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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."
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.
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.
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.
Well, like in Black & White the development goals shifted around a lot and like Black & White the initial reviews are good...
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
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.
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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Yes, that's the one. The original game seems to be most readily available used for Super NES and Genesis.
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.
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!
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
The game was originally released for DOS, Atari ST, Amiga, Genesis, SNES and Sega Master System. There's also Populous II (less SMS). A 'modern' PC version called Populous: The Beginning was also released a few years back. Your best bet is googling or by searching the plethora of abandonware sites that are out there. My personal vote goes to the Amiga version.
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
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!
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
You should really realize this on the 3rd level. No creature, and you just sit around casting a spell, again, and again, and some more, and some more... It was boring as all hell. Any game where you start reading a book for entertainment while playing it has an issue or two.
On top of this, and the bugs, the game had no real challenge to it in the end. It's an exercise in slow, painful attrition, nothing more.
Really, if it was marketed as some virtual pet simulator I might have given it some credit, but as a strategy game it sucked.
"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!
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.)
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.
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.
Populous was excellent, Theme Hospital & Theme Park were also very good. However, creatures was bugged to hell and at times unplayable.
When The Bitmap Brothers can do Speedball 2, Team 17 can do Alien Breed, ID can do Doom & Quake, Sid Meier can do Civilisation and Alpha Centauri, and Chris Sawyer can do Transport Tycoon, Peter Molyneux's output actually drops quite far down that table of "great games".
Yes, the guy has some nice ideas but perhaps needs to give his over-inflated ego a rest and actually get on with his game design a little more.
Perhaps if he sent more time debugging his output (all of Molyneux's games are renowned for wierd and wonderful bugs) rather than hyping himself, he'd get a bit more respect for what he does.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
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.
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.
Bye!
SeqBox
Hear, hear!
I *loved* B&W for.. about a day. Within that day, I was totally stoked. Here was a game that did a lot of things no other game did:
- the Creature actually acted based on training, and it was very noticable
- the gestures were just plain cool, especially throwing fireballs over villager's heads for 'faith'
- the graphics were fantastic. zoom out and see the whole island, zoom in to see two people dancing
- the Good/Evil thing. it's nothing new in video games, but it was done well. you can be the God of Errand Running, or the God of Smashing Houses Open To Get What You Want especially in how it reflected on your Creature.
It was fresh and it was intensely fun.. For the first day.
The first problem I noticed was when I started a fresh game.. And couldn't skip over and of the boring pre-game-show (until you got the Creature). I hear it was fixed in a patch, but that's moot now, I was playing this game the week it hit shelves.
The second problem I noticed was the villagers needing insane amounts of food when worshipping.. Another bug that was fixed. Of course, there was no fix on week 1, but there was a second bug that gave you infinite food if you were sneaky, so the two sort of cancelled each other out.
But then you get the the third level. And the game just stops. I tried putting the game into 'Skirmish' mode when I couldn't make any progress, except that wasn't any fun either.
The game totally dried up, all at once. During the first little while, it all feels so DIFFERENT that you didn't care about the weaknesses in the gameplay. But after a few hours, they start to stack up..
I really don't know what they were trying to achieve with this game, and I'm glad they tried. I really think it could have gone somewhere. Sadly, in the end, this game was released TOO EARLY.. The gameplay issues and outright bugs should not have escaped QA.
Anyway, if there had been some 'open-ended' way to play the game, without worrying about the stupid story levels, I would be saying different things now. But that's why it's a lousy strategy game, there's no fun way to just play that side of it.
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?
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.