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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."
Remember this is Lionhead, their mediocre games are considered AAA world class (black and white anyone, Fable anyone?)
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 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.