of their fingers for a Syndicate/DK/Populous sequel, I still say he has his head deep stuck on his arse. Post-MS sellout vanity, perhaps?
01/07/2010 at 05:22 Urthman says:
He may come across as a jerk in interviews, but his Twitter feed is hysterically funny:
http://twitter.com/petermolyneux2
01/07/2010 at 09:32 Michael says:
That’s fake, a friend of mine writes that.
It’s certainly a spot-on parody, though!
01/07/2010 at 18:09 Urthman says:
I thought it would be funnier to let people discover that for themselves.
(Not much funnier, as the twitter feed is super funny either way.)
Natal can tell if you’re crying. Imagine if for some reason you had a mission where you were REQUIRED to cry to pass a gate. Interesting…
Question. Would you be willing to have a surgical operation to play a game that is at least 100 times more immersive than anything else?
3D gaming? What if the game characters saw the GAMER in 3D instead of the other way around?
“DLC” is so robotic and mechanical at the moment isn’t it? What IF… “DLC” was an breathing living entity?
Imagine if in E.T he was wearing your fave shirt at the end, your tears would be increased by at least 25%.
Something we didn’t mention at E3. Milo can detect if someone in your house is pregnant.
01/07/2010 at 05:26 Mo says:
I can pinpoint the exact moment Peter Molyneux “jumped the shark”, so to speak:
It happened when he wrote a letter to Lionhead fans apologizing for leaving out some of the features he “promised” in Fable.
Yes, you read that correctly, “promised”. You know, he used to get *so* excited about his games that he couldn’t help but talk about them. He’d talk about the stuff that was in there, the stuff his team was working on, his vision for the game. He’d talk about things he wanted to stick in there. He was excited, he got carried away, whatever. He was *passionate*.
And now? I died a little on the inside when, prefacing a demo of Fable 2, Molyneux said, “I’m not going to talk about a feature until I can demo it for you”.
Ladies and gentlemen, you are absolutely correct. Molyneux isn’t the same designer he used to be. But the fault lies (at least) partially with us. We have entitlement issues. We sucked the creativity out of him. We demanded FACTS! and PROMISES! not lofty ambition and vision. We turned Molyneux into a responsible adult. Is it surprising at all that his mind doesn’t wander as far as it used to?
01/07/2010 at 06:26 Dave L. says:
I’d almost agree with you if the Milo presentation at last year’s E3 hadn’t been dripping snake oil everywhere.
01/07/2010 at 07:19 Mo says:
That’s not entirely fair though. Yes, the whole demo was somewhat contrived. But the press got their hands on it too, no? I just re-read the Eurogamer preview, a brief preview granted, but it’s not like Milo is complete bullshit. Honestly, compared to the Kinect demos this year, I’d say Milo was pretty complete and functional.
Here’s the thing though: it’s all beside the point. Let me ask you this: is anyone in the industry doing anything *half* as batshit insane as Milo? Anyone at all? Of course Milo isn’t going to be perfect. Like everything Molyneux has done before, Milo will be flawed. But it’s refreshing, it’s original, it’s over ambitious, in the same way I remember Black & White.
01/07/2010 at 07:24 Lacero says:
I thought they’d canned it? vg247 had a quote about it being a tech demo and not necessarily intended for release. I could be wrong.
01/07/2010 at 09:11 Mo says:
A misunderstanding, apparently. Molyneux says it’s a full game, they’ve got 50 people working it at Lionhead, and it’s most certainly not canned. The truth, I think, lies somewhere in between. It’s not quite a full game yet, but it’s advanced substantially past a tech demo.
01/07/2010 at 12:30 Adam Whitehead says:
Molyneux’s promises for game features were hystrically funny.
BLACK AND WHITE
Promised: A work of towering and astronomical genius which would force anyone who played it to explode from the sheer awesomeness of playing the game. You would be a God, you could be good or evil, there were no on-screen controls, the possibilities were endless.
Reality: Bovine abuse simulator.
