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Molyneux on the Vanity of Gamers
Fable 2 is turning out to be a fantasy game unlike any other, with a new feature announced almost every time Molyneux opens his mouth. At a games industry event in Brighton, he sat down for a chat with Gamasutra to discuss using vanity as an incentive. "Fable 2 will take a similar dramatic approach to the concept. Drained of health points and laid out on the ground, players will have the choice of losing experience points - the game's key method of building up a selection of fearsome fighting moves - and immediately jumping up to regain the action, or letting the enemy close in and work them over with stabs, kicks and punches ... Worse than that, when you eventually get up again to fight another day, the marks of your beating will remain for all to see." These scars will be important, somehow, in Fable 2 online mode, a topic they still aren't discussing in detail.
I thought this was about the vanity in gamers that call themselves elite. You know, the ones that use SKU as a word instead of model, those that call it Squeenix instead of Square-Enix, that refer to shooters as shmups, those that say Rogue-Like when they've never personally played Rouge, those that refer to Shigeru Miyamoto as Shiggy, and other stupidity to make themselves feel better than everyone else.
More Twoson than Cupertino
Makes sense. Even in Fable 1, if you took a good hit to the face without armor, it'd leave marks which you'd have to look at every time the camera cut to your face...God forbid you wore cloth, because you'd look like a surgery fetishist before you finished the game, with gashes, scratches, etc all over. If they allow you to bring your character online, would you rather look like a badass, or like everyone's favorite prison bitch? Or, conversely, would you want to look 100 times as abused as everyone else?
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Now that is a laugh. Keep promising us the world, you crazy Frenchman...
Rob
Molyneux is a guy I have very mixed feelings about. He headed up Bullfrog when they made Dungeon Keeper, one of the first games I've ever played from the evil perspective, and a game that earns him huge cool points in my mind. The trouble is, the guy keeps talking about making games that I really want to play but then isn't able to deliver. Black and White is an excellent example: huge potential, but the delivery lacked...something. I can't decide whether I like the guy for being such a visionary, or dislike him for constantly taunting me with game experiences I can't have!
P.P.S. I'm doing Science and I'm still alive.
Unlike any other? I dunno, sounding a LOT like Fable 1 so far. Free-roaming so vast that one of the devs got lost, for example... Yeah, sure it was.
You'd think PM would have learned his lesson on Fable 1 about opening his mouth, and I think I remember him SAYING he learned his lesson (Why did I believe him?) but here he goes again.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I think this will cater to machismo, not seen as a drawback.
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
I want to put scars on my Mii and import him into Fable 2 for the Wii.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
the thing is, if none of these choices affect your ability to complete the game then it doesn't matter anyway. Why do I care if my in game character has scars? And the next time I play i'll probably choose something different anyway in the hope of getting some different gameplay anyway.
Thanks for clearing this up. I hate the vain IMers who use 'LOL' instead of typing out the ha ha has or using the phrase 'I'm laughing out loud' too!
Perhaps we can combine forces and release an informative newsletter!
Blar.
The guys that pick the "hot chick" character in every game.
Why not? There _will_ be people whose goal will be exactly to look as disturbing and menacing as possible. And there _will_ be people who'll wear "I'm the smart guy who took the xp advantage over dumb aesthetics" like a medal of honour.
You can see both sides of the medal in WoW too, that is, both PM's point and the counter-point.
On one hand, if you take a census of the population (repeatedly at different times, to have a good statistic), on any server, you'll find that, with exactly one notable exception, the more a race looks human and pretty, the more players play it. Before Burning Crusade, that meant there were more Humans or Night Elves than the whole Horde combined, no matter what advantages the Horde races got. Even as everyone was bitching about shamen and warlock-killing un-fearable Undead, most people didn't actually want to go and play one.
That's one major reason why the Horde got Blood Elves in the Burning Crusade expansion. Blizzard just caved in and realized that the only thing that would even start to even the odds was to give the Horde a pretty and human-looking race. In fact, one prettier than the Night Elves on the Alliance side.
So that would sorta illustrate PM's point that, indeed, a lot of people will take looking pretty over being an effective killing machine.
The counter-point, though, is that notable exception I've mentioned: the undead. (Technically called the "Forsaken".) The WoW undead aren't the pretty sanitized VTM vampires, but something more hideous than anything you could get in Fable or in most other games. They look literally like someone who's been rotting in a grave for two weeks and then got dug out. You know, with missing flesh, tattered clothes, bones poking out, etc.
The funny thing is, the undead were the most played Horde race. Ok, so the Will Of The Forsaken ability was a major selling point too, but even then it illustrates that some people do take power over looking pretty. But the funny thing is, even after WOTF got nerfed, the undead _still_ are disturbingly popular. Some people actually _like_ looking like that. Go figure.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"Every babe that weeps at your approach, every woman who cries out, 'Dear God! What is that thing,' will echo in your perfect ears."
Based on what Molyneux has said before regarding scars, your interactions with NPCs and (possibly) other players online will be affected. So your ability to complete the game won't be changed, but the manner in which you complete it would.
Thant is, if you believe everything Molyneux is saying. Personally, I have a box of Morton's Kosher on hand.
This article really needs to be tagged "potkettleblack."
Does that make the pot wrong?
You mad
As far as I'm concerned, this guy has burned all of his credibility. Years from now, I suspect someone somewhere will write a retrospective of his career arc, and we'll find out how one of his former colleagues at Bullfrog was responsible for keeping his wilder impulses in check, keeping his visions grounded in reality, and keeping his mouth shut when the gaming press was around. Whoever or whatever it was that kept him from doing the same thing back at Bullfrog, it's clear that that influence is sorely needed now at Lionhead. His inability to reproduce at Lionhead the level of success and critical acclaim he received at Bullfrog makes me think that a) at the very least he wasn't solely responsible for those fantastic game designs and b) he's not the visionary designer he's sometimes made out to be. I've completely stopped paying attention to his hyperbole, as his track record at Lionhead has shown that he's not able to cash the checks his mouth keeps writing. Will Wright is a top game designer. Shigeru Miyamoto is a top game designer. Molyneux is a superb pitch-man, but maybe not so much a top-tier game designer. Perhaps he should give advertising or PR a try.
This gamer says Molyneux needs to talk less and deliver more. This guy is in grave danger of being relegated to has-been windbag status.
Molyneux is an expert. Every time he opens his mouth, he promises his next game will have this and that, and it always, always under-delivers.
The rest of us actually don't choose a hot chick so that at critical game moments, we won't be caught surprised because we were staring at a virtual woman's ass.
That's what our porn collections/internet are for.
Nope.
:)
One more shibboleth: "Aerith"
My god I hate this Molyneux. Talking trash all day long as if he still had some credibility. He always promises what cool new stuff he invented and his new game will have, but in the end the game is nothing like it. Look at Fable: It's fun, but it's not revolutional at all. It's a good old hack'n slay, nothing more.
Kind of like how Guitar Hero tries to make us non guitar-playing types not feel foolish.