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Tough Times for Lionhead Studios
Alice, over at the Wonderland blog, discusses Lionhead's decision to reduce the size of the company. The maker of The Movies and Black and White 2 has apparently not been doing so well financially this year. From the article: "Over the last few months Lionhead has been working on plans for a new AAA world class game. As work on a number of its titles draws to a close, a pool of 100 super talented developers at Lionhead are available to create a new super team at Lionhead. This will be in addition to an existing team which is working on an amazing next generation title. This strategy was presented to Lionhead this morning in a company meeting but sadly it will mean some redundancies."
AAA world class game made by an amazing team? Well, that's a relief--at least they aren't putting out mediocre games!
English is easier said than done.
Anyone else thinking that the next generation game is most probably Fable 2?
Sure hope so
How you've fallen from grace! Black and White 2 was nothing more than a slick RTS with terrible multiplayer gaming, Fable was a pretty rail adventure, and the Movies is an elegant slice of what might have been a good game if not for the overwhelming micromanagement. I dont want to even mention Black and White and how you released a game that could not be finished because of the poor debugging.
Its no wonder that Lionhead has to downsize; they're not trying to make 'popular' or 'successful' games... they're still trying to make 'innovative, groundbreaking games' and failing. Mabye they should take a que from Will Wright with his new SPORE, which is the sort of thing that I used to expect out of Lionhead or Peter Molyneux.
Let me open by saying that Populous (sp?) is one of my favorite games of all time, even to this day. It's the game that really defined the "god game" genre and in my opinion, the only game better than it is for the time in which it was released is Populous 2.
Since then, however, it's been a downhill slide for Peter. This was made most clear to me when Populous 3 came out and totally ruined the gameplay model. The overly-curvy 3D interface made it far too difficult to see what you were doing. I would have honestly preferred another 2D iso-view game.
Black & White was a horrible, terrible bugfest, and it was slow and chunky even on fairly high-end hardware. A god game should not be that demanding, because it doesn't need to be, unless you're reaching too far.
Reaching too far seems to be Molyneux's current M.O. Fable did about 25% of the stuff it was supposed to do. Black & White 2 was a step backwards in playability, from all I've heard - I wasn't even motivated enough to hook up my desktop system, which currently is sitting in a corner, in order to play it based on the reviews.
As long as Molyneux is unwilling to actually finish a game, I couldn't give one tenth of one fuck if he never makes another one.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Lionhead has this tremendous disconnect between what they hype up in public, and what the end up producing.
Fable promised to deliver some truly impressive features and a massive, interactive world -- and ended up delivering a simple 15-hour RPG.
Black & White 2 promised an innovative sequel to one of my favorite (but also one of the most frustrating) games ever produced. Instead, by the time it stores, it had cut all the best features that the original game had, like multiplayer and AI learning from your actions. It required a 1.1 patch to get past a crash-on-startup, and then barely ran at 10-15fps @ 640x480 on my GeForce 6800. The software mouse cursor at 10fps made it impossible for me to even select anything, so I couldn't even judge the quality of the game. I had to return it after a number of fruitless calls to tech support.
And now they promise that they are gathering 100 "super developers" to create a "AAA world class game". So to me, that means that they are actually hiring any CS college grads they can find, to produce yet another overhyped game that doesn't do live up to half of its premise.
> A new AAA world class game...
> a pool of 100 super talented developers...
> a new super team...
> an amazing next generation title...
Sorry, Lionhead forfeited the right to all those adjectives when it made Black and White.
The Movies wouldn't be a bad game if they had some way to make Snakes on a Plane...
It seems I may have to hold may head in shame but I liked the first Black and White.
Yes it might be a bit buggy sometimes but for something you pickup from the $5 shelf
its not all that bad.
[sVen]
If this means they'll have to stop having their Good and Evil narrators stop talking, or the Guildmaster not say "There's another quest for you at the Guild, Hero", then I'm all in favor of downsizing at Lion's Head studios.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Lionhead is best at trying new concepts, and in creating games that give players a great deal of leeway in how they want to play. But they are not so good at creating games that trigger the 'must buy' reflex in the average consumer. Alot of that is that their games, particularly the gameplay, dont seem to be the sort that lend themselves well to typical marketing campaigns. Black and White was a fine game, but how do you sell someone on the notion of spending hours training a giant cow?
The games are excellent in the most abstract and fundamental sense. Be a god, good or evil as you choose. Be a villian or a hero. But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. I would say that Fable is probably Lionheads most commercially viable franchise. Black and White and Movies are just too hard for marketing to sell.