FABLE
Promised: An alternate-life simulator where you could get married and have children and there’d be a point to doing so, the game would dramatically shift around your decisions and the game’s moral code would be complex and challenging.
Reality: Bioware-lite.
Crazy Mentalist Molyneux is fun, and we got some more of that last year with his predictions of Milo, the sentient artificial boy who will dwell within your X-Box 360 and talk to you when you come home from work, which was so funny The Onion couldn’t out-do it if it tried.
01/07/2010 at 05:39 wyrmsine says:
Loved Black & White, precisely for all those mad, unnecessary features they included, and the weird,sprawling discontinuities of it’s implementation. Playing a generous, loving god was made all the sweeter with the instrument of my divine benevolence inexplicably evolving into a black, mangy beast that drowned our worshipers in it’s own excrement. Raised Catholic, FWIW.
01/07/2010 at 06:03 badoli says:
Hey, i LOVED the sequel… One of the few games that got me totally hooked. Mind you, i didn’t have the first title back then. But hey, you could cast a freaking METEORSTORM onto the land burning all and everything! Or create a chasm of a mile long as if it was only a tap on the table…
What happened to all the terraforming ideas? We have like a 100 times powerful machines everywhere, but the enviroments seem to have become more and more static…
01/07/2010 at 13:31 jeremypeel says:
There’s a great Warren Spector interview over at Edge right now in which he talks about terraforming basically being one of the key inspirations for Epic Mickey. And you should all read it anyway, even if it isn’t coming to PC.
http://www.edge-online.com
01/07/2010 at 18:02 Ragnar says:
@jeremypeel
Thank you for that link. Epic Mickey looks to be a really good game. And Spector says all the right things. I might even buy a Wii just to play that game (hint: I’ve never owned a console).
01/07/2010 at 20:43 jeremypeel says:
I’m going to be hijacking my brother’s Wii when the time comes. I for one am especially excited knowing the concept – I always loved Fantasia and the Sorceror’s Apprentice segment was particularly amazing.
01/07/2010 at 06:24 Dave L. says:
In response to the responses to my previous response (Login doesn’t seem to work for main page responses for me anymore. I assume this has something to do with separating Main Page comments threads from the forums. Why did you guys do that?):
Huh. I never once had it say my name, and I spent way more hours in Black & White than I really should have, considering.
01/07/2010 at 07:13 c-Row says:
Fun, yeah, but how was Dungeon Keeper “complex”? Every map pretty much plays the same, they just get larger.
01/07/2010 at 07:16 BLU_Soldier says:
I concur. I’ve never liked this guy, especially his constant inability to keep his mouth shut about what they’re going to include in a game. Fable was a huge disappointment to play, mostly because of the hype he himself had built.
Really, amongst those games, I like theme park the most. Except for the fact that ultimately you kill yourself unless you’re some kind of sick pro.
01/07/2010 at 07:25 Rond says:
Smart, accessibility, consoles, money, smart.
Really boring stuff. I mean, if some people find some games unaccessible, maybe there’s a problem with people? Maybe there’s no reason to dumb down pretty well everything? Ah, there is a reason – increased income.
01/07/2010 at 08:06 little grilly says:
oddly enough, for some reason i remembered ’4d sports driving’ the other day, and the way that the internal clock was variable like you say, but the timer wasn’t – so by turning the detail right down to minimum, you actually drove faster and could get high scores.
ah the days of fun glitches…
01/07/2010 at 08:14 the_fanciest_of_pants says:
See the problem with Peter’s stuff is he USED to care about doing something different, but after Black & White it became about sales. His work has seen a sharp degradation in quality and interest ever since.
Personally I count Populous, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper and Black & White 1 among some of my favorite games, and it’s a shame that he abandoned that line of thinking.
01/07/2010 at 08:26 Simonkey75 says:
Well, I must be in the minority but I like the guy. I like the tendency to promise the moon. To me it shows a deep-founded love of games and what they could be capable of being, rather than the (sadly) endless re-tread of tropes we’ve already seen. Whether he ever delivers on such ideas is of course moot, but if nothing else the desire to innovate and push gaming on into new territories should be applauded, even if PM’s failures only provide inspiration to others to actually succeed.
