I lost all respect for Peter Molyneux after Black & White and after I heard about how he went crazy for not winning some award from the queen for interactive entertainment.
He is all Ego, and his ideas are not all that good. The biggest problem is proabblly that he hypes the shit out of everything he does as if god himself would be jellous if his ability, and then nothing he delivers lives up to the hype.
Someone just needs to let him know he isnt god’s gift to the gaming world and he isn’t nearly as good as he thinks he is. Then he may actually make some games half as good as he promises.
That’s never how I’ve read Molyneux. While I can really see how people come to that impression of him given his history, he bubbles genuine manic enthusiasm like virtually no-one else in the western medium. He says stupid things because he really can’t help himself. He certainly deserved a bit of a backlash, but the pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction now.
(On topic, has anyone here mentioned Alter-Ego (Either Male or Female) as a reference for this? The direct equivalent to the Sims’ Little Computer People?)
He certainly deserved a bit of a backlash, but the pendulum has swung far too far in the other direction now.
It might have helped had he not promised to keep quiet after Fable, only to start making grandiose claims like that. Bullfrog as a company almost invariably seemed to design by taking some flashy technology and then building a game around it by committee - I find it amusing that the only one I ever bothered finishing was Syndicate, and nobody, but nobody I have ever heard enthusing about, say, Magic Carpet has mentioned the actual (frankly pretty crap) game part of it.
Molyneux himself, by which I mean Bullfrog, had an irritating tendency to make the same mistake time after time after time - excellent concepts that could make something fantastic, but don’t ultimately prove all that much fun. Gene Wars*, Syndicate Wars, Magic Carpet, Black and White**, Dungeon Keeper and almost all the others were simply a million times better on paper than they ended up being on screen.
[size=2]
Possibly the most vicious learning curve in RTS history
** My biggest memory of Black and White remains him demonstrate his own game and still be entirely incapable of throwing rocks in a straight line.[/size]
(I always had the - probably slightly unfair - impression that the main reason he talks and hypes so much isn’t a matter of ego-boosting so much as a desire to feel his game realised in a form that it just won’t end up as when on CD rather than living in his head.)
I don’t think it has. He has an obviously infectious enthusiasm for what he does, and I can’t see how that wouldn’t rub off on the development teams that build his games for him. I wonder if they feel obliged (beyond their employment by him) to indulge his wacky claims even to the detriment of the overall game. The whole “zoom-in to the worm eating an apple” thing from B&W. Did they put that in because he’d mouthed off about it, or was he boasting about something interesting he’d noticed in what had been produced at that point?
Interestingly, the whole “building the AI into the interface” spiel he’s coming out with now for The Movies sounds very similar to the same stuff he was saying about Gene Wars, and that was a stinker.
Did they put that in because he’d mouthed off about it, or was he boasting about something interesting he’d noticed in what had been produced at that point?
He’s said on several occasions that he used to make up features on the spur of the moment when talking to the press, leaving the developers scratching their heads and whispering ‘You get to fly between planets now? I thought we were making a theme park game…’
Molyneaux should re-hire Wayne Imlach, the designer of Theme Hospital and Startopia. They were the only ‘Bullfrog Blueprint’ type games that were any good. I still call into work sick with Bloaty Head and The Squits.
Edit: Today, I promise I’ll learn how to spell Molyneux.
My view on Peter is that he is a brilliant toymaker but a pretty weak games maker.
I think this toy/game relationship is a fairly well established theme (and problem). E.g. a ball is a good toy, but there are lots of games (some good, some bad) which use the toy.
So the toy is some basic mechanism, like Black and White’s tamagotchi+religion thing, or Populous’ landscape flattening, etc., while the game is a set of rules and objectives laid on top of the toy.
The toy in Black and White, for instance, was great fun – I loved working with the tamagotchi. But the “game” amounted to some dreadful RTS micromanagement-fest where I got to do very little except pour corn on starving villagers while my neglected creature wandered alone.
That’s the thing: I’m not really sure whether this is that grandiose a claim. I mean, if he appeared and said “We’re going to have a game where you control the entire history of the human race”, we’ll be rolling our eyes. But that’s just Civilization, and entirely feasible.
