Molyneux Slips Additional Details on Fable II 55
Via Xbox 360 Fanboy, and in the grand tradition of Peter Molyneux's history of saying crazy-awesome things in interviews, comes some fascinating revelations about Fable 2 and past games. Mr. Molyneux's tradition of honesty continues, with up-front admissions of problems with Black and White 2 and a few hints about what we'll be seeing in his upcoming fantasy game. "One of the tiny decisions that we made in Black and White 2 was to use Black and White 1 as the foundation stone for all the code for Black and White 2, and what we found was you had this massive amount of code and you were putting an even more massive amount of code on top, and underneath it was this quite shaky foundation stone, and that meant we had to rewrite quite a lot of stuff. And then it came down that the original plan for Black and White 2 - we thought we had it on time, but we didn't, we ran out of money to produce really - was that it was gonna be twenty-five lands, I think, fifteen to twenty-five lands, the creatures' intelligence could have been much more, we had a real plan to stretch the features out so that you didn't get them all by land, you know, third land I think it was, stretch those features out, there was an awful lot more about the RTSy side of the game, an awful more about the army side."
The Dog Companion (Score:1)
Then again, we'll see how the
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Well, actually.. (Score:2)
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Nethack. Teaching your dog to steal from shops, the fear of seeing them disappear through a trap door, the danger of them going feral, I think it added a lot to that game.
I agree about seeing animals get hurt, why is that more heart-wrenching than seeing people get hurt? Is it because animals are innocent? Because they are relatively helpless? I don't know, but I've always felt that way.
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Tofu FTW! (Score:2)
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For cooking it whole you need to press out the excess water and then marinate it.
It works well cut up and fried or stewed (again it will not add much flavor so you want a flavorful soup like hot and sour).
Get the soft style and fry it up like scrambled eggs with some seasonings.
I eat meat and I think tofu can be a great thing to include in meals. Just make it tasty.
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I'm not totally weak minded. I quit smoking. Honestly, quitting meat for the year that I did was harder. Way harder. With cigarettes, you just avoid them and the situations where you used to smoke. You can't do that with meat, it's ev
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In all our decadence people die.
Let the rabbits wear glasses. (Score:1)
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No, I don't like it, and I still eat meat. But I would like animals to be treated better. Is that any different from so many other issues? I don't like pollution, but I use computers with mercury in them, that consume electricity, and I think global warming is a serious problem but drive to work. Sometimes I take airplanes across the country *gasp*. Should I become a homeless bum to save the environment? Isn't there an alternati
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Shinobi: Shadow Dancer.
Ninja dog. Hells yeah.
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And Fallout 2 had TWO of them.
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Seems like a sincere guy, but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
His games are usually good, but never nearly as revolutionary as he talks about before they're released. The innovations he tries end up being around the edges of the game and the core game often is very... typical.
Re:Seems like a sincere guy, but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
I mean, come on - what did he actually say in that interview? It's obvious he's excited, and that's neat and all, but he didn't tell us anything.
Except that death is going to be involved some how, some way. Maybe. But he can't tell you anything about how, or why it might be cool. But it'll be better. Or maybe just different. Or maybe not, but it's something he's thought about a lot.
And there'll be one-button fighting. If it works out well when people test it. If they have people test it. But that's risky.
Also there's this other thing that's super-duper awesome, but he can't tell you anything about it. Well, OK, he can. It's one word. But he can't tell you what that word is. But it's awesome.
I mean, I can respect the fact that you don't want to let the cat out of the bag prematurely when you're making a game and trying to innovate. And given his history, it's not surprising if Molyneux is trying to be far more careful than he's inclined to be about letting information out. But if that's your goal, then just say there isn't anything you can say except you're working on things that you hope will be innovative and fun.
It's a much shorter interview, I admit. But, brevity and wit and all that.
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Something extraneous, here... (Score:4, Insightful)
You know, removing one word from that phrase would transform it into an accurate representation of reality.
All right, technically one hyphen followed by one word.
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Love this part (Score:1)
That about sums it up...
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Perfect term... (Score:3, Interesting)
It's a shame in some ways because each of his games have actually been amazing, particularly in terms of innovation, in their own right. They just always fall short of the fantasies he had in his head and described to the press and so always get judged accordingly. It's like a high jumper setting the bar at a mile in to the sky then jumping twice as high as the previous world record - everyone leaves disappointed that he failed to reach the bar he set for himself rather than impressed by what was still a great jump.
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It's a shame in some ways because each of his games have actually been amazing
Have you and I been playing the same games? Are we talking about the same Peter Molyneux? I found Black & White to be a tedious and frustrating take on the RTS genre. The giant animal pets were a nifty concept, but they just weren't backed up by good gameplay, there was far too much micromanagement and not nearly enough fun. I found Fable to be a boring, linear, uninspired take on the RPG genre. The thought of having your character's appearance change over time was a nifty concept, but it just was
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Populous amazed for its time - and was actually a huge amount of fun for the era.
Syndicate - a truly fun strategy based RTS before anyone coined the term RTS.
Magic Carpet - Any game, especially considering how long ago it was, that can render stereograms in real time to give genuine 3D (even if it sucks in practice) will manage to amaze me.
Dungeon Keeper - Regularly amazed with moments of humor and turning the dungeon crawl on its head.
Black And White - Admitted
Not optismistic. (Score:4, Interesting)
The first Fable is a good example of it. The game is actually quite decent. It's entertaining. However, the story is extremely simplistic. In general the game is much more simple than Molyneux would imply. It's got many of the features he originally promised; the lead character's visual appearance changes based on his alignment, he can get married, his actions sort of have an impact on the world and he ages. However, the implementation for all these features is severely lacking.
Aging doesn't really affect anything because the developers clearly didn't have the nerve to profoundly affect the main character in any way. It's fairly easy to move alignment back and forth between good and evil because the scripting for that aspect is so simplistic. It renders alignment meaningless. NPC interactions leading to marriage are even more superficial. With the necessary items a player can pretty much go from being a stranger to a spouse within a minute. Changes to the world consist of NPC responses to the character. For all the supposed character development the fact that I couldn't really customize the look of my own character was a disappointment. And on top of all that the storyline is very linear and uninspired.
It almost feels like they spent too much time brainstorming about what they could do and not enough time actually implementing those features. Many of the features in the first Fable feel like they were slapped on at the last minute just so they could live up to some of the promises. Graphics aside I can think of quite a few Gameboy Advance games with more depth than Fable.
The team would have been better served coming up with a handful of ideas and sticking to those insuring a higher level of refinement. As I've mentioned, despite those shortcomings the game was fun. Well, specifically, I found the fighting to be fun. And I thought the game had potential. Fable 2 may address many of these issues, but given Molyneux's record I'm not optimistic.
Agree with most comments here (Score:2)
Peter definately does hype his stuff up and yeah they never are as good as he claims, that being said Fable is quite a good game and Black and white was certainly new and innovative fun for at least 8hours
I'm looking forward to Fable 2, although I must admit I couldn't care less about the dog sidekick or the terrible bland graphics from the demo but I'll still play the game, it'll hopefully be as good as Fable 1.
Also, Peter made Syndicate and really, that des
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Hope this is not considered off-topic (Score:2)
Lionhead's game 'The Movies' is essentially two things:
- a ho-hum management game based on running a movie studio
- an extremely powerful machinima generator
When The Movies was released, it was released as a management game -- you have to play for a couple of hours to get to the machinima maker. Most people weren't interested; the game was a flop, and contributed to LH being bou
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