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Fable 2 Follow Up a "Significant Scientific Achievement"?
In a bold statement, game developer Peter Molyneux is claiming that his new Fable 2 follow up is a "significant scientific achievement". His unbridled excitement stems from years of work on AI, simulation, and character interaction. "Fortunately for fans of Molyneux-style hyperbole, the man is back with wide-eyed, reins-off enthusiasm of his own future work. [...] In Molyneux's own words, 'I think it's such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired.'"
There, fixed it for you. 'I think it's such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired.' Yes, Wired.
Someone just said that major scientific achievements make the cover of Wired. Not Nature, not Science, not Physical Review Letters. Wired.
*cough* *cough*
No offense Mr Molyneux but it would probably be better to get your major scientific achievement on the cover of UFO Magazine. More "major scientific achievements" have died after making the cover of Wired than almost any other hipster magazine. At least with UFO Magazine you will still have some believers in 10 years.
It won't be what he's boasting but I'll play it and probably enjoy it. If they can deliver even half of what they claim, then I'll be satisfied.
So is he talking about Fable 2 (the follow-up to Fable) being the achievement, or the eventual follow-up to Fable 2?
Am I the only one who loves Peter Molyneux and his crazy claims about his upcoming works?
It's funny every time, also it's fun to let the imagination run wild a bit... the problem is in the fans taking it to heart so strongly.
Getting on the cover of Wired is more of a significant marketing achievement.
More seriously, if this is actually a scientific advance, then it would be published in peer-reviewed journals, scrutinized by the community, and (if worthy) built upon by others. It isn't really science if you keep the secrets of your techniques locked up, and don't allow others to see/understand what you're doing. And it's certainly not a "significant achievement" if all you're doing is using the same techniques that are well-established in the field. Grandiose claims of novelty need correspondingly rigorous evidence.
I tell you, there's no greater reward for scientific achievement than to be put on the cover of Wired.
...and in related news, Mozart still laments having never made the cover of Rolling Stone.
and I predict that this post will be a significant scientific achievement in the field of karma hitchhiking.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
While I liked Black & White, Mr. Molyneux has been a windbag since Bullfrog. Always hype, hype, hype, disappointment with him. Most of his recent games would be decent to fairly good if only he would shut the hell up before release.
Wish he'd make another Dungeon Keeper.
I want to follow him around and periodically shout "Try to get your combat multiplier *even higher*! Until the cops drag me away.
"In a bold statement, game developer Peter Molyneux..."
I honestly didn't make it past that part.
1. Molyneux hypes the hell out of $game_X
2. Delivered product turns out to be nothing like the hype.
3. Expansion released to attempt to mollify angry fans.
4. Pick up $game_X plus expansion for 1/5th-1/10th of its original retail value a couple years later, and at that price it turns out to be not that bad at all.
A message from Peter Molyneux.
There is something I have to say. And I have to say it because I love making games. When a game is in development, myself and the development teams I work with constantly encourage each other to think of the best features and the most ground-breaking design possible.
However, what happens is that we strive to include absolutely everything we've ever dreamt of and, in my enthusiasm, I talk about it to anyone who'll listen, mainly in press interviews. When I tell people about what we're planning, I'm telling the truth, and people, of course, expect to see all the features I've mentioned. And when some of the most ambitious ideas get altered, redesigned or even dropped, people rightly want to know what happened to them.
If I have mentioned any feature in the past which, for whatever reason, didn't make it as I described into Fable, I apologise. Every feature I have ever talked about WAS in development, but not all made it. Often the reason is that the feature did not make sense. For example, three years ago I talked about trees growing as time past. The team did code this but it took so much processor time (15%) that the feature was not worth leaving in. That 15 % was much better spent on effects and combat. So nothing I said was groundless hype, but people expecting specific features which couldn't be included were of course disappointed. If that's you, I apologise. All I can say is that Fable is the best game we could possibly make, and that people really seem to love it.
I have come to realise that I should not talk about features too early so I am considering not talking about games as early as I do. This will mean that the Lionhead games will not be known about as early as they are, but I think this is the more industry standard.
Our job as the Lionhead family of studios is to be as ambitious as we possibly can. But although we jump up and down in glee about the fabulous concepts and features we're working on, I will not mention them to the outside world until we've implemented and tested them, and they are a reality.
Thank you for reading.
Peter.
Source: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/10/01/1651219
I'll believe it when I see it. I wish you the best of luck Mr. Molyneux.
Actually, Fable was a very nice, if too short, game. Still, it was great fun.
That said, the guy does brag way too much, and there is a chance that this kind of self-hype will sink any game, no matter how good. For example a lot of B&W's flaws would have been easier to swallow, if it hadn't been for the hype promising the moon and the stars and everything that the game didn't actually have as released.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I just hope the peasants don't all sound like rejects from "My Fair Lady" this time. I hated that the only woman you could marry that DIDN'T have an obnoxious accent was the Mayor. Not easy when you're trying to do the "all good" type run-through. "Oh! You really ARE an 'ero!" *shudder* And yet, all the prostitutes sounded educated. Hmm...
Last night I played a blank tape at full volume. The mime next door went nuts.
Why does anyone bother to report Molyneux's hype?
Well because some of us have extreme nostalgia for Populous, Powermonger, and of course the holy grail called 'Syndicate'.
Way back in the early 90s, back when I first got Syndicate to run on my 486 with 4mb of ram with the right boot disk configuration I was floored and once I figured out how to get it to play with sound I was really into the whole game for several hundred (if not thousand) hours of my life.
Sadly, I never played Dungeon Master for some odd reason (maybe I was too much into Quake at the time) by the mid to late 90's.
Anyways... Flash forward 10 or 15 years and those games are forgotten and Black and White elicited yawns from many people. I personally played it for a few hours and then sort of just threw my people against the mountain side or into the ocean with my creature and moved on to other games.
I personally never played Fable and some people call it the greatest game they have ever played and others just shrugged at it saying it was an ok game but nothing revolutionary.
To be fair, the best comparison of Molyneux is George Lucas who as we all know made 3 amazing movies and then made some mediocre sequels. Really... I think it all went down hill once Bullfrog got axed or whatever happened to that company.
So maybe... Just maybe he'll pull off another Populous or Syndicate and thats what most people are hoping for, but I'm not holding my breathe. I'm still bitter about Episode I and Syndicate 2.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Don't forget Magic Carpet. That game was bloody amazing!
Imagine this: it's just a year after the original Doom was released with its (for the time) amazing 2.5D game engine. Now this other game comes along that has dynamically lighted, fully morphable terrain. It has dynamic music that changes when the player enters a fight, reflections in the water, distance fog, transparency, a particle system, mouse controls, 8 player multiplayer, support for VR headsets, and, get this, it even had a red-green Stereogram mode! (Think those 3D images that you look at with red-green glasses.)
And the spells, my god. The things you could do with those. You had spells that would cause the ground to rise up at any place of your choosing and form a castle that would act as your base, you could cause tornadoes to appear, or meteors to crash down and leave a huge crater. You still don't see effects like that in most games, and Magic Carpet did it all in 1994!
To this day it's still by far the most amazing game I've ever played.