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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 think this will cater to machismo, not seen as a drawback.
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The only ones that really bug me are the "hardcore" gamers.... who play either madden, counterstrike, Wow, star craft... or any game exclusively. Then there are the ones who spend more time bitching about what game is better or how all the new games suck, then they actually spend enjoying the games they hold so highly. Actually I just hate all the asshats who claim to be hardcore gamers then act like it makes them an authority any game.
When ever someone say "I'm a hardcore gamer", I have the urge to kick them in the teeth.
You mad
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.
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Here's the problem with Molyneux: While his games have great concepts and ideas, the execution is usually lacking.
Dungeon Keeper had a great concept, but as a game it was kind of eh. Dungeon Keeper 2, on the other hand, is a much better game in every way. Ditto with Black and White and Black and White 2. For some reason, Molyneux's sequels come out to be better games than the originals... either this is because he needs some feedback from the gaming community to decide what to change, or that he pays less personal attention to the game to give more power to his 'underlings' to add features. (i.e. skipping the tutorial in Black and White 2, but even that was a patch.)
Interestingly, both Dungeon Keeper and Black and White had the exact same bug. In both games, once you set your minion to worship, they were supposed to leave when they get hungry or tired, go get some food, then come back to the job. Instead, they would worship until they starved to death and died. Both Dungeon Keeper 2 and Black and White 2 fixed this bug.
I will give him this though: Although he makes crazy promises, like a lot of bigwig game producers, he's a lot better at following-up with them than most. I think Black and White contained nearly every feature it was touted to contain. (Although I know Fable was missing more than a few.) Also, his games come out at least remotely close to "on time."
P.S. What was with that level in Black and White where they stole your creature away? The creature was the selling point of the game, and frankly the most fun part of it by far. Then you go to an island, and bam it's gone. That sucked.
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I always thought that was one of the coolest things about Fable.
Early in the game I opted to help the man whose group was attacked by a werewolf, despite (correctly) guessing he would turn into a werewolf at some point and attack me. This left the only scar I'd accrue the entire game. It ran over my character's left eye for the rest of the game and served two purposes: reminding me there's a price for careless do-gooding and instilling a sense of cumulative experience.
Molyneux is a visionary. And he's great at that. As a game creator, he lacks a few things. Mostly what is lacking in most visionaries: He doesn't see the "long run".
You can say about his games what you want, but they are never some kind of clone of what's been done a billion times before. They usually are either something completely new or at least twist things around in a way that make them look like something completely new. Not a bad thing if you ask me.
The problem with him is that his vision usually stops where the game starts. His concepts are awesome. His ideas are brilliant. His execution often lacking. The first moments of playing you're simply in awe. It's something really new. It's something really cool. It's something really stunning. Then, after a few hours, you learn that it's something really repetitive. What a lot of his game have is an incredible level of micro management that gets tedious after a while. B&W being a prime example of it, but DK suffers from the same problem.
Also, often it's not really easy to do well in his games in the "long run". DK was quite hard to beat if you had to wage a prolonged war, your money was usually running quite low quickly. B&W required a lot of micromanagement if you didn't want your worshipers to die or "forget" that they should probably stock up on food. They were also slow enough that it made quite some sense to "help" them. Which leads back to repetitive, boring micro management.
I love his vision, though. If he could manage to coop with someone who knows how to make games fun and entertaining for a long period of time, we'd see the best game of all ages.
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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.
I don't know why you'd have to have played Rogue to legitimately use the word Rogue-like. Angband, Nethack, Moria, etc are all "Rogue-like", and it's a very useful way of referring to the genre of similar games with a very recognizable style even if you haven't played the original. What's a non-vain way of saying it? Should I stop saying "sci-fi" because I haven't read whatever the first science fiction book supposedly was?
And I have played Rogue, at least enough to know that I would rather play any other Rogue-like game, because surprise it's the most primitive. I only played it because it was the only Rogue-like that I found for my Palm at the time; once I found kMoria I played that instead. I think it would be stupid to require people to play it before they can otherwise claim to appreciate the genre, since ultimately it's not a very good game compared to the other options.
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