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Peter Molyneux On Developmental Experimentation
Gamasutra reports on a talk given at GDC by Peter Molyneux, founder of Lionhead Studios and designer of games such as Black & White and Fable. Molyneux discussed some of the experimentation that went into the development of their various games. Quoting:
"After his overview of the process, Molyneux demonstrated a number of actual experiments. He began by showing an early version of Fable II's dog, which he himself designed and which ended up factoring heavily into the full game. 'This is probably one of the most valuable experiments we ever did,' he said. Using the original Fable engine, the team asked itself, 'Why don't we think how the dog can actually move and be a companion to the player?' They decided to focus on exploring what a dog would do, rather than try to slot a canine into existing typical video game companion tasks. This led to the mechanic of the dog running out in front of the player, rather than beside or behind the player as most game AI companions are positioned, which had a huge impact on the dog's role."
I disagree. Molyneux does experiment far more than any other major developer, for the most part. Of course, these days video gaming is pretty well established and there isn't quite the room to invent whole new genres like there was back in the 80s and 90s. But even so, he always seems to me to be trying to find new twists on existing genres, or to mesh genres together in a new way. Fable and Black & White are good examples of this.
The problem is that, despite what people like to think, experimentation and innovation don't often make for very good games. These days, making a good game is, like it or not, generally about polish, attention to detail, technical prowess and the shameless lifting of other people's innovations. Molyneux will put out something interesting and different, which fails to provide any kind of fun. Then a year later, somebody else lifts all of the good ideas and puts them into a package that actually works as a game. Look at how Black & White, which was undoubtedly one of the most broken experiences ever to be marketed as a leisure activity, laid down much of the groundwork for the modern virtual pet genre, which is seriously big money now.
I don't like the guy's games, but I think the industry is better for his involvement.
I've always enjoyed Molyneux games for the new ideas he tries to pack in. Black & White for example; a great game in that it provided some genuinely different game-play to anything else ever. A few of us played that game for an entire weekend once; it's slow enough to leave running while eating/drinking/sleeping, but involving enough to play when and if you want.
It was quite funny to wake up to find your creature had randomly taught itself to fling faeces at non-friendly villages and promptly eat all the villagers once this bizarre spectacle had converted the hearts and minds of an opposition village to your cause.
Anyway, the point is, the guy's trying to inject some originality into gameplay at least; some times it works, other times not.
throw new NoSignatureException();
"The problem is that, despite what people like to think, experimentation and innovation don't often make for very good games."
I disagree, peter has had hit games (through his experimentation) out of the gate (populous comes to mind, as well as syndicate, etc), of which which were totally original projects - and hit the ground running.
Sometimes it's just that the first games that experiment with new ideas usually don't get everything right and some games (black and white as you mentioned) ran into problems where the developer (peter) was clueless himself in where the fun in his creative vision was, he has said so himself by the way in more recent interviews that can be found by googling around.
Peter has some serious street cred, I'm not sure you're old enough (or aware enough) of all the games Peter has been involved in - us older gamers know Bullfrog productions (list of games @ link below)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullfrog_Productions
Game developers have been in the process of learning to make better video games over the years, the problem was - they didn't have a process for finding the fun in games, that is now becoming a lot more of a scientifically based process of hypothesis - testing and experimentation before a game is released.
Even developers who take what already works, STILL have problems getting it right. Supreme commander comes to mind, where Chris taylor was disappointed they fell back on tanks and artillery and making the races mostly the same, when he wanted race diversity.
No game would have ever been made if it wasn't for experimentation, that is generating a lot of ideas and selecting the ones according to some selection criteria and seeing what sticks. The early periods of gaming, in the NES days there was lots of crap but lots of new ideas. For instance would you ever see Cobra Triangle today?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_Triangle
Cobra Triangle was made by RARE (yes that RARE, of Killer instinct fame, and other N64 games
The real problem is that developers didn't have a complete handle on WHY and WHAT made their games successful (what worked and what didn't), it took a lot of trial and error for them to figure this out and even STILL TODAY many developers haven't figured it out... I can tell which developers have gotten it and which developers haven't by playing sequels in a franchise, I can always tell when developers don't understand what in their games were fun or not.
