Preview Completely fucking nuts: a Molyneux article

[Mr. Teatime]

Looking at that pic of Syndicate reminded me why I like isometric viewpoint so much. Even that ancient screenshot in 8-bit or whatever it is, makes me want to start pushing buttons and exploring the world.

 

[Texas Red]

I'm getting a getting a crazy, "Pink Floyd is me bitches!" Roger Waters vibe from Molyneux. There's this back catalogue of fairly incredible work, of which the main credit is attached to him, but when his ego grows too big and his ideas are left unchecked, they're rubbish. Maybe he's been this raving lunatic all along, and his development teams just took his ludicrous ideas and made them palatable.

There are no ideas. His "ideas" are only means to sell as much as possible. I have never seen such blatant whoring. He is not an artist.

 

[max]

Who dares to oppose THE MOLYNEUX?

The problem with Molyneux is that while his ideas are often pretty original, he often goes totally off base on what is practical and impractical, and instead gets totally wrapped up in the originality aspect. (Like: 'Virtual Reality' 3d user interface for a computer, sounds like a neat idea, but isn't.) Most of his recent games are basically demos of a couple of interesting mechanics without an actual game included. I blame this on lack of aforementioned play testing, or maybe lack of anyone daring to objectively criticize his designs 'in house'.

After all, how can you say 'NO' to a man who has a rear view mirror on his computer to make sure that his development team is not slacking off?

PS. Of course Molyneux is not the only one whose half baked ideas end up being patent disasters for gameplay, but most people don't have the clout/financing to keep pushing those ideas out the door.

 

[Rei]

The way I understood it... combat will be more like playing a violin then ending someone's existence.

 

[RGE]

It's like Jackass the Game Development, isn't it?

Nah, his ideas ain't even funny anymore.

Are you saying that Jackass is funny then? Or that it ever was?

I kind of like his idea of replacing the save/reload mechanic with horrible scars, but I guess people might still choose to reload if battles go badly. And musical weapons... hehe, I'm sure that'll sell his game to the Guitar Hero crowd. Everyone loves music, right? :wink:

 

[Deleted member 7219]

Re: Who dares to oppose THE MOLYNEUX?

Most of his recent games are basically demos of a couple of interesting mechanics without an actual game included.

My question is WHAT interesting mechanics have his recent games had which weren't already there in previous games? Black and White was a god sim, well so was Sim City. Fable had people reacting you differently depending on whether you were good or evil. Fallout had that. KOTOR had it too.

WHAT did Fable have that was so god damn original?

Perhaps overly-simplistic gameplay, stupid combat, a mind-numbingly boring plotline.... and the ability to run around farting on girls.

Molyneux is shit and so are his games.

 

[Fat Dragon]

Damn. Whatever the hell it is that Molyneux is on, he needs to reduce the dosage. The man seems to get crazier and crazier.

 

[Data4]

Okay, I still think Molyneux is bonkers, but I decided to actually watch one of the videos on IGN. Specifically, the one button melee combat demo.

It actually looks fun. Before you all grab a rope, let me put this into perspective. Until I know more about the gameplay of Fable 2, I'm just going to consider it a Fantasy Action game, like Dark Messiah. Knowing full well that it's my skill with a controller (or kb and mouse, since I'd never get an X360 for ANYthing), I think it'd be a fun little romp.

All of Molyneux's madness aside, there might be something worth checking out there. It's just not an RPG.

Flame on!

 

[Lingwe]

Sounds like it actually came from The Onion.

 

[sabishii]

Okay, I really have to wonder - does the majority of gamers actually want games to be dumbed down? Is there an actual statistic somewhere? AFAIK the most popular video games, whether or not they are easy to learn, are all hard to master. I know I can't get my head around Starcraft. And Counter-Strike may be easy to pick up but you can definitely tell the veterans from the novices. What else... What about games like Devil May Cry that I hear are frustratingly hard, yet then have a some even harder crazy difficulty level like "Masochism mode." Sounds to me like there is still a large number of people that want a good challenge in their games.

