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."

Comments

Better than Black and White I hope

[Sycraft-fu]

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.

No! No more games!

[Monkelectric]

B&W was a *GREAT* game. I logged about 350 hours on it and its expansion pack (it keeps track for you). The final level of B&W took me 40 hours alone.

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 :)