In a post-Sims world, this isn’t that big an idea, surely? It’s even, in the form of Alter-Ego, got precursors to cite.
I get the opinion there are a lot of talented Bullfroggers who probably can’t get work but are too sick of PM’s crap and teflon to go back to the neo-Bullfrog madness.
It seems his games consist of years of undisciplined, dreamy development that comes crashing down to 6 month deathmarch as they try to cobble some gameplay out of the chaos.
Whether the games are any good or not, is due to what comes out of the crunch time which is never a reliable indicator.
Perhaps I’m mixing up my games, but I’m vaguely remember them letting slip about Dmitri before - some highly convoluted stuff about pub fights and social dynamics, rather than just Sims stuff.
In a post-Sims world, this isn’t that big an idea, surely
Give him time. The trouble isn’t so much his idea as his execution - the fact that everything he says about his games needs to be run through a reality check (with the possible exception of ‘Powermonger was shit’). I like the fact he comes up with big, exciting ideas, but by this point, it really is a case of ‘Pete, please shut up and let your game do the talking for once.’
Well, I meant Sims stuff in the more general sense. I’m not pretending there’s only one game method which can take the vague life-sim route, but it’s not out there. And christ: get Will Wright talking about Social Dynamics, and we’d be here all day.
Give him time.’
But no-one is. Everyone’s treating a fairly reasonable idea for a game as if it were just Mad Ol’ Uncle Molyneux having one of his turns. It’s either a prejudiced or conservative response, and that grates.
EDIT: Removed some "Deeply"s from the final paragraphy, as it was rhetorical hyperbole.
It’s only prejudiced by an entire career of him doing exactly the same thing and showing absolutely no sign of stopping. About the only Bullfrog game that managed to avoid it was Hi-Octane, and that was rubbish.
He’s successful, and it’s a shame there aren’t more developers in the kind of position where they can take the same risks, but he simply and consistently bites off much bigger ideas than he can chew - everything from Theme Park to Black and White has featured a great central concept, but then seriously weak wrapping (for instance, Theme Park’s map screen as a quick remedy for the fact that you’re basically done with it in a couple of games). People are being negative about him because he’s started down the exact same path of promising the moon, delivering Swindon and then promising not to be silly again that we’ve all seen before. To avoid that backlash, he simply needs to stop nattering and ship a great game - not a collection of promises that once again haven’t sprouted fruit.
Are we being overly critical of Peter because of the information we have? Had you picked up Dungeon Keeper in the store without any foreknowledge of the company or the people behind it, would it have seemed a good game to you? (God, I hope so) My son still plays Black & White occasionally. He still plays Fable as well. I don’t want to tell him how the RTS in Black & White is a joke, or how, if you just play the main storyline, Fable ends in about 8 hours of game play.
I just wonder how much we’re trashing the games because of our own expectations over what Peter’s said or promised in interviews and press gatherings.
That’s one more reason to ignore all previews and hype. Of course, then you can’t cut down the virgin forest of being among the first people to talk about a game.
I still like Peter Molyneux and his games. In my eyes, he’s only had one dissapointment, Black & White. Even then, it was very different in a world full of clones.
Black & White was his only abject failure, but all of his games have been overhyped. Dungeon Keeper is one of my all-time favourite RTS’s, but that’s because of the whole “up with evil” atmosphere more than the actual mining and training gameplay. And I still remember him talking about how it was going to have advanced creature AI that would react to the way you played the game.
On their own, most of his games other than B&W are pretty solid. They just don’t live up to their own hype.
Molyneux himself, by which I mean Bullfrog, had an irritating tendency to make the same mistake time after time after time - excellent concepts that could make something fantastic, but don’t ultimately prove all that much fun. Gene Wars*, Syndicate Wars, Magic Carpet, Black and White**, Dungeon Keeper and almost all the others were simply a million times better on paper than they ended up being on screen.
What the? Syndicate and Magic Carpet were fantastic games, Not to mention Dungeon keeper was also great. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen Syndicate mentioned in people’s favourite games of all time.
