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NYT Profiles Creator of Black & White and Fable
Amy's Robot writes "The NYT has a profile of Peter Molyneux, creator of 'Populous,' 'Black & White,' and the upcoming 'Fable.' In Fable, the moral decisions you make affect the character's appearance, the outcome of the game, and so on. You get the impression that Molyneux's unconventional approach to game design infuses each of his creations with something more than your average game. Fable will be released for X-Box on September 14."
Because I was fooled by all the hype for Black and White and actually bought it. Yes, paid cash money. And it sucked. It was boring and buggy.
I've had several discussions with my friends who swear up and down that since this guy was responsible for Populous that he basically invented the real time strategy game. I don't think this is true. I remember playing Utopia on the Intellivision years before I played Populous, and it was definately real time strategy.
Don't get me wrong. I repsect the hell out of Molyneux. The two titles I have played by him - Populous and Black & White - were very enjoyable. I just don't think he invented the RTS genre. Some unknown dude at Mattel did.
Fable is getting some pretty solid reviews.
Was populous the game wherein you are a diety and can raise and lower land, and have your followers attack other people, and cause floods, and whatnot?
If it is, is it available currently in any format? As I remeber having played something like that some time ago, and the name sounds familiar.
Thanks to the internet, we can now all die alone together! -SomeWoman
In Fable, the moral decisions you make affect the character's appearance, the outcome of the game, and so on.
reminds me of Star Wars KOTOR...
Now, I havent seen this game, I havent played his earlier creations, though I have seen people play Populous (and tried to get my hands on a copy) and Black and White.
A bit in to the NYT article, it is said that the actions define the characters. It definitely does interest, but fail in the face of scrutiny since it is still too thin, too amateurish which leads me to believe it was a design choice to leave it less complex. For e.g., the characters tend to look their part, defined by the direction they take when presented with choices throughout the game. That is, one looks godlike, when said character chooses to be pious and honest, where as the same character look like a devil (with horns) when he consistently choose the wrong path. Why would Peter Molyneux decide to make a mockery of who the character is, is what stopping this game from achieving its full potential. Why cant the character look the same, act the same and still be good/evil? We certainly do not see people or beings among us with horns or wings?
The picturisation of these characters and giving them a blessed or cursed look depending on their choices kind of trivializes or cheapens the whole experience in my opinion. I read a while ago that in the fairy tales and tales of kings long ago lived and fallen, one could clearly draw a line between those who were good and those who were evil. Yet, if we attempt to do the same now, that line will fall across the souls of each of us as that line will not seek to divide one from the other, rather it will show how that line which differentiates the good from evil is now resting upon our own soul.
Rapid Nirvana
Really dug the completely in game mouse driven interface in Black & White (although rotating the viewpoint was annoying) and the game was cute.
Ultimately though it came down to micro management and resource gathering.
Nothing revolutionary.
Black and white was way cool! Very unorthodox gameplay. Or rather it was the way we all really play RTS games made into a real game. Getlots of minions so you can you build really huge cool buildings! And then torture your puney units with whatever experiments you want. I'm glad somebody out there is making something other than cookie cutter stradegy games.
Some time I shall sleep out, the rest I'll whistle.
B&W, on the other hand, is the worst game I have ever purchased. Awesome graphics (at the time) can not make up for bad gameplay, buggy code, and an AI that simply didn't work.
Buy one.
Reviews with a twist! http://www.sardonicbastard.com
I had high hopes for B&W, but frankly it was just another micromanagement festival -- been there, done that too many times. I did really like throwing villagers and slapping my monkey around, though.
Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on him, but TFA makes him out to be some kind of visionary making truly revolutionary games -- which as far as I can tell, he ain't.
Mr. Molyneux's game concepts are always amazing, topnotch, and sadly, overambitious. Thats how I've always felt. B&W was a disappointment, because for all the hype and all the "open-ended" promises, the game played pretty much the same for everyone, and had a ton of bugs too. I put it down after getting about 3/4 of the way through and just never picked it up--just didn't live up.