I mean, it could be that the mainstream really is that dumb. But I have a suspicion that all these "RPG" devs are just hyping this "casual" gameplay so much that it forces the mainstream to believe that's what they want.

 

[Severian Silk]

Molyneux is a visionary... a visionary of CRAP!!!

 

[aries202]

No, I don't think that the majority of gamers, be they casual, hardcore or somewhere in-between want games to be dumbed-down. Casual gamers enjoy choice&consequence, a good story, great character etc. as well as the hardcore gamers do.

When I play a game, I don't want to have to click on say 7 things on the keyboard, while holding the mouse as I once tried in the very first Hitman demo.
(no more hitman for me....). I don't mind reading in the manual on how to operate the controls, but then the controls better do what they say they going to do in the game, and not the exact opposite. I also would like a very intuitive userfriendly interface which takes into account that the player should be able to jump right in and play the game. There's very few games out there which actually delivers this and some of these are games made with the Infinity Engine, Morrowind, Oblivion, (although perhaps this was too easy?) and some adventure games.

Please donøt confuse userfriendlyness in the user interfaces (the controls) to be the same as dumbing games down...

 

[Claw]

I think casual gamers want games to be easy to get into, but I don't believe Molyneux' subcomplex solutions are the right answer.

 

[Sonic The Hedgehog]

The only good Molyneaux game I ever played was Dungeon Keeper, and that was outdone significantly by Startopia.

So no, not interested in playing Molyneaux's game.

 

[MetalCraze]

Casual gamers enjoy choice&consequence, a good story, great character etc.

That's why they say that fallout and bg is teh suxx0rz and oblivion rules?

I think casual gamers enjoy fucking shiny eye-candy and an ability to simply shoot things, rather than using brains. Of course if they have some... [offtopic]I was VERY surprised when I noticed a topic at bioware forums about possible bg3 from atari. Majority of people want it to use the same 2d engine and only have a new story. And they wanted the game to be HARD. Not like kotor and JE. Those are hardcore gamers I think [/offtopic]

I also would like a very intuitive userfriendly interface which takes into account that the player should be able to jump right in and play the game

Who cares about interfaces when the game is shit?
According to people Gothic series have shitty interface (though I don't know why ) but in many other aspects G series are great.

P.S. When Fable was out on PC I didn't know about this game, as I don't usually look after games on consoles, because majority of them are shit. But everyone was so happy about the game that I tried to play it. I uninstalled it the next day with argument that this game is for kids - so dumbed down it was.
Teh Irony - I didn't know that all next years gamedevs will try to feed me casual shit.
And now that I've heard about what to expect from Fable2... I think humanity is fucking doomed.
WTB fucking Vault.

 

[sabishii]

That's why they say that fallout and bg is teh suxx0rz and oblivion rules?

But the question is... do the gamers actually say that, or do journalists say that because they THINK that's what gamers want to hear? Could be either, from what I see.

 

[MetalCraze]

But the question is... do the gamers actually say that, or do journalists say that because they THINK that's what gamers want to hear? Could be either, from what I see.

I actually meant gamers. Based on examples from RL. For example one of them tried to convince me that diablo is a mother of all rpgs, oblivion is a great immersive game while bg2 is some shitty adventure with too much talking.

And another one said - I installed your fucking fallout just to see what this bethesda-hating shit around all about. Fallout sucks - it's 2d, it has poor graphics and turn-based combat is sooo boring. But he said that fallout3 looks promising and nice.

of course you understand that LOOKS is a main word here....

And another one calls Dark Messiah a true rpg while calling NWN1 hack'n'slash.
"and look how you can roleplay in it!" (about DMOMM). He wasn't joking. When I asked him how actually can he roleplay his character - he said "You can randomly roleplay it by choosing how to develop your character and what skills to choose". Dear freedom of choice.
[Place here a random pic with a guy holding hand to his head]

And journalists. Well - Beth simply wants them to play on the feelings of such gamers.
Of course there's another part of gamers which are total idiots, don't play games just because they think they are old. But they aren't worthy of any emotions other that a pity...

