Slashdot Mirror
Molyneux Slips Additional Details on Fable II
Via Xbox 360 Fanboy, and in the grand tradition of Peter Molyneux's history of saying crazy-awesome things in interviews, comes some fascinating revelations about Fable 2 and past games. Mr. Molyneux's tradition of honesty continues, with up-front admissions of problems with Black and White 2 and a few hints about what we'll be seeing in his upcoming fantasy game. "One of the tiny decisions that we made in Black and White 2 was to use Black and White 1 as the foundation stone for all the code for Black and White 2, and what we found was you had this massive amount of code and you were putting an even more massive amount of code on top, and underneath it was this quite shaky foundation stone, and that meant we had to rewrite quite a lot of stuff. And then it came down that the original plan for Black and White 2 - we thought we had it on time, but we didn't, we ran out of money to produce really - was that it was gonna be twenty-five lands, I think, fifteen to twenty-five lands, the creatures' intelligence could have been much more, we had a real plan to stretch the features out so that you didn't get them all by land, you know, third land I think it was, stretch those features out, there was an awful lot more about the RTSy side of the game, an awful more about the army side."
"Fable II will feature incredibly boring storytelling and overwhelmingly cheesy acting, pushing the Molyneaux envelope even further!"
Even though I love Molyeux games, I have grown extremely skeptical about the implementation of Dogs in the game play of Fable II. Have you ever seen a game where a dog sidekick added to the experience. I also am somewhat up in the air about having my emotional connection to dogs manipulated by game play to see dogs hurt and injured to kick an emotion. I don't know why, but the death of a character is a story arc, but watching dogs get hurt seems to be emotionaly manipulative.
Then again, we'll see how the game looks when it's done.
Peter's enthusiasm is always nice, but does anyone put a lot of weight into what he says before a game is released?
His games are usually good, but never nearly as revolutionary as he talks about before they're released. The innovations he tries end up being around the edges of the game and the core game often is very... typical.
Molyneux's history of saying crazy-awesome things in interviews
You know, removing one word from that phrase would transform it into an accurate representation of reality.
All right, technically one hyphen followed by one word.
Reality has a conservative bias: it conserves mass, energy, momentum...
"So I haven't talked about death, there's another thing which I haven't talked at all about which is another word that you're gonna hear me use - which I'm not gonna talk about - it's another big thing."
That about sums it up...
The main peroblem was that my burst fire didn't miss him. R.I.P. Dogmeat, you were a loyal friend all the way until we tried to take down those supermutants.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
It's a shame in some ways because each of his games have actually been amazing, particularly in terms of innovation, in their own right. They just always fall short of the fantasies he had in his head and described to the press and so always get judged accordingly. It's like a high jumper setting the bar at a mile in to the sky then jumping twice as high as the previous world record - everyone leaves disappointed that he failed to reach the bar he set for himself rather than impressed by what was still a great jump.
I just plain fucking HATE people. I hate animals, too, but not nearly as much.
I'm not expecting much from Fable 2. Molyneux obviously has a history of promising too much and then not delivering on most of it. I'm convinced he'd like to do everything he describes the problem is that ultimately most of it just isn't feasible given a reasonable budget and schedule. Ultimately his games suffer from feature creep.
The first Fable is a good example of it. The game is actually quite decent. It's entertaining. However, the story is extremely simplistic. In general the game is much more simple than Molyneux would imply. It's got many of the features he originally promised; the lead character's visual appearance changes based on his alignment, he can get married, his actions sort of have an impact on the world and he ages. However, the implementation for all these features is severely lacking.
Aging doesn't really affect anything because the developers clearly didn't have the nerve to profoundly affect the main character in any way. It's fairly easy to move alignment back and forth between good and evil because the scripting for that aspect is so simplistic. It renders alignment meaningless. NPC interactions leading to marriage are even more superficial. With the necessary items a player can pretty much go from being a stranger to a spouse within a minute. Changes to the world consist of NPC responses to the character. For all the supposed character development the fact that I couldn't really customize the look of my own character was a disappointment. And on top of all that the storyline is very linear and uninspired.
It almost feels like they spent too much time brainstorming about what they could do and not enough time actually implementing those features. Many of the features in the first Fable feel like they were slapped on at the last minute just so they could live up to some of the promises. Graphics aside I can think of quite a few Gameboy Advance games with more depth than Fable.
The team would have been better served coming up with a handful of ideas and sticking to those insuring a higher level of refinement. As I've mentioned, despite those shortcomings the game was fun. Well, specifically, I found the fighting to be fun. And I thought the game had potential. Fable 2 may address many of these issues, but given Molyneux's record I'm not optimistic.
I empathize with vegetables a lot more, ever since brother Maynard opened my ears to the cries of the carrots. I will not participate in their holocaust.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
Surprisingly no Molyneux bashers today, weird!
:/
Peter definately does hype his stuff up and yeah they never are as good as he claims, that being said Fable is quite a good game and Black and white was certainly new and innovative fun for at least 8hours
I'm looking forward to Fable 2, although I must admit I couldn't care less about the dog sidekick or the terrible bland graphics from the demo but I'll still play the game, it'll hopefully be as good as Fable 1.
Also, Peter made Syndicate and really, that deserves a lifelong pass as far as I'm concerned!
Actually, after eating out in lots of asian places recently, I figured out that it's possible to make tofu really, really delicious. Tofu FTW!
Perhaps Peter should spend a bit more time debugging his code rather than sharing his "wisdom" with us.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I hope this is not considered off-topic, but IMHO Molyneux missed a huge opportunity and perhaps they could put it right...
Lionhead's game 'The Movies' is essentially two things:
- a ho-hum management game based on running a movie studio
- an extremely powerful machinima generator
When The Movies was released, it was released as a management game -- you have to play for a couple of hours to get to the machinima maker. Most people weren't interested; the game was a flop, and contributed to LH being bought by MS.
What they should have done -- and still could -- is drop the idea of the management game; and just release the machinima maker, not as a game, but as a cool way to make your own movies. If Apple owned it, I'm sure they'd have released it already, calling it "your movie studio in a box" etc.
Not too late -- would be great to see Lionhead get something back for all the work they put into the game.