Now that I hear that a lot of the promises of Fable didn't make it into the final game, I wonder if the same thing will happen -- huge concept, big promises, but weak on the execution.
This isn't to say the games are bad, they're just horribly disappointing to me. A game that sounds like 10/10 ends up being more like an 8 or a 7/10, but given the expectations, tends to "feel" more like a 5/10.
Moo.
That game was a disaster. I mean I wanted to like it, I really did, I'm a huge Populus fan and B&W sounded so cool. After about 6 hours of play I just had to accept the fact that the game sucked.
The problem was too much of this pioneering and doing your own thing, I think. Like the creatures, he decided to make them really trainable and to that effect gave them a pretty indepth AI... that sucked. Good idea, shitty execution. Same with gestures. Seems neat until your wrist is aching from having to do that fireball gesture 100 times.
Hopefully he learned something from that because Populus was just dynamite and I'd love to see more from him of that quality.
Or going way back, those books you read, made a decision, and could change the ending. THose were a blast.
I hope Fable isn't as overhyped as Black&White was... reading the previews, you had the impression that it would revolution gaming. Playing it (well, the 5 short levels, where your creature, the main part of the game, was taken away on 2 of em) was really disappointing. Few quests, no replay value AT ALL, AI not that revolutionnary (look! it can dance and root out trees if you show him too! and he can... hum... that's about it), big bug on the unpatched version (you couldn't finish the game), etc...
That said, I am waiting with impatience B&W2 and Fable! Overhyped? I hope not!
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I bought Black and White and was amazed at how much people loved it. The mouse driven interface was frustrating as hell when you needed to do something quickly and as other posters have mentioned it all came down to micromanagement and resource gathering. I spent a good 30 hours playing it before I gave up trying to have any fun with it. In game cut scenes were long, annoying, and could not be skipped. The game was hardly revolutionary although it made taking out the garabage and doing dishes seem like fun.
I don't have celebrity game creators in very high esteem. In almost 30 years, they have failed to make gaming a recognized art form, which cinema had achieved at the same age by the 1930s. They leave no legacy, since video games mostly disappear with the platform they were running on. And game designers, instead of concentrating on the entertainment value of their games, like to hype BS "artificial intelligence", "real virtual worlds that interract like the real real world", and armchair philosopher's mumbo jumbo.
We can't buy one because we can't get a refund on the "Microsoft Tax."
Isn't a violation of someone's civil liberties to profile them? I mean, shouldn't that be stopped? Especially when it comes to Black & White... racial profiling is wrong!
The all time greatest one man hype machine. Game announced: "This game will allow the user to do everything and anything they could do in real life, and our advanced morphing abilities and statistics charts magically make anything possible!" ... Five years later: "The game is the greatest game ever made, definitely. Well we had to change some of it but it is still the best game ever made... ever." ... First review: "The game is a lot of fun and has interesting new gameplay aspects... it's the greatest game ever." ... First play experience: "Wtf is going on here? Nothing works! Oh I see, only another 6 months till I can download a patch and make the game work."
Greatest games ever. Don't question it!
But at the same time the game was seriously flawed -- your creature was *ALWAYS* learning, so you could never misbehave infront of it. You could spend weeks training your creature to be good, then for some reason you might HAVE to kill people in the game, your creature would see, he'd start killing people, and you couldn't stop him from doing it -- because at some point you actually had to play the game instead of baby sit your creature, and at that point your creature would wander off, kill people, and you couldn't discipline him for it.