The simplest way to create a monster hit is to have fundamentally solid gameplay mechanics paired with a style and tone that both compliments that gameplay, and that the intended audience can identify with even without being hard core gamers. I believe that most of Lionheads problems are primarily stylistic.
END COMMUNICATION
Black and White was a fine game, but how do you sell someone on the notion of spending hours training a giant cow?
I don't know. Nintendo has done a good job sucking people into NintenDogs...
When a game is in development and he's meeting with the press he will always talk about every idea he has as if it is nailed down and already a fact of the game. When said game comes out we realise that we've been bullshitted, again. I thought black and white, while enjoyable was just a bit too ambitious for the available hardware at the time, Fable was a superb little romp, black and white 2 - the jury's still out and the movies - whilst being told by pre-release news that you could run your own movie studio and take it through the ages - it trned out you got to run your own movie studio but you didnt get to do any of the fun stuff! I'd hate to see the studio close but I would like to see them become a little bit more realistic, dont aim lower Lionhead - just get yourselves a little closer to the target.
The other day I got to play a multiplayer session of DK2, something I didn't do back in the day when it came out. Wow, what fun! The only problem is keeps loosing contact when troop counts get high. I also loved the Magic Carpet series. My point is Molex can make games, but he is getting too caught up in the race to produce a game with everything, than focusing on core design, so we get these games from him that have a 50% core idea complete with several trivial ideas to fill in the space.
And Red all over?
[UID-HeinzIntel]
"how do you sell someone on the notion of spending hours training a giant cow?"
Nintendogs was already mentioned, and it's not only selling like crazy, it's also helping sell the DS big time. I know people who had no intention of getting a portable console, but ended up buying one anyway because their kid wanted Nintendogs.
I'll add titles like Catz or Creatures. I don't know the exact sales numbers, but I'd assume it must have been enough to be worth making sequels and console ports. Creatures was up to number 3, last I checked, and it had spawned user mods and a free semi-online expansion. And, oh, you could train them. In fact, you pretty much had to.
And then there's The Sims Unleashed, and expansion pack which did amazingly well given that almost all it gave you was cats and dogs for The Sims. And yes, the dogs had to be trained.
So basically enough people _do_ want a virtual pet, but it still had to be fun. That's where Black And White fell short. For most of us was about as much fun as a trip to the dentist.
"The games are excellent in the most abstract and fundamental sense. Be a god, good or evil as you choose. Be a villian or a hero. But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. I would say that Fable is probably Lionheads most commercially viable franchise. Black and White and Movies are just too hard for marketing to sell."
Marketting it had in spades, and in a sense that's all it had. PM hypes any half-baked idea he ever has, and EA was more than happy to act as the amplifier for that hype.
His games since Populous weren't even that innovative. Training a creature had been done before (Creatures 1 to 3 already existed), creature fights had been done before (Pokemon), Movies style games are a dime a dozen (look for anything with "Tycoon" in the title), and good-vs-evil is a _stapple_ of RPGs and several other games. I mean, seriously, whop-de-fucking-do, a RPG where you get alignment and a good-or-evil choice at the end? It describes almost half the RPGs ever made. Vampire, KOTOR, you name it.
That wasn't as much innovation, as just hype.
But that's not the real problem. The real problem is just that: "But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. ". No, make that: falls very much short compared to what's already on the market.
See, making games isn't all about having a crazy idea, but also then actually making a game that's fun to play. Any gamer has some crazy idea of a game. Ask anyone. (And see if it doesn't involve good-vs-evil too.) What makes a great designer is then putting some good gameplay around it, giving it some interesting content, and polishing it all into a gem. _That's_ what game design is all about.
Now let's look at Lionhead's games.
Black And White was a micro-management nightmare, and an _intrusive_ nightmare at that. (You know it's bad when even the fanboys tell you to use the turbo-click infinite-resources _exploit_ to keep the worshippers fed or to have enough wood. Or for fuck's sake, literally, the villagers wouldn't even reproduce unless you personally assign them to.) It also passes swift good-or-evil judgment on the _player_, based on some idiotic criteria that don't even follow your actions. (E.g., failing to save the villagers from someone else's attack, even if you did try to save them, makes you the spawn of satan. Sorry, that's just bullshit. Incompetent, maybe, but no way that counts as evil.) It also doesn't help that both sides are a grotesque carricature that boggles the mind. There is no good or evil in that game, there's just playing a micro-managing retard versus playing a self-destructive retard that's damaging his own power pool.
The execution also basically sucked. The game was launched missing features that were hyped to hell and back, the AI for the creature (i.e., the main hyped feature) was a sick joke, save and reload were broken by design (wtf is the point of save and reload if half the game, e.g., the creature's state, _isn't_ saved or restoreabl
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.