Molyneux Apology Explained

Thanks to the BBC for a follow-up to an earlier story. Following Peter Molyneux's apology to the Fable community last week, the BBC spoke with the game designer about his decision. "[I] owed a duty to fans to explain why some features did not make it into the finished product."

Comments

Re:Platform apology

[XsynackX]

He had to apologize because of all the thing he said about the game that weren't true.

I followed this game for about three years, all along the way excited after Mr. Molyneux would say things like "If you drop an acorn in the beginning of the game, by the end it will grow to a great oak tree." and tons of other over-hyped things like that. I was nearly the number one Fable fan out there on Big Blue Box's (the developer's) message board, but after getting the game, playng it for 8 hours, beating it, starting a new character, playing it 4 more hours, and finding it has little to no replay value, I feel downright screwed. And the first person I thought of to be pissed at about the game sucking was Molyneux. So that is why he had to apologize, and he should apologize a few more times too.

Re:I still think it's cool that he apologized

[Babbster]

"Tried" to do something different doesn't help the game consumer at all, nor should it be a good point on the resume of a guy who's become a legendary game developer (Populous? Dungeon Keeper? Awwww, yeah). I've liked what I've played of Fable so far, but the reality is that it isn't anything that fresh or that new. In fact, there are aspects of it (the linearity, the restricted movement within zones and the small size of the zones) which are actually steps BACKWARD for the genre.

If we're giving credit for an RPG trying to do something big, Morrowind still has to come out on top in that area. It had a very open map where you could go anywhere in the game that you could see, it was dense with subplots and nonlinear gameplay (you could go a hundred hours of play and barely touch the main storyline) and it was free of traditional load screens (yes, there were pauses but I found them quite tolerable compared to the usual RPG load times). Morrowind's main flaw was it's combat system which was, at various times, either cumbersome and annoying or just boring.

What I hoped for from Fable was a marriage of Morrowind's open-ended nature with more dynamic AI and more interesting interaction with NPCs. What I got instead was, in essence, a pretty standard RPG with time passage - annoyingly fast time passage, by the way, where you can age years just completing one mission if you stop to play with the environment even a little bit.

Re:Platform apology

[Babbster]

I know that PC gamers (of which I'm one) tend to think as you do, but the idea that a major game release can have tons of extra features on the PC because of being "less limited" in terms of specifications is something of a fallacy. In fact, PC game releases tend to be just as gameplay feature-limited as console games and just make more eye candy available to the people with the hotter systems.

For example, Sims 2 is probably going to go on to be yet another best seller for EA. Whilst requiring a T&L graphics card in order to play on lower order systems (such graphics cards being available for far less than $100), when that requirement is met the game is gameplay feature complete with a processor down to 800 MHz (for comparison, the Xbox CPU clocks in at 733 MHz). Even Doom 3, the current champ in terms of hardware demands, cites a minimum of 1.5 GHz which was top speed years ago (as evidenced by the fact that I'm currently on an AMD 1500 and I stay way behind the curve) and will be far lower than the CPU speed of the slowest of the next set of consoles. In short, PC games have to target systems far below the state of the art in order to make the big bucks.

I would also note that there are negatives to Fable (see my post above for a brief list) which were easily addressable in its console incarnation - Morrowind, for example, gives the illusion of a gigantic, nearly seamless world with complete freedom of movement. Even GBA Pokemon games have trees that are planted and grow over time!

I think the problem is less that Molyneaux and company COULDN'T do all the things they wanted to do with Fable, but rather that as development dragged on they reached a point where they were running out of time to implement all the features, probably because they got too preoccupied with prettifying the features they already had.

It's not about the limitations of the Xbox but the limitations of their development team.