Game creator Peter Molyneux is well-known for making grandiose promises about his upcoming games, but he was on his best behavior at this week's Microsoft media event, as he was about to begin demoing Fable 2.
"I'm being really careful," he tells me. "I will only talk about real tangible features of the game that I can show."
But, when I ask him about his next game, we get a glimpse of classic Molyneux.
"I think it's such a significant scientific achievement that it will be on the cover of Wired," he says with a twinkle in his eye.
"My next game will not be Fable 3. It's not a game I can talk to you about right now, but: AI, simulation, the way characters interact -- we've had smart people working on that stuff for over a decade with the Fable games and Black and White." His next game consolidates all of what they have learned, he says.
"All right," says Molyneux's PR wrangler, ready for situations like this. "I think it's time to move on to another topic now."
On Game Design
The first Fable, released on the Xbox and PC, was a critical hit that sold 3.5 million units worldwide. It's the sort of success that many developers would have been delighted with.
"But I'm essentially a very greedy person," Molyneux says. "I was disappointed with how the game was received."
Molyneux blames himself for the game not doing better: "I did an awful job of promoting the game. I would talk to journalists about the things I wanted to do, the stuff that was exciting me in design terms, and I ended up disappointing them."
That rings true. Game journos adore Molyneux because his enthusiasm is so palpable, and he'll get so carried away that he talks to them about incredibly ambitious features he's not yet implemented in the game. Then, when he has to retreat from that, the same journos tend to downplay the very real innovations in his games, and rake him over the coals for whatever he wasn't able to pull off.
Hence, Molyneux is on his best behavior today. Fable 2, he says, has "a whole bunch of simulation" and "a mess of AI"
"There's so much that people can do playing it, so many things that they never anticipated," he says. In creating this complex world where other characters respond to you based on your past behavior and your appearance, Molyneux says his team is encountering "all sorts of bizarre, weird and wonderful bugs" that arise from this openness.
For instance, there was a problem where your canine companion got a strange reception from AI characters. "All the towns you went to, people absolutely hated your dog," he says. "They would immediately go to it and try to beat it up."
Hammering out all these bugs is incredibly stressful, according to Molyneux. "We have a permanent group of testers on staff," he says. "But every week we'll have four testers come in who've not seen it before, and get their reactions."
The team has ballooned in size for this game -- from 60 to 150. "Creatively speaking, it's a nightmare making sure that all 150 know what game they're making. I have to get them motivated, get them to believe. I can't just say, 'I've just had a wonderful idea! Go do it.'"
"There are huge fights that rage," says Molyneux. Fable 2 doesn't have a mini-map that shows a player's location. Instead, what Molyneux calls a "breadcrumb trail" illustrates the player's next path using a line drawn right on the game world, something that some of his team members insisted couldn't be done.
Interactive cut scenes allow you to be in control at all times, by changing your character's facial expression to get different reactions out of the NPCs. "The cinematographer had to think in different ways, not use the sort of cuts and camera movements they might have," Molyneux says.
I mention the recent release of Grand Theft Auto 4, bringing up reports that the game cost $100 million to develop, with more than a thousand people working on it.
"The way games are made now is fundamentally flawed," he responds. "If I was a betting man, I’d imagine that in the future, this business of getting more than a hundred people together for three, four years will look really odd. It's so incredibly expensive. I predict that we'll see a core of deeply talented people working on games beforehand, then a big team comes together for a brief period of time."
So, I say -- game design is moving toward something sort of like a movie, with years of preproduction by a small team, then a big production with set designers and key grips that only lasts a couple of months?
"Yes, exactly."
On Morality
One of the things that Molyneux hyped for years prior to Fable's release was the game's morality system, which would determine whether your character grew up good or evil.
"The tests were too obvious in the last game. Save lives good, kill people bad. This time, we know what we're doing with the morality system. If you want to be truly good, you have to sacrifice. If I can make you stop and have to really think about what you're about to do next, I've succeeded," he says.
Part of graying out the black-and-white morality system includes altering the spectrum itself. It's no longer just a measurement of good and evil. "We're measuring purity versus corruption, and cruelty versus kindness," Molyneux says. "That's different from good versus evil. I tell my son to go to bed and he thinks I’m cruel, but I'm really being kind."
I ask about the scars that your character will gain over time, a feature he discussed at last year's E3. Molyneux says he wanted to do something where a character can lose a fight and not die, but still suffer consequences: All the bad guys gang up and beat the shit out of you after you're bested, and your avatar gets scarred.
It was a very intriguing idea, but Molyneux says it's gone now. Testers were turning the game off and restarting from their last save rather than have their avatar be permanently scarred. "I had to retreat on that," he says. "They emulated the very thing I was trying to avoid."
But scarring isn't completely removed from the game. At one point during Fable 2, Molyneux says you will face a choice: Be horribly scarred and have every character from then on notice your ruined appearance and respond differently to you, or choose to have an innocent character scarred instead of you.
"Are you willing for people, including your wife, to find you abhorrent for the rest of the game?" he asks.
Molyneux says that through previous games like Fable and Black and White, he's done extensive research of how people test the moral boundaries in a game, what they do if they're given the choice to be good or evil.
"70 percent of people will be good," he says. "20 percent will dabble with evil, then be good. Only 10 percent will choose to be evil all the way through. What's fascinating is that this is very regionally dependent. It's different from Germany to the U.K. to Asia."
Also, what people are willing to do is totally age-dependent. "When people reach age 12-14, they become obsessed with evil," he says. "The percentage of people who are good versus evil becomes reversed. It's part of the way that teens' minds are being reordered -- it's just a developmental stage."
On Letting His 5-Year-Old Son Play* Half-Life 2*
"I play computer games every day of my life," Molyneux says emphatically. He adds that he plays a lot with his 5-year-old son these days.
"It's a little bit wrong that his favorite game is by Valve," he concedes. Portal? No, Half-Life 2.
The game is rated Mature in the United States, meaning its appropriate for ages
17 and up. And it's rated 15 by the British Board of Film
Classification, meaning it can't be sold or rented to children under 15.
But parents can always let their kids play at their discretion.
I mention that Wired magazine's Editor-in-Chief Chris Anderson applies the Lego rule of thumb for his kids -- violent games set in the past or future are OK, just not from the present. Anderson loves to bond with his son over a game of Halo.
Molyneux agrees. "You don't kill humans. In Half-Life 2, they're monsters."
"Boys love guns. Games are chance for them to express their more boisterous side," he says. "What's really interesting for me is what he cares about and doesn't care about in a game. What he finds engaging is very unexpected. He hates to be made to look stupid. And so many games do that, especially games that are ostensibly for children. They don't reward you, they just punish you. They motivate you through failure. In Half-Life 2, the consequences for failure are small. You can just try again."
Photo: Susan Arendt/Wired.com
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