Peter Molyneux wants Project MOAT to represent his life's work
gamedeveloper.com
gamedeveloper.com
Dungeon Keeper is right up there in my all-time best games.
Black & White was great, but there was always something just not quite right (or not quite complete) with it.
Really enjoyed the Fable games, but they still didn't live up to the hype.
And then there's the Godus saga, which I played a lot but ultimately gave up on. It felt like backing a particularly doomed Kickstarter for a game I really wanted to play.
He talks the talk, and then stumbles the walk. And I'm a total sucker for his vision of what a game should be. But almost always disappointed by the execution (Dungeon Keeper was the exception - almost perfect execution on that). It's like he has a vision of a gaming paradise that humans can't actually build.
But he never seems to acknowledge the amount of pain that his failure to build causes. And he never seems to learn to under-promise and over-deliver. Every new game is going to be this amazing work of art, and then what emerges from the development process is like a poor shadow of what he describes. I'm not falling for it this time.
And I don't believe a word of "this is my last game, so I want it to be amazing".
It did have a lot of at the time revolutionary ideas though.
Who else gets a bit emotional knowing their personal gaming enjoyment peaked 20 years ago in front of a CRT?
I hoped for a closure to the monkey island series for so long. And after getting it I’m full of regret. Nothing they did would have made me happy. Nostalgia is what it is.
That said, a cursory comparison of the game features with the initial press releases from molineaux shows the kind of disconnect that exists from his ideas to his executions.
It's not bad to have a daydreamer setting the overall project vision, but anything he say at any time of the development process is to be treated just like that, as an internal vision document unrelated to the final product.
> Project MOAT isn't his final game, Molyneux assured.
> Famously in Fable 1, I think I mentioned that if you planted an acorn, an oak tree would grow, but that feature was dropped from the original Fable, and I think that was the start of me getting in trouble. I’m deeply sorry if I offended or upset anybody by my often overenthusiastic and ill thought out press. The great thing about this blog is it’s not trying to do anything but explain the process (you’re probably going to see me get ridiculously exicted).
> And I should make a note here that normally when I’m designing a game, and this is just me, it’s actually a terrible idea, so if anyone is reading this and thinking, right, this is how to design a game, don’t do this! I think, because of my dyslexia, I prefer not to write things down. I mean, you have to write things down when you’re communicating to a team, but in the early days, I think once I’ve written something down, I feel subconsciously that that’s it. It’s written in stone, there’s no more changing it. If you keep it inside your mind and keep mulling it over and thinking about it and wondering about it, and being very curious about how this idea evolves, then it’s much more likely to be fluid. And being fluid allows me to play around a lot with an idea.
> Now the downside is you are depending on yourself to remember all that shit. Because it’s so easy to get excited about something, especially when under the influence of a mood enhancer. It’s very easy to forget about.
> So I’m not saying that this game is going to be my last game, but I am saying that time is running out and that is incredibly sad, but that makes this game, in my mind, very, very meaningful. I feel it should be something which represents parts of my career and the many games I’ve been lucky to work on.
There's a level where you're constantly under attack. There's a level where you lose your creature, which is the game's main perk. And there's a level where it's impossible to progress without using brutal and extremely tedious means. And there's only 5 levels, so that's most of the game for you.
It's like somebody said "Hey, we got the fun stuff out of the way, now let's have every kind of annoying mission a game can have, one after another".
I thought the game's first three lands were great, though you're right that the first area is arguably the best. I can see what they were going for with land 4, and it could have been very rewarding, but I never felt the catharsis by breaking the curses that was probably intended.
I did not like land 5, though.
This and variations of "represent his life's work" are catchphrases he always uses to announce his next game. Sense of urgency ("last"), drama ("my life"). Just another phrase for "most bestes game I ever did!". Marketing...
That's how you end up getting us all extinctified by legions of Go playing deathbots.
I was enamored with 22cans, even 'played' curiosity - it was when they reached the center of that cube that everything came to light: Peter has lost his touch.
Godus released shortly after and was a mess, terrible gameplay and terrible direction.
This is like if someone was the best Chess player off of intuition in the 1500s and received great respect for it, then fell off as others studied the game more deeply, but still considered themselves the pinnacle of Chess skill in 2023 despite not coming close to a championship for centuries.
Peter Molyneux deserves respect for the foundational impact he had on the game industry. That does not mean that respect needs to carry over to literally anything he does today if the work itself doesn't amount to much.
It is pretty clear that overstatement and hype has become the only (or the best) way for him to get low cost attention.
Market forces for his brand, leads to more of the same hype/let-down cycle.
so I agree its a valid marketing strat and so far it worked out for him, more or less.
I think people are so passionate in this thread because we want him to be better, to actually be the godsent genius that will make the ultimate game.
I gotta say no game designer made me dream like Molyneux and just for that I love him, even if not all of his dreams became reality.
But he has the vision and power to inspire, and that is rare as well.
But for some reason, games journalism always repeated his wild and completely impossible ideas for the next product like a gospel. That is the core of the problem, and not a thirteen year old boy trapped in the bod of a grown man talking about the game he’s going to create once he has read through c++ for dummies.
tbh that is all you need for a truly exceptional product, not just in gaming. And it's insanely hard to do that.
Dungeon Keeper is still one of the best games I played after all these years and I will die defending it on this hill.
Sure be they were executed well enough that they all make the list of some of my favourite games of the time.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
I mean, I'm not even a fan of Molyneux. The only game from him I truly enjoyed was Dungeon Keeper. But this kind of interview feels like it just wants to drag the guy for some public humiliation. And it is not like putting the person being interviewed on the defensive will result in anything but self-defense when responding.
Beyond that videogames are just entertainment - if you play one and it is a disappointment, just go play some other one, there are plenty of games out there. It's not like the guy was a corrupt politician who stole hundreds of millions, or shit like that.
And he’s able to communicate that passion so well, and each time you find yourself hoping he succeeds
So it's gonna be a monument to "Over-promise and under-deliver"?
In the same way, I think a lot of people are going to roast Elon Musk if he dies before he manages to get to Mars.
All this article says about MOAT is that it's set in the Fable universe, which I assume means Molyneux is working with Microsoft in some capacity again.
On the plus side, Molyneux can't follow his normal MO of over-promising if he isn't providing any details.