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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
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.
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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.
I used plate/mail and I was still all kinds of fucked up. Though my old guy just looked freaking badass in the white magicians outfit. He freaking pulsed power.... to bad the towns people were really scared of him because i screwed up the prison escape 6 freaking times...
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.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Because the scaring in the last game did affect gameplay.
You could be the glorious hero, full of light and wisdom, but you were so damned fugley by the end game that the towns people would run away from you.
Not to mention the fact that some people DO care what their character looks like, even more once you go online, a name isn't always enough to make you unique.
Go look at wow, how many lvl 70s look almost the same and are the same right down to the enchants, the talents, and the equipment? Its not pretty and it gets really annoying really fast.
People want unique characters, this is part of that to an extent.
You mad
"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.
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.