The fact that he wants such ideas to reach the widest possible market, and that he believes simplification and the console market are the ways to do so are hardly a stick to beat him with, are they?
Milo and Kate may have been many things (and as mentioned above, that Eurogamer hands on and others made it clear it was not just codswallop) but at least it was attempting something original with the Natal (am I the only one who prefers that name to bloody Kinect?!) interface, Microsoft’s E3 display of, quel surprise, a bunch of Wii mini-game knock-offs was one of the most depressing things I’ve ever witnessed.
01/07/2010 at 08:33 Tei says:
He is obsesed with streamlining. He has been obsesed with streamlining games years before the concept infected most game studios. And is not a good thing. Making games less complex is just another idea, and is has not more weight than pretty color, fun story, fast level loads, etc.. is not THE central point of a game. He was a consolized game dev, even before the consoles defined consolized. So you must factor this, at least a 50% of all his ambitions is to make the one game with a single button, the I WIN button.
01/07/2010 at 09:15 Simonkey75 says:
Streamlining is not inherently a bad thing for the wider audience who are still not particularly game-literate, though. Removing barriers of entry should be applauded. Even as someone who has been playing games for 28 years, I now find that I don’t have the desire to wade through complex mechanics to get to the heart of a game’s experience. I did ten years ago, but not now that life has far too many elements competing for my time. Depth in games is a good thing, but depth and complexity are not always the same thing. I returned to PC gaming after 5 years in the console “wilderness” because I desired more diverse experiences than the Xbox, PS3 etc were offering me, not more complex ones. For that, the PC continues to reign supreme.
If the overall experience of playing an “I win” button game is memorable, interesting or moving, and it allows as many people to experience those same feelings as possible, bring it on I say.
01/07/2010 at 09:23 Tei says:
You have a point, streamlining could be a good thing. The Witcher has One Button for combat, and I like it, is fun and has not lack of tacticalities.
But my point is that is not the central point. And if 8 millions guys are playing the same singleplayer game than you, that don’t make the game x2 more fun (maybe x0.0001 more fun, since is another thing you share with lots of people, so theres another theme to talk about ). And,… I have played videogames for more than 20 years now. You think I need games to be made more simple? me, and lots of people don’t need that. The hell with the casuals and his facebook activities.
01/07/2010 at 09:52 Simonkey75 says:
I’m not saying that more people being able to play a game automatically makes it more fun, far from it, the game has to stand on its own merits. Just like any other game. But if it can do that and the interface barrier is low enough for anyone to pick it up and be able to actually play it, then that is what should be applauded.
I’m also not saying games should be more simple, but that the actual interfacing should not be so arcane as to be mystifying. Yes, Populous and Syndicate were great games for the niche of games-literate people, but put them in front of most people and they would find the interface incomprehensible bollocks.
As for “the hell with casuals”, niche PC gaming – the TF2s, Civilization and Starcraft’s of the world aren’t going anywhere, aren’t under threat no matter what industry doomsayers may like to pronounce. But those games are preaching to the converted. Personally, I think gaming is the greatest cultural thing to happen in my lifetime, and I want as many people in the world to get the pleasure I do from it. Expansion of the borders of the gaming community to encompass as many as possible is a good thing. Otherwise it’s just elitist bollocks to intentionally put up walls around our very own little garden.
I want my wife to play games and have fun. Put a mouse and keyboard or a 360 controller in her hands and she’s all over the place. Not because she’s a moron, not because she “doesn’t get it”, not because she doesn’t want to learn, but because those interfaces (and their implementation in games) remain more complex and arcane than they need to be. Put a Wiimote in her hand and she’s awesome. Once she gets her hands on Natal I’m sure she’ll be even better.
