Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Molyneux On Future Of Game Design

Posted by simoniker on from the fabulous-hype dept.

Thanks to GameSpy for its interview with Lionhead boss and Populous creator Peter Molyneux, part of a talk held at the DICE Conference in Las Vegas. While admitting that "this industry tends to bumble through innovation", Molyneux noted freeform games could be less interesting than they looked, lamenting that "he always dreamed about making games that give people total freedom, but what he discovered is that complete freedom in a game world is boring after about ten minutes." He concluded by suggesting alternatives to the 'sandbox' approach, arguing: "People like to have challenges, goals, and something to struggle toward."

9 of 46 comments (clear)

  1. Rewards by Apreche · · Score: 5, Interesting

    "People like to have challenges, goals, and something to struggle toward."

    Don't forget rewards. Back in the day the reward for beating a game was twofold.

    1) you got to see the end of the game
    2) you got to tell all your friends you beat the game, hahahaha

    Nowadays #2 is jax3d because everyone beats every game that can be beaten. That's why multiplayer games like CS are so popular. Since there is no challenge anymore in playing against the computer people play against each other.

    Whenever I look for quality in game design I always look to Zelda games. You can go anywhere and do stuff, so its freeform. But you have a predetermined quest, to get all the triforce pieces and beat ganon. Don't make a linear game in which the places you go and the things you do are in a predetermined order, that hasn't been fun since Mario 1 and 2. You have to at least do things like Mario 3 did or like Mega Man did if not what Zelda did. But be sure to give the player a goal, make sure that they know what the goal is and make sure that you give the player enough information in game so that they will be able to figure out what to do.

    Make it hard, but don't make it stupid and arbitrary. FF:CC had this problem. The way to get lots of items and things and cast different spells requires the players to pretty much randomly figure stuff out. There were no puzzles to solve like in a Zelda game. You don't make a series of logical thougts and arrive at a conclusion that gives you the hidden shiny. You pretty much either find it randomly, or you read a FAQ. That is piss poor game design right there. I just can't understand. Everyone recognizes certain games as the best, but so few people learn from those games and apply that learning in designing new games. They just make the same design mistakes over and over. Hopefully indy developers will save the day.

    --
    The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
  2. Case in Point: GTA by nifboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    GTA is the perfect example of implementing a "sandbox" approach and still giving the player something to do; the player can, at any time, cut loose from the mission structure and spend some time with General Mayhem, or they can just go forward mission by mission.

    I suppose Morrowind is like that, too, only with way too much walking/running for my tastes (even with the Boots of Blinding Speed).

  3. Peter Molyneux by Lol+the+unbeliever · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Peter Molyneux has done great games but lately he seems to have forgotten gameplay. Black and White should have been an excellent game, if only the pet had taken less of a center stage: it's not because you have one (not so) original (tamagotchi) idea that you have to sacrifice everything to it. Black & White could have been a good RTS with a twist.

  4. This has to be the best part of the article... by toiletsalmon · · Score: 5, Interesting
    I think this really says something about the "Human Condition".:

    "He says he watched a 15-year old playtester chat up a woman in town who happened to be the mayor's daughter. He brought her gifts and flowers, talked to her all the time, started hugging and kissing her... and eventually they married and moved in together. Molyneux says he was delighted that a player was exploring this part of the game. Then the playtester talked to the Mayor and asked him to follow him. He took the mayor out to the woods, got him behind a tree ... and killed him! "Why did you do that!?" Molyneux asked. "I figured the mayor was rich, and he'd give all his money to his only daughter," answered the tester. Of course, now the daughter had lots of money, but didn't want to share any of it. So the playtester killed her, too. (Then he moved into the mayor's house!)

    I'm anxiously awaiting the release of Fable this summer, but I can't help but wonder: Does freedom turn us into complete psychopaths in the game world, or does freedom allow us to "express ourselves" in the game world without real world consequences?

    1. Re:This has to be the best part of the article... by JavaLord · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm anxiously awaiting the release of Fable this summer, but I can't help but wonder: Does freedom turn us into complete psychopaths in the game world, or does freedom allow us to "express ourselves" in the game world without real world consequences?