Still a great game, finally a good use for my xbox :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
What about Dungeon Keeper?, I didn't play any of the Populus games, but Dungeon Keeper sucked away atleast 6 months of my and my friends lives. Hopefully this game will get released for the PC eventually, we need something new that isn't a sequel. And even though most Molyneux games are very similar in gameplay (your god), they always have something new and original that makes it worth playing
For instance, from what I've heard (and after seeing the pre-release game videos) of Ghost Recon 2, they've ruined ruined a great tactical shooter by making the sequel into a goddamn run-through-machinegun-fire-unscathed- and-down-a-helicopter-with-a-handgun kind of console game. I liked the spend-30-minutes-setting-up-your-assault-teams-onl y-to-get-downed-by-an-unseen-enemy-sniper much more. And the game is released for X-box first, of course.
The next game I was going to buy was Full Spectrum Warrior, but so far there's only a release date for X-box version.
I swear I'm going to go on a shooting spree if Operation Flashpoint 2 goes this way too.
I got hugely caught up in the hype of B&W and was very excited to buy it the day it hit the shelves.
It took me about ten hours to realize that B&W was less of a video game and more like an application. The UI and design and visuals were very cool but I wasn't having any fun listening to the guy saying "Your people are dying!" over and over.
I would compare it to something like a fractal visualization program, or maybe mapping software. Fun to play with but not really a game.
The only thing that gave me giggles was teaching my creature to eat his own poop.
The single most frustrating thing about it was not being able to skip the damn tutorials. I wanted to start over wit ha different creature but didn't want to sit through the 30 minutes of BS, so I never played it again.
I don't know a single person who made it all the way through B&W.
Hey this is cool. This is my starting evil character in the game.
After doing some non evil stuff, my character now looks like this
Open Source Java Web Forum with LDAP authentication
For those of you who liked Populous there is a game called Powermonger that is a somewhat similar and fun game. You will probably need DOSBox to play it. Check out some of the other games on Underdogs they have a bunch of classics.
Today that hackneyed convention lives on in countless genre pieces, comic books, and indeed much of the output of Hollywood and TV, even if modern people have come to see that the real face of evil may look as shiny, plump and friendly as the face of, say, an Enron CEO or a leader who lies to his nation. In this way, our imaginative fictions too often fail us by repackaging our tribal prejudices as villains. Typically in modern life it is the devil who looks and sounds normal--a paragon of the banality of evil--that one must fear, not some dark-skinned and different-looking Other!
I already have a gmail account but I was wondering how you get invites to give. Do they just give them to you randomly to give away?
A couple months later, they came over to my apartment for a visit. The first thing his wife did when they came is was pull the CD out of her purse, hand it to me and say, "don't ever give him this again!".
Now *there* is an endorsement for a video game.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
Peter Molyneux is all hype. We suffer through endless bullshit hype everytime he makes a game. Please Peter, stop making games, or stop talking so much about how great your shitty games will be.
But we're still going to be able to run around and shoot things, right?!
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
No entry found for picturisation.
Did you mean pasteurisation?
Must feed your cow NOW!
It was a... unique game.
You can't take the sky from me...
Is this like Princess Maker where she always ends up a total slut?
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
"Mr. Molyneux is both excited and anxious about the amount of flexibility in a game that allows the male hero to murder or marry almost any woman or man in Albion."
oh no! this is going to be the downfall of video game families everywhere! everyone write their senators and congressmen immediately and help protect our video game family values!
On their heads!
Moran!
He made:
Populus (sp), which was great
He made syndicate, a REVOLUTIONARY game. never seen cyperpunk tactics like that again.
He made Magic carpet, which was fun and had a AWESOME engine for its time
He made Dungeon Keeper, which was unique and great.
He is responsible for the original Pirates, clones till this day...
And yes, he did black and white, which wasnt stellar. But neither was your idiotic post.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
This is an old game that the name reminded me of instantly. Hopefully the developers will avoid the problems that plagued this game 7 years ago.
Namely nasty bugs, poor character development, and too many loose ends at the end of the game.