The important thing now is to leverage these streamlined controls to get better games in front of this expanded audience instead of lowest-common denominator shite. I don’t believe that the two are mutually exclusive. As I said above, the absolute lack of ambition Microsoft showed at E3 was heartbreaking. Peter Molyneux, for all his many flaws, does want to put better and different experiences in front of this still untapped demographic.
01/07/2010 at 10:30 alseT says:
@Simonkey75
Neither Starcraft nor TF2 are niche. They are the perfect example of easy to pick up and play, but they also have a lot of depth. Maybe Civ, I’ll give you that, but personally if someone can’t handle something moderately complex as Civ he has no business playing games.
01/07/2010 at 11:05 oceanclub says:
“Depth in games is a good thing, but depth and complexity are not always the same thing.”
That’s a good point; however, I felt that in Fable 2, it so simplified that, in all honesty, it’s about as much as an RPG as Sabre Wulf. If you stripped out the British jokeyness and funny descriptions, there’s hardly any game left. Follow the trailing of sparkling lights from cut-scene to cut-scene, and hit (A) where appropriate. Buy any house you come across and, if you don’t play the game often, since you earn money in _real-time_, you’ll soon have more money than you know what to do with, thereby rending the financial aspect of it meaningless.
P.
01/07/2010 at 11:06 Simonkey75 says:
Maybe “niche” was the wrong word, what I was getting at is show Starcraft’s interface to a general member of the public and they will be “WTF” – even TF2′s controls are beyond the majority of people. We gamers understand them instinctively because we have been conditioned in the language of “FPS” over the last two decades. WASD is not natural for most people.
As for your comment about Civ and people having no business playing games – exactly the elitist bollocks I was talking about. Everyone’s got a business playing games.
01/07/2010 at 11:10 Simonkey75 says:
@ oceanclub:
I’m not saying Molyneux gets it right – far from it. But he is reaching towards something, even if it’s fuzzy and ill-defined and oversold at times, that is different and more inclusive.
I suspect it will be designers picking up ideas strewn in his wake that will actually make them work.
01/07/2010 at 09:12 sfury says:
“He’s turned his attention to Kinect, and to the new wave of social games and microtransactions. Fable 3, rather surprisingly also due on PC, will be available as episodes, and feature purchasable in-game items, and, well, most of the buzzwords you can imagine. ”
If I had any excitement for Fable 3 it just evaporated.
01/07/2010 at 09:19 Tei says:
I can imagine Microsoft is somewhat like feudalist europe, with lots of mini-boss fighting for power, with zero or -1 sympathy for the peasant (that are less than peons). Making Fable 3 be distributed in the PC could have be the success of one of these miniboss and his feud, but the multi-transaction can be a counter-attack from a different minoboss.
01/07/2010 at 09:21 Okami says:
I used to like Molyneux, he was one of the few designers with vision out there. Turned out that his games could never live up to his promises and now he’s shifting the blame for that. Of course he’s admitting to having made a few mistakes along the way, but somehow he still tries to come across as nice and innocent. But the problem about Black and White weren’t the fans talking about giant blueberrys – the problem was all the other bullshit he lied about and that never made it into the game.
There was one early presentation of Black and White were some Lionhead guys were showing the engine and PM was talking about the game. He actually made stuff up while he was talking about B&W and the Lionhead guys presenting the game were cringing every time they heard him conjure up another fever dream.
Concerning Black and White 2: That was just a sub par game. Nothing to do with the pc underperforming at retail.
01/07/2010 at 10:06 jon_hill987 says:
Black and White 2 sold poorly because it was shit, not because of the “Decline of the PC”. It was just another RTS with a hero unit that happened to be a creature. There was no longer any real need to make your people believe in you and your godly abilities were just another way of attacking the enemy.
The idea of getting power from belief in B&W 1 was revolutionary, B&W 2 went back on that and gave us Age of Empires with a giant wolf tacked on.
01/07/2010 at 10:17 Gap Gen says:
“c’s not a proper language, you’re not a proper games indusry person, you should write in assembly language.”
Instant lack of respect for the person who said that.