 

[Jeff Graw]

Oblivion was a great game, but the combat was rubbish; we all talked about it being rubbish. So imagine you had a great role-playing game and really, really good combat system."

Thats funny, 'cause it seemed to me like the only thing about Oblivion that *wasn't* shit was the combat.

 

[tardtastic]

The combat in Oblivion was pretty shit. Slash, block, slash, block -- all you had to do was block then slash to win every fight, provided you didn't let anyone get behind you. and though they added little "Extra effects" to directional attacks, they just really weren't worth it in the course of the game. Not to mention that that hand-to-hand was quite worthless, and bows-and-arrows just felt....chunky. Leading targets, or overaiming them to compensate for distance, just felt clumsy - it wasn't setup well. I had no fun fighting in Oblivion, and for the few weeks that I tried to get into the game, I avoided it as much as possible.

If these quasi-RPG games are going to stick to this realtime melee junk, then they should revisit the gameplay from games like Rune and the Jedi Academy/Outcast/whatever games, because it was all done pretty well there. If not those sources, then they should go for some of the samurai/ninja swordfighting console games -- at least those were fun as action games, if that's what they're really shooting for.

 

[MetalCraze]

[molyneux_mode]a combos? are you nuts? combos are hard! you have to press more than one fucking button! And that's hard! The games must be playable by everyone! even retards! We're doing our game for them you know... *shy* [/molyneux_mode]

 

[sabishii]

Leading targets, or overaiming them to compensate for distance, just felt clumsy - it wasn't setup well.

Yeah, they should've made them like lazer guns instead.

 

[Jeff Graw]

The combat in Oblivion was pretty shit. Slash, block, slash, block -- all you had to do was block then slash to win every fight, provided you didn't let anyone get behind you.

Well, I'm not arguing that the enemy AI wasn't exploitable (as is the case with most games). just that combat in Oblivion had a certain visceral and immediate feeling to it that just felt right. For example, getting hit with a war hammer actually felt painful with the way your character stumbled backwards and you view port shook. Because of that 'being there' feeling of melee combat in Oblivion I actually kind of enjoyed the arena (although I was disappointed with the rest).

For that reason, I think that if Bethesda had made Oblivion into a linear FPS with some RPG elements instead of going with the "let's make an RPG of the grandest scale but simplify it down to stupidity for the kiddies" approach they could have made a good game. Oh well, some people just bite off more than they can chew.

 

[Monolith]

Yeah, but not Bethesda. They made their millions after all.

 

[Saran]

:shock:

I don't know what to say. Fable was ok, really, yes, it was, fuck off you nazi bastards with your hatred, It was a simple hack and slash game with a fantastic fairytale atmosphere, it was nowhere near what he made it out to be, and as a CRPG it was a steaming pile of shit, but it was ok as a "Fun" game.

But this, while most of you are using Hyperbole I really have to wonder if he has all of his facultys, this is probably one of the most moronic statements I have ever read, worse than anything said by bethesda, the sheer insanity of calling fucking halo a hardcore game is just....jesus.

I have to wonder what he thinks of games like Civilization, never mind hardcore wargames and the like.

The worst thing is, I just have to try it out now, just too see what a complete and utter mess he makes of it, I thought that Fallout 3 was going to be the biggest abomination released in the next couple of years, but it looks like it has a challenger in the guise of Fable 2.

In summary "El Oh El, Moly's gone batshit insane."

 

[tardtastic]

Leading targets, or overaiming them to compensate for distance, just felt clumsy - it wasn't setup well.

Yeah, they should've made them like lazer guns instead.

It must take some kind of brain damage to interpret my statement criticising a clumsy implementation of archery mechanics as a vote for lightspeed arrows.
I play Mount and Blade. Mount and Blade has a much better - though not flawless - archery system.