Oh believe me, I'm old enough to remember Molyneux's old games. I played Populus back when it was new. I remember the excitement of getting home with a copy of PC Format which had a 5 1/4 inch floppy on the cover with the demo of Powermonger. (Btw, I mostly liked your post, but comments about "not sure you're old enough or aware enough" do make you sound a bit petulent.)
But the industry has changed since then, as have the expectations of gamers. Back then, if you had a good and original idea, you could build a decent game around it with only a small team and a modest budget. Development teams were still led by visionary geniuses, who not only thought up the concept for the game, but also did a large chunk of the hands on development.
For better or worse (and I do think it's mostly for the better) the industry has changed. Putting out a decent commercial game these days requires years of development, a budget of millions and the efforts of hundreds of people (albeit maybe not all at the same time). The best developers today aren't the ones who can throw out 10 great innovations in game design before breakfast - they're the ones who can define the scope of a game, prevent it from creeping, decide which ideas to lift from elsewhere and then project manage the various teams of programmers, artists and QA people to produce the product on time and to a satisfactory standard, while keeping the publishers off their backs to a sufficient degree that the overall vision isn't compromised. If you look at some of the best games of recent years (I'd nominate World of Warcraft, Dead Space, Crysis and Gears of War), all of them have lifted ideas shamelessly from elsewhere, adding very little of their own but they've been delivered with degree of focus that results in a very polished end product (leaving aside crappy PC ports in a couple of cases).
Now, Molyneux isn't completely lacking in these skills. He's not John Romero and he hasn't turned Lionhead into a running joke like Ion Storm. But it's clear that having hyper-active, ideas-based management is holding Lionhead back from joining the top tier of developers. However, it's still good to have studios like that around, throwing out innovation-rich games for others to cannibalise. This is why I continue to buy Molyneux's games, even though I haven't actually enjoyed one since the original Dungeon Keeper.
Yes, they like the dog because it's probably the cruelest twist in the game. They think hey we'll hype the dog up so everyone wants to see what the dog does and play around with it THEN WE'LL FUCKING KILL IT.
At the end you get the choice between saving your dog who gets shot dead, everyone else in the world who died or getting 1 million gold.
So what they did was made the dog pretty fucking integral into the game, but made you feel like a selfish dick for reviving him rather than all the other innocents that died.
Molyneux is a dog killing bastard and he uses it against you and that's what he meant when he talks about bringing emotion to games! Me being a good guy thought hey, I'll choose sacrifice and sacrifice the god damn dog for everyone else and all I got was a letter of thanks from everyone. If I'd known that I'd have got my dog back or taken the £1million and let the damn peasants stay dead.
Seriously though, the dog was quite fun to play around with. The game itself was far, far too short though but that seems to be par for the course with these sorts of games now, Fallout 3 was the same - the main storyline last about 5 seconds and the rest of the gameplay time is filled with boring side quests that are as repetitive as the crap in MMOs. Ironically I got bored of MMOs because the content in single player or coop games was much more rich and interesting, but that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. Frankly I'd quite happily say goodbye to the side quests altogether and have them work on the main storyline more for these sorts of games. Games like Deadspace show how awesome games can be if you just focus on the storyline.
Peter had already gone to Lionhead by that time. EA killed DK3 about three months into prototyping, at the same time as they killed the entire Bullfrog brand. They moved the Bullfrog people onto Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter instead. It's hard to argue with that as a business decision.
Still, I was bummed it never saw the light of day.
More details here:
http://pcgtw.retro-net.de/index.php?id=games:keeper3
I piss off bigots.
I don't see why everyone is all up molyneux's ass about games. his ideas really aren't all that innovative. there are SO MANY great game ideas that I've heard of over the years, but they all get shot/watered down by the time the project managers or whoever gets through with them. the only reason molyshit gets recognition is because he can apparently brown nose with the best of them to keep his "cool hip features" in the final cut of the games.
thumbs down molyneux, all of us gamers seeking quality and originality frown upon you and are tired of hearing your "genius" schemes.
she was the daughter of a wealthy florentine pogen read em and weep was her adjustable slogan