excise; excerpt.
I'm finishing my Fable post (look out in the next day or two for that one), but I have decided I don't like the distractingly long aside about Peter Molyneux, or at least, how it fits with the rest of the ThinkThank. I haven't fully established my structure for those pieces, but I can tell what I don't want. A somewhat snarky distraction from the real discussion is not the direction I want to go. The following has been removed from my Fable ThinkThank, to be read on its own. And for anyone who isn't really aware, only knowing Molyneux from the cultural osmosis that demands you believe he is the worst villain in gaming, I really recommend the Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview. Its nearly ten years old now, so I'm not saying anything groundbreaking by defending him, but I think it warrants a good-faith read. For anyone interested, you can find the interview here.
Anyway, on with the excised excerpt:
If you only Molyneux...
I will need to be careful in this next part, as any discussion of Molyneux tends to bring out dormant hater-ade faster than mentioning Daikatana. So let me be delicate: Treating Peter Molyneux's over-promising as representative of evil that lurks in the heart of the gaming industry is stupid. Sorry, let me start over. Peter Molyneux did nothing to you, and the passion he brought to the AAA space was worth more than any bungled interview or under-delivered game feature. Man I can't seem to get the tone right. Molyneux is *fine* and hating on him is juvenile. I suppose this will have to do.
In the context of our modern AAA space, where multi-million dollar, lifeless, live-service corporate games dominate the conversation, crowding every room with so much of their stink that most air has been swapped with micro-payments and emotes, an overly excited guy who thought his games could do more than they could just doesn't register on the morality scale. In an industry which now tethers all of its hopes upon the psychological manipulations of FOMO and purposeful fostering of addictive tendencies, a man who saw an internal tech demo and misunderstood its replicability at game-scale is a non-issue.
But what about at the time? I mean, I started this whole thing off by complaining that people take an ahistorical view, unfairly pitting current knowledge against an temporally significant cultural context; where do I get off then saying, "Thing A from the past isn't so bad, when you consider Thing B from the FutureNow." And thats the thing, friends... Go back and read an article or two. Listen to a trade show demo led by Molyneux. Listen to his interviews. Did he *actually* commit heinous game fraud? In some cases, did he even promise anything?
Of course, there are really only two controversies of any significance. Starting with the BIG one, its Godus, the God game that first introduced the public to the ugly and inevitable side of Kickstarter. Features were planned, money was given, and the game changed scope, scale, and vision. It was also the introduction for many to the world of "Core" games being infected by the need for games to operate like mobile titles, at least financially. And despite gleefully flinging cash at lootboxes in Overwatch and Ubisoft single-handedly killing the value of "open-worlds", Godus was chosen as the worst thing the internet had seen for the day, and thus Molyneux should be pilloried.
Godus was a successfully Kickstarted game which promised many exciting features to players, most of which never reached their potential or were outright abandoned in favor of flights of fancy which Peter and the team latched onto over the course of development, or in some cases at the demand of their publisher. It is bad, and its good that players expressed displeasure at a game they had literally invested in being steered in a direction which they opposed. But somewhat infamously, many people began to feel a little icky after Rock, Paper, Shotgun published an interview in which RPS co-founder John Walker asks a series of heated questions, many of which read in terribly bad faith. The very first question of the interview, "Do you think that you are a pathological liar?" really set the tone.
Like anybody that is in the business of creating something that doesn't exist, I say things that I believe [are] true, that very often don't come true and sometimes do come true.
For me, this one hit. You try your best. You work hard. You start by believing in yourself, and then you try to get others to believe in you too. And a lot of times, that isn't enough. Most times, it isn't enough. In the efforts of doing the extraordinary, the ordinary is still the most common result. Which leads me to the next 'crime' of Molyneux: the promises of Fable.
I still remember watching the tech demos which were circulating before the release of Fable 2. Peter gleefully showed off the new, clean, unobstructed HUD, explaining that the purpose of removing so many on-screen elements was to draw the player deeper into the atmosphere, and to keep their focus on the game itself. He mentioned that in the first Fable, you could nearly play from the minimap itself. This was not the intended play experience, so they hoped to eliminate such things without making the world impossible to navigate. He showed us the dog companion who would be by your side, who you could pet and play fetch with and who would defend you in battle. You could see him next to the screen barely able to keep his attention to the audience, as he wanted to explore his little world. It was evident that his imagination was running wild with the possibilities before himself and his team.
He went on to suggest that every tree would grow in real time, and every leaf would be rendered individually, and that your dog was practically a lifelike simulation of a real dog etcetera. But every single person, including a fifteen year old boy watching from his childhood apartment, knew that the spirit of those suggestions, not he features of themselves, were what would be delivered. The game had a dog which could do a number of fun tasks, but also could get a bit lost and hardly was "lifelike". But it certainly felt like a lovable dog companion, which is why it (spoiler) shattered anyone who played to the end to see their sweetheart struck dead. It hurt so bad we needed DLC to make the dog come back to life. No, the individual, nitpicking, literalist features were not created, but that is not really what we expected anyway. That said, I think Peter Molyneux was the only person in the room who was unaware that all of these things weren't possible in the end. He sets his sights into the stratosphere, and for that I'm deeply thankful. I want more absurd, starry-eyed imagineers who will manically and passionately pursue greatness. I want more designers who make impossible demands of themselves. I want more restless creatives.
And really, I ask again, what did you lose with Godus or a Fable game? With Godus; its Kickstarter, failure is a major risk factor, otherwise they wouldn't be on Kickstarter. Pretending that you were scandalized by the loss of your crowdfund investment is whack. I know it feels like an online store where you are pre-purchasing items, but you are supporting a project in active development, in the hopes that it succeeds. And in Fable, what? You lost nothing, because the games were feature-rich and playable and sold at normal retail prices. Be annoyed that some feature or another wasn't present, but don't amend your opinion retroactively in 2024, claiming that back in 2007 you hated Fable 2, as its clear from sales, reviews, forums, and "Best of" lists... a lot of people really liked Fable. Obviously this is all anecdotal and I'm not about to dox people from my life on the internet... but I WAS THERE [Insert friend's name], I REMEMBER you gushing about it to me at lunch. Don't go pretending on Twitter now that you've always hated it.
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