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Molyneux And The Room
hammersuit writes "GameDaily recently visited Peter Molyneux in his UK-based Lionhead Studios and had the opportunity to discuss a few things. The Room, a new dev tool being worked on internally, sounds exciting: 'Even more intriguing than The Room itself, was the purpose behind it. Peter wants his next generation titles to mimic the real world as closely as possible.' The piece goes into depth about what The Room is about, but also about episodic content (likes it), MMOs (wants to do one, but not Fable 2), and the future of the Fable series." If you'll recall, Molyneux used his 'Room' technology as his entrant into the game design challenge at last year's GDC.
Most things that Molyneux talks about are exciting. It's just that the end products are about 15% of what he envisions. The guy isnt so much an awesome game designer, just someone who made a career off of videogame fantasies (not the creepy kind).
"What we saw really makes us think that Molyneux is the true God of Simulation"
This calls for a Celebrity Death Match featuring Peter Molyneux vs. Will Wright!
I...I'm attacking the darkness!
Well at least tinkering around and just exploring new ideas might result in some new creative games since they arent sitting down discussing how to we do a better FPS game with 1 new neato graphical effect. The Movies was definately a step in the right direction, although I've yet to play it
I foresee an elderly sage who will ask us "Have You Opened The Door To The Next Room?" every five minutes while we try to enjoy the room ...
[think of his Black & White or later games]
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
is this what passes for video game journalism? There is such a thing as the boy who cried wolf, and peter is it. Remember how the movies was going to be "bigger than the sims" and how "you could totally remake star wars using this game"
Why does anyone take a word this fool says seriously? what interesting new games get ignored because journalists are writing this crap.
Besides the entire team who made "the room" left the company months ago to form their own startup. The journo didnt even do his basic research.
So do better tools mean that maybe next time, Molyneux will actually be able to finish a game he's working on?
Bryan Dawson, if you're reading this, please have your editor proofread your paper. It sounds like a 7th grade book report.
(It's not as bad as Kieron Gillen's horrible piece of masturbatory twaddle. That's a classic, right there. "Time for a Monday neologism: Post-genre," indeed.)
Mod me troll or whatever, but the article was poorly written ("place center"? "the feeling"?), contained very little real information, and was obviously written by someone who knows very little about how games and the game industry work.
They made a demo app running on specialized hardware that has a lot of interactive stuff in one room? yeah that sounds like it will translate easily to a COMPLETE TITLE.
It's a neat demo, but that article only contained about a paragraph, if that, of real information, recorded and translated by someone who really has no idea what they saw.
The technology to make a "fully interactive" or "reality" type game has existed for a while. The reason no one bothers to make it is that it will take artists a hojillion years to create all those assets, and it breaks the 90/10 curve pretty bad. That is, with 10% of the effort you could create a world that had about 90% of the same interactivity where it really counted. That full-on level of interaction just isn't worth it.
Remember the vision in B&W? The learning creature, that piece of software that should be the revolution for AI design?
It was. Oh, it certainly was. It was tracking a billion variables, every single one had some tiny influence in the creature's behaviour. The impact on the game was a mix between zero and unplayable. Zero, because the many little things went by unnoticed, unplayable because you couldn't make a connection between cause and effect, between what you did and how it affected the creature.
I just hope that this magical room isn't going to suffer the same fate. Yes, it is very nice that items behave "realistic". That they age, that they follow physical and biological laws, but the question that remains is: How much will it matter in the game? When the game is set for a period of a few days, I doubt the "aging" effect is noticable. Let's just hope that the cool features don't suffer the same fate they did in earlier games: Being somewhere between unnoticable and annoying.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Molyneux showed B&W2, The Movies, and The Room during this presentation.
I agree that it would not make a very compelling game, but it would certainly be an interesting toy.
The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
I couldn't even get B&W to work. It crashed on every machine I tried it on, so much that it was unplayable. Tech support was 100% unresponsive.
I'm never going to buy another game by this guy. That game was the most over-hyped piece of crap ever.
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Well, it wasn't THAT bad, and concerning being overhyped, it can't hold a candle to WoW in that department.
But it sure was a game with a LOT of potential and a LOT of thought put into, with the result of being a rather mediocre "build and crush" game. Too much emphasis on the "new and cool" features, too little on gameplay and playability.
They learned their lesson with B&W 2, which is indeed better. But again, the comperative isn't necessarily better than the positive, it's still not a "good" game.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.