With regard to the current state of the genre, I maintain that Westwood's 'Dune II' is the mold in which virtually all RTS games since (to some usually large degree) have been cast. Modular base construction, one-screen GUI+top-down view, not to mention the cornerstone of all such games: the lockstep of game pacing to resource gathering.
Although, IMO, the paradigm is a hoary old Cliche Golem here in 2004, when 'Dune II' arrived more than a decade ago as the unheralded sequel to an unsatisfying adventure title, it was remarkably fun and innovative at the same time. Westwood continued releasing incremental sequels (called 'Command&Conquer' so that it was their own IP and they didn't have to pay licensing to Herbert estate); Blizzard copped it quick with 'Warcraft' (eventually creating the best-balanced penultimate RTS, 'Starcraft'), et al.
Literally, though, "real-time strategy" games have been around much longer; the question becomes the denotation of RTS as a genre. 'Populous' for example, though "real-time" is far more accurately categorized as a Builder due to its gameplay mechanics (abstracted vs. direct control, no military, etc.)
No thanks. They enjoy it too much.
Ultima 4 had ethical questions at the beginning the determined your first characters class.
I think this was in response to the repeated destroying of towns (or the same town over and over) in ultima1-3.
I don't see it as a cheapening of the experience. Instead I think of it as something that games are supposed to be - you know, fun.
It'd be nice to have a concrete representation of how your character has developed over time based on the actions you chose. If I play a character that fights like a champion, I want him to look the part -- based on my chosen actions, not some arbitrary class I selected at the beginning. In how many games does that actually happen? Not many, I'd imagine...I can't think of one that does this to any real end.
But it still comes down to entertainment value, and not any attempt at realism. The game is called Fable, after all.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but our Peter's English...
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
As the title hints, maybe if you stopped being snotty about that arts degree, you could notice that reality isn't that simple.
There are "gamers" and there are "gamers"."Gamer" means pretty much everyone from the die-hard who only talks about Counter-Strike ever, to the old grandma playing Solitaire and Minesweeper. We're talking people ranging from 2 year olds (yes, a friend was teaching his 2 year old son to play Wolfenstein) to teenagers to 50-60 year olds. (Yes, both my parents are gamers.) As for "technical", "gamer" includes not on the die hard PC geeks who overclock and mod their PC, but also some console gamers who wouldn't know "technical" if it came up and bit them in the ass.
Judging and damning _that_ diverse a group into a single pre-conceived category is snotty and pretentious. Actually, lemme rephrase that: it's just brain dead.
And even when you acknowledge that some read stuff that's not a tech manual, you still manage to shovel it all into another pre-conceived notion: that it _must_ be SF and _must_ be related to technology.
Geesh. Talk about an "everyone but me is a nerd" troll...
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Your character being affected by your actions is nothing revolutionary. Dungeons and Dragons has had a system of alignment(good/evil and anywhere inbetween) since the early days. Invariably this is where all todays good/evil ideas in games(video or otherwise) come from. I think the fact that it affects your physical appearance is rather nonsensical, and trivializes the concept of good/evil. Then again I'm an RPG fanboy and love my D&D so I might be biased.
The problem remains that games nowadays tend _not_ to be up to either book or movie standards. Regardless of whether you're into plots, or angsty whiny character development, or whatever, your average computer game manages to just pull a ham-fisted approach to either.
When they try to address any problem or issue, e.g., good vs evil, it's usually just a quick excuse as to why you're allowed to kill those people. They're just evil, go kill them already. Doesn't matter if they actually did anything evil at all. They were just born that way. Go kill them.
E.g., since we're talking about its creator, when I played the first Populous, once let it on auto-play, just to see how the computer plays. The "evil" guys were just minding their business, building their evil towns and planting their evil crops. The "good" guys suddenly built an army and slaughtered them all. Who was good and who was evil there?
E.g., to stick to this guy's creations, Black and White didn't really address any issue of good or evil, and didn't even try to get into the subtleties of being evil without being purely self-destructive for no good reason.