      I think that is the real fun of open ended games. It shows you what people are capable of if there are no consequences. Of course, the playtester understood that the mayor and the mayors daughter weren't people....but would he have done it in-game if they were people? (ie in a MMORPG). I really think a MMORPG with no consequences other than ones created by other players would be a great social experement on top of a great game.

    2. Re:This has to be the best part of the article... by Ayaress · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I play an MMORPG that works that way, and it's actually a pretty sad social experiment.

      When it started out, pvp was the most profitable thing to do, income and exp-wise, and everybody did it who was at least moderately well equipped. When they took out exp for pvp (due to abuse - people would stand just outside of NPC guard ranges and beat each other to death for hours to powerlevel), it shifted, and finally started working like they wanted: The game split into two major camps: Those that PK'd, and those that didn't. A chunk of those that didn't ended up forming into guilds and alliances that hunted PKers and protected low level players who were being hounded by higher leveled PKs who could kill them in one or two hits.

      It took about four months for the groups that hunted PK's to turn into PK's themselves - killing people for no reason other than they have a red or gray name (the more people you killed, the farther down a green/red alignment scale you went. It turned gray for about a minute after you kill somebody. This didn't effect the game itself, though, except that NPC guards would attack you with a gray name).

      In the long run, the game went from being a holy guild vs. an evil guild to a constantly shifting power struggle between evil-ish guilds - at one point, two major RP guilds, who by their very premise sould be at eternal war, ended up allied against a rapidly growing PK guild that was rapidly threatening both their power bases.

      Now, there are very few good-aligned guilds. Most are either overtly evil, or at best neutral. The main good thing about this is that low leveled players have recieved some indirect "protection" from the competing evil guilds - whenever one would start PKing in an area, another would move in to try to get easy loot while they couldn't run to town for safety, usually affording victims an opportunity to run in and recover at least important items.

    3. Re:This has to be the best part of the article... by Ayaress · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I have the same problem. Although I don't have any problem being evil in games like Dungeon Keeper or GTA (where there isn't an option), I have a hard time hardlining myself in more open games. In Fallout, the only time I managed to stay really evil in a game was when a child got caught in the crossfire while I was killing slavers. Once I got labled a childkiller, there really wasn't much of a choice. Even most of the bad guys would try to kill me because I was TOO evil.

  5. Re:Pah, just because he can't make them. by Jeffool · · Score: 4, Interesting

    >He is living on Populous fame.

    Yeah. Well, that and Theme Park. Well, that, Theme Park and Theme Hospital. And let's not forget the wonderfully fun Dungeon Keeper. And obviously, as we all know it, Black & White was popular. So I guess that one too.

    Unless you could name some of his other recent games that have 'missed their goal'?

    And yeah reviewers raved about B&W, and while I liked it, I can see why most didn't. Like the first poster in this story pointed out, everyone wants these exceedingly easy games. I really didn't think that B&W was any harder than Theme Hospital or Populous was back when first picked it up. (It's been a long time, to be fair.)

    Not to mention the whole decision tree/perceptron deal it had surrounding it. That was why it got such big press, unfortunately.

    And so far as his doing talks being his PR machine? Quite possibly. Does that make what his says garbage, though? For that matter, maybe it's possible that with Fable and The Movies nearing completion he's got more free time?

    Personally, the biggest error was not supporting a mod community early on in B&W. But, that's just me.

  6. Re:Zelda and Metroid non-linearity by AllenChristopher · · Score: 2, Interesting
    "although the game points you to Death Mountain after completing the Forest Temple, you can actually complete the Water Temple first."

    Moreover, there's no particular reason at all to complete the Shadow Temple before the Spirit Temple. Indeed, the first time I played the game, I only realized after the spirit temple that I'd done them in the "wrong" order and had to go "back" to find one because of the order on the medallion chart.

    "And of course all the Zelda games (except maybe II) have had little things like extra equipment and heart pieces scattered around to find outside the "main" sequence."

    In Majora's Mask, the number of masks is so great that it completely destroys the notion of linearity... it's nothing like clear whethr helping a certain townsperson will be necessary to move forward in the dungeons or not. Great fun, because you're never really stuck, and the gameplay varies so much.