I’ve kinda turned around on Peter Molyneux. The man cannot stop over-hyping and over-promising, and it makes it hard to trust anything he says—especially after the Curiosity and Godus fiascos—but increasingly I feel like he’s just the sort of person who dreams big and can’t contain their excitement, even when it’s only going to lead to disappointment.
And he’s at it again.
At last year’s TGAs, Molyneux announced that he was returning to god games with Masters of Albion, and honestly it got me excited. What can I say? The man knows how to pitch. But it was also classic Molyneux, with big, big promises. At one point in the demo, the player equips a citizen with a sword. That sword is made out of bread.
“You can design anything,” Molyneux said. “The food the people eat, the clothes they wear, the weapons they use, the armor they fight with. There is a strategy behind every creation. I can even feed them rats.”
Will this system be even a tenth as flexible as he’s making out? History suggests that no, it won’t be, but there’s something about Molyneux that makes me desperately want to believe him.
This is even more the case today. The folks at GamesIndustry.biz have caught up with Molyneux to see how development is progressing, and once again he cannot stop selling big dreams.
“I’ve got to say this, but it’s going to get me in trouble: every atom of my being believes we’re making a great game,” he says. This is the modern Molyneux strategy. After Godus, Molyneux said he was going to stop talking to the press, then he backpedalled and said he’d just stop over-hyping. But he can’t stop. He just says he’ll get into trouble for saying this or that, or that he’s not trying to hype the game.
But it’s also hard to blame someone for wanting to get people excited about the thing they are making; the thing they are presumably really pumped to show off. But due to his history, there’s always going to be a part of me that wonders if he’s just telling us what we want to hear.
Like this: “There is a magic that we used to have, when we created Dungeon Keeper and Black & White and Fable, and that magic was completely intangible. It’s not something you can produce. But it really feels [like] that magic is back.”
He goes even further moments later: “It’s exactly what I wanted it to be: it’s a marriage of Dungeon Keeper, and Black & White, and Fable, and it’s all [of] that put together. And how the hell does that work? It’s only now, really, in the last year, that I’ve dared to hope that this weird mixture of game mechanics can actually blend into something unique and different.”
These are his greatest hits. The best games Bullfrog and Lionhead ever made. But the most recent one on the list, Fable, is 20 years old. Black & White and Dungeon Keeper, meanwhile, came out before quite a few of PC Gamer’s writers were even born. It’s been a long time since Molyneux has been attached to anything this impressive.
Then again, Molyneux is working with a bunch of his old collaborators again, which is pretty reassuring. “I bullied, persuaded, and blackmailed a lot of the old people that I worked with, like Russell Shaw, Mark Healey and Ian Wright, Kareem Ettouney, to come back and do one last gig. And it’s incredible.”
Shaw was the composer for Bullfrog back in the ’90s, and followed Molyneux to Lionhead. Healey served as an artist at Bullfrog and Lionhead, before co-founding LittleBigPlanet and Dreams developer Media Molecule, along with Ettouney, who’d been an artist at Lionhead. Wright, meanwhile, joined Lionhead as a designer for Black & White 2 and Fable 2.
Molyneux goes on to explain his approach to game design, and why he’s constantly fiddling around with different genres. “I think I’ve realised that the consistency is the experience that the player has. What we’re really trying to do is create an experience.” He describes his process as “stumbling through the darkness looking for the daylight as you’re developing the game”.
For Masters of Albion specifically, he says it’s like making soup. “I can put potatoes in, and I can put leeks in—and it’s going to be a leek and potato soup. Then I can put strange other ingredients in, and it tastes like nothing I’ve ever tasted before. That’s how I think about Masters of Albion.”
The Dungeon Keeper and Black & White influences are clear, but Molyneux says Fable’s influence is just as critical. “But Fable: that’s where the main focus comes from, because the entire narrative, the entire world, the openness of the world, the freedom which Fable gave you as a player, absolutely is embraced [here fully].”
He says that feedback from user tests (“I shouldn’t be saying any of this”) showed how players were immediately reminded of Fable. “And the first thing that came back is, ‘oh my god, I’m playing Fable.’ That was such a wonderful moment for me.” But after playing for a while it reminded them of Black & White. “It is a blend, but that blend, just like that soup analogy, is something new, fresh and different.”
The proof will be in the soup, I guess? Masters of Albion will initially launch in early access, and that’s when we’re also going to see a roadmap. As for when that is? Soon, Molyneux says.
“So I think the time for a roadmap, the time to be predictive about what we’re releasing and share that with the community, that’s soon coming up.”
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