When it did attempt to make a moral judgment, it was an arbitrary ham-fisted one. E.g., along the lines of "you failed to protect the village from the barrage of fireballs, so you're an evil evil monster." Ahem. There's a difference between evil and trying to protect someone and failing. The second is at most just incompetence.
When a game actually tries to tell a story, or even apply the Hero's Journey recipe that Hollywood loves, it usually again does it in a ham-fisted way that ruins it all. E.g., see Final Fantasy 8, which went so over the top, practically shouting in your face "see, I'm still at step 2 in that recipe! Not a hero yet!", that it just ended annoying everyone.
That is, if a game even tries. Most computer games actually have _less_ plot or behavioural analysis than your average porn flick. And that says a lot.
My theory is: the problem is the entry barrier. Anyone can write a novel. You don't have to, say, first prove that you're good in something completely unrelated, before someone lets you write a book. You just write it, take it to an editor, and that's that. So tens of thousands of crap attempts are written each year, but some gem from someone unknown before also happens now and then.
In games by comparison, there's a huge road ahead before anyone even considers letting you anywhere near a designer position. It's "Peter's Principle" all the way: you have to prove that you're good in some utterly unrelated skill (e.g., programming or 3D modelling) before you get promoted into a position you're utterly incompetent for: designer.
What I'd really like to see is some good open source game engine, and a good open-source 3D model generator, so _everyone_ can try their hand at making a game. Let them try. Just like with books, 99.9% of attempts will suck and silently disappear. But we might also see more people who can actually make a good and _new_ game. (I.e., something which isn't a lame rehash of whatever sold last year.)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Maybe you should find something better to hate than a video game console. Seems like a lot of wasted energy.
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience
He has a track record of destroying things he touches. Witness Black and White. Witness Dungeon Keeper. For the last 10 years, he has picked up other peoples' work and mashed it into the ground.
...Bitter that I have to post this anon as the powers that be would have my everloving arse in a sling for this.
Fable was NOT conceived of by Molyneux. It was conceived of by the folks who conceived of Dungeon Keeper in its pre-Molyneux (and pre-EA) form. Lionshead, due to Peter's enormous potential to gain funding from large entities (ie: EA, Microsoft) effectively bought out the entity that had been Fable. Fortunately, those who created the game had had sufficient experience with Molyneux's way of doing things that they were able to fight his influence more effectively than before.
Fable is *fun*. A lot moreso that I'd expected given the hype and the Molyneux factor.
...The whole good/evil thing has TWO aspects to it:
1: Your character's appearance
2: How others view you.
For example, if I am a totally wicked guy, people will literally run in fear from me. But if I am a good saintly person, women will love me and I might get a discount at a store.
Bye!
SeqBox
Try running their console business at a loss.
Thanks to their OS monopoly, they have enough cash to attempt to price everyone out of any market.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Black & White was rushed by the publisher to beat Tribes. Peter Molyneux has stated this on every occasion. It was essentially an unfinished game. He set out to address every one of its issues in the sequel.
To be fair, that doesn't matter to the gamer who shelled out money for the thing, but you can't just pin it on Molyneux when he was against releasing it before it was even finished.
Procedure:
1) Find this article, click reply
2) Write about Black & Whites many bugs, or the over potential behind it.
3) ???
4) PROFIT!
Yeah, ok, you need to get out a bit more. And try some of those deep breathing exercises... in... out... in... out... in... out... ok good.
Now remember the Golden Rule of all pointlessly stupid Slashdot rants:
"If you don't like it, you don't have to buy it."
When you realize the inherant truth in that statement, your soul will find peace.
Comment of the year
How kind of you to volunteer!
Oh, I'd never buy an X-Box, but I WAS looking forward to Halo. Microsoft can do whatever they want but when they aren't just making bad products, but taking away good ones, then I get pissed.
