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Comment by seanthemon | Hacker News Reader

I dunno, Peter is a great talker and I always WANT to believe him, but after his last projects I'm gonna pass on following this unless he releases something spectacular.

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.

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Peter has a classic case of "Illusory superiority". Because of the recognition he received in the very early formative years of the game development industry, he has come to believe he eternally stands on the pinnacle of game industry innovation and creativity no matter what he does, rather than treating each of his projects critically and individually.

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.

Even his failures today are worth more than all the lootbox spam of modern gaming, a industry unarguably in decline, were it not for the indys.

Curiosity was literally a giant lootbox with nothing inside.

No, there was something inside: a broken promise.

It could be a stretch to say he believes himself to be superior.

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.

Everyone makes bad games, IMO he did some really exceptional ones;

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.

He's unable to admit when something is taking the wrong direction! I play-tested Godus throughout it's journey and in the early middle, it was really enjoyable to play and it took the right direction. But then they did a 180 and could never figure out the mechanics of the AI inhabitants or "what to do next" in the game, so it became a one-trick pony that never led anywhere. And there was certainly no lack of feedback about these issues early on..

I wish Godus had turned out to be what the videos looked like, with physics and simulation. Instead it just turned into a timer farming game.

Even his greatest successes were never the breathtaking, revolutionary advances he promised. Populous, Syndicate, Themen Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper were nothing but a fairly simple game play idea, executed 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.

> a fairly simple game play idea, executed well.

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.

Yes. But strangely, he always promised wide simulations of worlds with fascinating emergent behavior. But even his truly great games were never like that. But it took journalism roughly 25 years to notice.

I have to hard disagree with you here on a personal level, a lot of my formative years I spent playing his games and they mean a great deal to me. But I wish he would take a step back to look at the market today and make something that's really needed, not try to relive the old glory days.

I wonder if it might have been more than that: maybe the problem wasn't games journalism repeating, but games journalism listening? Every piece of entertainment that is a multi-person effort has a little more thought put into it than visible on the surface (the opposite seems to be true for most solo art). That's nothing special. But when journalists start digging for more, trying to outdo each other in deep questions at interviews, the interviewee will be flattered and try to deliver more of that. Perhaps he would have continued doing well executed simple ideas if he never got that "the big ideas guy!" spotlight pointed at him. Remember how the matrix sequels felt like force-fed intellectual posturing? Same effect I think, inability to resist the flattery of attention, and as a consequence all the subtlety of "there might be more beneath just the explosions" gone.

Populous, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper were nothing but a fairly simple game play idea, executed well.

Sure be they were executed well enough that they all make the list of some of my favourite games of the time.

My all time favorite games can be described as "fairly simple gameplay idea, executed well".

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