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.

Comments

That was a pretty bad article.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I hope it's more "viable" than his other visions

[Opportunist]

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.