The fanboys on GameFAQs.com say it's "going to be teh worst game ever" "it's not even an rpg" (From the same group that say Planescape, Morrowind, and Baldur's Gate aren't RPGs) "my friend already has it and it doesn't even run" (popular troll method against upcomming games, like the guy who claimed to have Half Life 2 already and said it prevents the use of mods), and "the graphics don't look anything like a good REAL rpg like Final Fantasy VII (PS SPEHIRATH PWNZ U IN T3H BUN) so it suks."
I've bought a number of games that got this level of GameFAQs trollage, and so far, every single one of them has been aboslutely stellar (Fallout, Knights of the Old Republic, Planescape Torment, Golden Sun, Morrowind, Valkyrie Profile, and Tales of Symphonia come to mind). It's been such a good indicator so far, I consider the trollage level a better indicator of how good will probably be than any preview.
If too many GameFAQs users seem to think it'll be good, however, I won't touch it with a ten foot pole until a source I greatly respect gives it a thumbs up.
So please tell me how he destroyed:
Populous 1 & 2
Powermonger
Syndicate
+ others.
Or are are DK and B&W the only Molyneux games you've played?
As a Lionhead employee (and someone who knows Peter quite well), I can honestly say without a doubt that you are talking out of your arse. Ok, the project wasn't original Molyneux (wheras DK was), but he came along in it's darker days and had the drive and ambition to get it to what it is today (that being a fucking good game).
:) is a thoroughly nice bloke, and a lot of people both in the company and outside the company respect him.
Have you any IDEA how much time, effort, blood sweat and tears that goes into making a triple-A title? Molly (as we call him in the office
Keeping focus is hard..
All the good films that are remembered tend to have these same elements. They get you involved with the characters and the story and help you form emotional attachments.
Games are not films. Characters and story? Emotional attachments? Tetris? Chess?
Good films will be remembered for vastly different reasons from good games.
Yes, you can use the computer games medium as a cheap, alternative mass media narrative distribution outlet (which has been a very lucrative approach recently), but that's precisely the reason why games still lurk in the low-brow 'pop-culture' corner of the public sphere, despite building on a history of over 40 years and a history of game-playing that spans several thousand more.
Really. So what if gamers haven't succeeded in making games regarded as high art? Really. These things entertain millions of people. They are also mathematically and technologically very impressive. They are amazing creations.
Games have changed the way people see the world.
Do you criticize Lego because it's designers are rarely accepted to the Tate and get away with being arrogant wankers?
So why does this Peter guy think he's Aesop? Or even God!? Saying this is what's Moral???
If the character (i.e. Player) is making moral decision and being judged on them then there must be a Moral Code in this game and who is to say this is the right moral code? It's just one person version of morality. I hope there's a mod pack so I can create my own moral vision of the world, which Peter might feel is immoral but to me is how it should be. This game shouldn't be called Fable but 'The Last Judgement' as that's what Peter is in fact doing.
It looks like computer games are now going to takeover the role of teaching the young and easily lead what's right and wrong. If you ask me GTA 3 is a better tool for teaching morals, it's more real life.
>The only thing that gave me giggles was teaching my creature to eat his own poop.
hehehe love it. I remember when i bought the first version of Dogz way back in about 95/96 I managed to train mine to wipe his ass on the floor on command. that was accompanied by nice sound effect.
i tried the latest Dogz last year but i could tell I was not really interested as i just turned my dog in a trembling physcopath by chasing around with the water bottle all the time. its a shame you couldn't slap the hell out of it like you could to the creature in B&W. That was a great stress reliever after a hard day, shame you couldn't upload your bosses face onto it.
This is one of the mistakes people made with the game, that made is much less enjoyable. If you don't micro manage your villages, they'll manage themselves. Same as your creature. When you can stick to your godly tasks while your creature and villages take care of themselves, the game is a lot more interesting.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
my highest level char ever? 78.. she has about 8 in their 90's, and one complete IK set she collected herself....
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random