01/07/2010 at 10:33 Tei says:
The person that said that, probably is now writting device drivers in C. (Irony Laws work like that).
What you have to see in that comment, is a person that can make your MS-DOS game a 20% faster. That was a nice thing to have, back then. And now looks like a blind and fun comment, but because we know better, and things have changed a lot.
01/07/2010 at 10:36 Baboonanza says:
The comment was made 20 years ago.
then != now
01/07/2010 at 10:38 Baboonanza says:
Also, one of the people you’re dissing is David Braben, creator of Elite.
01/07/2010 at 11:38 Tei says:
Oh.. this is fun.
Seems the creator of Elite has learned from Molyneux more than Molyneus learned from him.
It seems Braven is the CEO of “Frontier Development” that is the company behind… Kinectimals!!! TADA!!. Awesome.
So, I was wrong, he is not writting device drivers in C.
01/07/2010 at 11:40 Tei says:
In a way, this make Kinectimals “Black and White 3 – Lite”
01/07/2010 at 12:25 sfury says:
The horror, THE HORROR…
01/07/2010 at 21:06 Tei says:
Best Case Scenario:
Kinectimals has a hidden “Elite” mode, where you and your tiger pet get a ufo, and have infinite adventures exploring 9.000.000 different planets procedurally generated. Spore, made by the author of Elite.
Whorst Case Scenario:
Kinectimals has not deep at all. Is just you petting tigers.
01/07/2010 at 10:31 Baboonanza says:
What has come arcross from both this and the Emil interview is that designers are chasing accessibility. Obviously this helps game sales, but additionally I think deisgners want their game to be enjoyed by as many people as possible which is fair enough.
But I like complexity. I want to have to learn the rules to a new world when I start a game. If you take all of the complexity out in the name of accessibility and ‘strip down the experience’ (which also seems very popular at the moment) then your game will be like every other game. I guess this may make you more money, but it is a worthwhile trade-off in terms of making interesting games? I would say no, and I suspect everybody who enjoys something like Dwarf Fortress would agree with me.
Bring on Elemental.
01/07/2010 at 10:45 Jack says:
Did you REALLY just pass on an opportunity to call Peter Molyneux “Bullhead” ?
01/07/2010 at 10:46 Baboonanza says:
Also, I don’t people like Molyneaux. Why is he chasing multi-million selling console titles? That forces you to make dull, accessible, mass-market titles. What his history clearly demonstrates is that he’s not very good at massive, big-budget games. OTOH he has an impressive ability to make innovative, fantastic smaller-scale games.
He could do that on the PC. Make smaller games, sell them on Steam. Make interesting games. Go indie.
Maybe he’s just greedy?
01/07/2010 at 10:47 Baboonanza says:
Should read:
‘Also, I don’t UNDERSTAND people like…’
me bad at proof-reading
01/07/2010 at 12:31 Ginger Yellow says:
I’m not a Molyneux hater, but that’s precisely what’s bugs me about Molyneux’s recent direction. It crystallised for me when I saw that Fable 3 presentation from a few months back. He said that the game had to sell 5m copies, and basically the design was built around that sales target. It’s such a backwards approach to game design, at least if you’re a creative type with good ideas. It killed Spore and it’s made Molyneux’s games become progressively more bland. The world would be a better place if the likes of Molyneux and Wright could build games that “only” have to sell 500,000 copies to turn a profit. It’s one thing to take a core game design and work hard to get rid of things that needlessly exclude people or turn people off. It’s another thing to start from the premise that anything at all that might turn some people off should be excluded from the core design. It’s basically design by committee, where the committee is everyone in the world.
01/07/2010 at 10:52 bill says:
When did making games stop being about doing something YOU want to do, making what YOU want to make and being creative, and start being about Accessibility, Cool new hardware tools and Profits?
Reading between the lines, he’s basically given up on making innovative games and things he’d enjoy to make, and he’s essentially relying on kinect and other hardware developments to make his games more simple and more mainstream.
I have nothing against accessibility or hardware innovation, heck, I rather love nintendo, but isn’t this a big cop out? It’s like the director of the godfather thinking he’d be more innovative if he was making movies that everyone could enjoy without too much thought, and claiming that his new family-friendly mainstream movies were much more innovative and worthwhile because they happened to use 3d glasses.
01/07/2010 at 11:15 rocketman71 says:
Wow, you were in the same room with Mark Rein and Peter Molyneux, AT THE SAME TIME?. I pity you.
“B&W became this pr and hype monster”. I wonder whose to blame for that. Surely not poor Peter.
“So Fansites took the design of B&W and started inventing it for themselves”. Yeah, sure, it was our fault. Of course. Not Peter’s “trees will grow” Molyneux.
Gotta agree with jackflash. Molyneux is the one that went downhill. And he’s still going down.
01/07/2010 at 11:24 SuperNashwan says:
Constantly amazed at how much credit for Bullfrog’s success Molyneux is granted when every time he opens his mouth I get the overwhelming feeling he’s an idiot. I mean, clearly he isn’t, because he’s still turning a hefty profit, but I’m not so sure he’s the games design genius he gets painted as.
01/07/2010 at 11:34 Andreas says:
Reading the comments is truly depressing. What I see is a mob.
Here we have one of gaming’s pioneers, a passionate man who has helped define a genre and keeps on trying to push the boundaries of the medium.
What is WRONG with you all? Why all this hate? Is it really just because Fable 1 and Black & White didn’t have all the features he talked about? Calm down and see what this man has done for gaming, and still does. Watching you scream your heads off over this guy while accepting the hordes of celebrated but generic titles released all the time is… bizarre.
Given up on creativity and innovation? Milo & Kate is, no matter how absurd you might find it, nothing short of a very bold attempt to try something new and difficult. Take a deep breath, and look at the man’s work… instead of continously confirming the “thruth” about how awful it is, in your club of anger.
01/07/2010 at 12:01 Cooper says:
I get the distinct feeling from this the he has absolutely no idea (except maybe for Theme Park) why so many Bullfrog games are absolute classics.
Which I guess is why B&W, whilst good, wasn’t so great.
01/07/2010 at 12:07 Zwebbie says:
I, for one, applaud his quest for accessibility.
For hundreds of years, mentally handicapped people have been excluded from games – from “you can’t play chess with me, you’re eating the pawn” to “our biochem corpus is far in advance of theirs, as is our electronic sentience”. Depth is just a means of keeping people with IQ scores you could count on your hands out, it’s discrimination. Luckily, Peter Molyneux and some other brave developers have realised that equality can only be found by bringing it down to the lowest level.
This issue of far more important than things like fun or enrichment of the soul, it’s the emancipation of the braindead and the acceptance of the human race as what we are. Huzzah!
01/07/2010 at 12:27 oceanclub says:
“you can’t play chess with me, you’re eating the pawn”
You’re lucky I’d just finished my coffee – searing nasal cavity pain was avoided.
P.
01/07/2010 at 12:21 oceanclub says:
“Here we have one of gaming’s pioneers, a passionate man who has helped define a genre and keeps on trying to push the boundaries of the medium.”
Um, while I think it’s completely over the top to hate the guy and he certainly deserves respects for past achievements, I don’t see why people can’t be critical of him now. I’d be critical of Molyneaux these days because, rather than being passionate and pushing the boundaries of the genre, it rather looks to me like the passion for innovation has been sucked out of him and he’d rather now play it safe – for the life of me, I can’t see how Fable 2 pushes any boundaries and, as already mentioned, his seeming lack of interest in his past successes is a bit odd.
P.
01/07/2010 at 12:33 AndrewC says:
Maybe he’s innovating in areas you are blind to or simply uninterested in? For those of us (which is all of us, in a place like this) who have already learnt how to tie our shoelaces upside-down while solving anagrams in Chinese, accessibility in game design and interface is meaningless. Accessibility, for those who have come to regard tieing shoelaces upside-down as the only way to tie shoelaces, could well be regarded as poisonous.
But to create a game where you can spend all your time deciding what to do rather than how to do it is a noble goal too.
Plus, as to his attitude regarding older games, innovators are always looking forwards, towards the next challenge, and away from anything old, and any already conquered challenges. It’s no wonder he’s vaguely dismissive of older games – it’s just in the personality type.
01/07/2010 at 13:00 oceanclub says:
“Accessibility, for those who have come to regard tieing shoelaces upside-down as the only way to tie shoelaces, could well be regarded as poisonous.”
No, honestly, I’m not against accessibility, per se. I’m all for it, especially in strategy/city building games, a genre I would like to like more but often find the mechanics so impenetrable it’s hard to figure out what effects my actions are actually having(*). But accessibility to me is giving existing mechanics an easier learning curve, not merely removing them.
P.
(*)I’m enjoying Tropico 3 though….
01/07/2010 at 12:30 oceanclub says:
EDIT: I mean, after being burnt before, you really REALLY think he wouldn’t be talking up his games as “changing the world”: http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=254007
01/07/2010 at 12:46 Diogo Ribeiro says:
“first free roaming game”
“first game with a minigun”
“first game with a fansite”
Jeebus.
01/07/2010 at 13:01 Flimgoblin says:
Every time I read some quotes from Peter Molyneux it makes me sad, but then I remember he made Populous, Syndicate and Dungeon Keeper and all is forgiven. Three of my all time favourites and the sort of stuff that inspires me to try and write my own stuff.
Same way I forgive The Who for whatever it was they released in the 80s because Baba O’Reilly is just fecking brilliant.
01/07/2010 at 13:19 Caleb367 says:
Way I see it, this guy’s one of the most overrated developers AND underrated designers in the industry, in that order. I mean, PM’s studios almost always manage to nail a single, BRILLIANT, idea for a game, and then screw it to oblivion.
Just a couple of examples to clarify: Dungeon Keeper. Awesome concept, never seen before, simple yet satisfying game mechanics… and then you realize that once you’ve seen every monster, room, and torture animation, there’s not much more left, late game plays exactly like middle which in turn plays exactly like early. Add to that the usual number of crippling bugs – and by usual number i mean “so many it looks like an end of days biblical scenario”.
Theme Park: now where’s a more awesome setting for a management game. HUGE fun tweaking rollercoasters and salt on french fries, until… again, game-crippling bugs, and zounds of features that didn’t actually work at all.
I’m not even touching B&W or Fable.
Seems to me the one good thing to do with this guy is to ask him for ideas, and when he gets one, quickly lock him out of the room before he loses interest and let the actual work on the game be done by someone else.
(on a NOT SERIOUS note: Some guy got some interesting ideas marred by a huge ego and crappy execution. Change “Some guy” with PM’s name and see if it fits. Done? Do the same with Derek Smart’s name. XD)
01/07/2010 at 13:49 LionsPhil says:
The irony is that Derek’s ego seems to have been slightly tamed with age.
01/07/2010 at 13:46 LionsPhil says:
That does not follow at all, unless he’s saying that the game was buggy, slow and unfinished, rather than that the controls and gameplay itself were too complicated.
01/07/2010 at 15:18 Baboonanza says:
I think he means that thinking in Assembler made him prone to designing a more complicated game. Still bizarre though.
01/07/2010 at 14:55 phuzz says:
Look, every word he says might be wrong, but the man created Populous, the first game I ever bought for my Amiga. So basically he started me off on PC gaming, in my book that makes him ok.
01/07/2010 at 15:06 Optimaximal says:
I stopped considering Molyneux relevant when he became nothing but a corporate shill for Microsoft. Baseless AIM attack? I don’t think so…
I have owned, at one point or another, every single Bullfrog game (apart from PowerMonger)… I still play Syndicate in DOSBox… Magic Carpet was amusing… But I have never finished any of his games – maybe he really did invent the Sandbox long before anyone realises, but everything he gets credited for did was an endless trudge of initially great ideas that got repetitive by the second hour of play.
It was only once the Bullfrog sequels came along did a game get attached to them (possibly following pressure from EA to solve the core problems with the prequels).
Then Lionhead came along and Molyneux went from ‘creative guy’ to a one-man creative-genius/PR machine – the biological equivalent of the XCOM name, only kept around to be wheeled out when Microsoft needed an ‘idea’ for a format-exclusive title then need someone to (over)sell it.
01/07/2010 at 16:55 Dominic White says:
The guy has given up even trying to please a PC audience. And you know why? Look at this comment thread. Whoever said this was an angry mob was right. Assuming you grew up playing Molyneuxs earlier games, you should all be grown adults. Is this how mature, respectable adults behave? If so, I want to be a kid again, because kids seem to be a bit more civil.
01/07/2010 at 17:46 Ragnar says:
1. Kids can be incredibly cruel (because they don’t understand that what they are doing is cruel).
2. I don’t see so much anger as disappointment and sadness at the direction of the work of Peter Molyneux.
01/07/2010 at 17:19 Deekyfun says:
I’m a bit confused. Didn’t most of those games spawn sequels or spins offs? Did he have nothing to do with them? Or is it just the specific time that populous came out that it was looked down on?
01/07/2010 at 17:48 Ragnar says:
Populous was looked down on? I remember it getting good reviews where I live at least (Sweden).
Also, I really liked the idea behind populous even if it got a bit repetitive after a while.
01/07/2010 at 17:24 Arathain says:
I have a huge amount of respect for Molyneaux. As many have already stated, he was responsible for some of the greatest and most innovative games that laid the foundation for PC gaming as we know it. There is no bad that can erase that amount of good.
I am a little sad that these comments seem to suggest that he no longer understands why those games were as great and as influential as they were. It is perfectly understandable and healthy for any creative to look back at previous works with a critical eye, but these comments of his are nonetheless a little sad.
Still, I caution myself, and you lot as well, about inferring too much from what he says here. The context and depth of statement is not really there, and this is, after all, a man who has a distinct public persona which I suspect is not quite the same as his working one.
01/07/2010 at 17:38 oceanclub says:
“The guy has given up even trying to please a PC audience. And you know why? Look at this comment thread.”
Have you read any console forums lately? This is Algonquin banter compared to some. Barely a CAPS LOCK or mispelt swear-word in sight.
Plenty of people here have articulated politely why they’re disappointed with Molyneaux’s current output. Your only defence of Molyneaux so far is that he’s making lots of money.
P.
01/07/2010 at 19:33 Supertonic says:
Ed, I think he was joking about the reason for Powermonger being too complex. For me by the way it’s really not. In fact Powermonger’s one of the most fun wargames I’ve played over the years, along with Mega-Lo-Mania (the latter for not taking itself terribly seriously) and it seems that Peter’s forgotten what made his games so great, which is a shame.
01/07/2010 at 20:22 Kazang says:
A man of vision and genius, but also of stupidity and obnoxious self-justification.
01/07/2010 at 20:36 terry says:
Goddamn you Braben!
02/07/2010 at 00:24 Dmo says:
I’m confused. Since when did accessibility require less complexity?
The creature in B&W held a world record for the most complex character in a game, based on lines of code, but interacting with it was intuitive and easy.
Complexity can be hidden behind intuitive, accessible interfaces, the two aren’t mutually exclusive.
02/07/2010 at 19:22 Dreamhacker says:
“PC gaming is dead”. I smile everytime I read that :)
Anyone who has studied programming can tell you that as long as they have Notepad, Paint and a compilator, PC gaming is nowhere near dead.
03/07/2010 at 07:20 Bill says:
@Manley Pointer very well said, good show
05/07/2010 at 11:35 Garg says:
*cough* World of Warcraft *cough*
But yes you are right I think, the demographics you target for your typical blockbuster game (CoD, Halo, Fable etc.) have shifted to consoles from the PC.