5 ms·

Peter Molyneux wants Project MOAT to represent his life's work

36 points by raytopia 3y ago

seanthemon 3y ago
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.
- tmikaeld 3y ago
  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..
- bastawhiz 3y ago
  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.
- keerthiko 3y ago
  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.
  - 3seashells 3y ago
    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.
    - gs17 3y ago
      Curiosity was literally a giant lootbox with nothing inside.
      - Hamuko 3y ago
        No, there was something inside: a broken promise.
  - barrysteve 3y ago
    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.
    - Lacerda69 3y ago
      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.
- thomasz 3y ago
  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.
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    > 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.
    - thomasz 3y ago
      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.
  - seanthemon 3y ago
    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.
  - usrusr 3y ago
    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.
Rebelgecko 3y ago
Didn't he say the same thing about Godus?
COGlory 3y ago
He's mostly missed, in recent years, but in a weird way I've missed him. Whether he can live up to his own hype, whether he is as much a legend to others as he is to himself, whether he's pushing the boundaries of art and interactivity, or simply making all the obvious mistakes and claiming it's something new, he's fantastically entertaining in the process.
kmeisthax 3y ago
I'm confused. What exactly is Project MOAT? All this article says about MOAT is that it's set in the Fable universe, which I assume means Molyneux is working with Microsoft in some capacity again.
- phire 3y ago
  That appears to be all the infomation, got to start building that hype early. On the plus side, Molyneux can't follow his normal MO of over-promising if he isn't providing any details.
marcus_holmes 3y ago
So conflicted about this guy. Dungeon Keeper is right up there in my all-time best games. Black & White was great, but there was always something just not quite right (or not quite complete) with it. Really enjoyed the Fable games, but they still didn't live up to the hype. And then there's the Godus saga, which I played a lot but ultimately gave up on. It felt like backing a particularly doomed Kickstarter for a game I really wanted to play. He talks the talk, and then stumbles the walk. And I'm a total sucker for his vision of what a game should be. But almost always disappointed by the execution (Dungeon Keeper was the exception - almost perfect execution on that). It's like he has a vision of a gaming paradise that humans can't actually build. But he never seems to acknowledge the amount of pain that his failure to build causes. And he never seems to learn to under-promise and over-deliver. Every new game is going to be this amazing work of art, and then what emerges from the development process is like a poor shadow of what he describes. I'm not falling for it this time. And I don't believe a word of "this is my last game, so I want it to be amazing".
- Pungsnigel 3y ago
  Fable 1 is among the best games ever in my opinion. Still holds up decent as well. Insanely good atmosphere.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    I mean, it’s pretty good, but I wouldn’t describe it as the best game ever. It did have a lot of at the time revolutionary ideas though.
  - KeplerBoy 3y ago
    True. And I foolishly have some hopes for the next Fable, but it's been 20 years and I'm not even the targeted audience anymore. Who else gets a bit emotional knowing their personal gaming enjoyment peaked 20 years ago in front of a CRT?
    - geoah 3y ago
      Sigh. I miss those stupid point and click adventure games so much. I hoped for a closure to the monkey island series for so long. And after getting it I’m full of regret. Nothing they did would have made me happy. Nostalgia is what it is.
epaga 3y ago
This headline summarizes everything I admire about Molyneux. When he does a thing, it becomes all-consuming to him. Whether or not he actually achieves that goal becomes almost secondary to the process of working toward it, for him. And he’s able to communicate that passion so well, and each time you find yourself hoping he succeeds
- loa_in_ 3y ago
  He should have trusted support people around to aid him. Is he rich? Does the company he works at care? Why doesn't he have everything he needs?
Lev1a 3y ago
> to represent his life's work So it's gonna be a monument to "Over-promise and under-deliver"?
- indigoabstract 3y ago
  That's a great way to make a comment 50% mean and 50% hilarious. In the same way, I think a lot of people are going to roast Elon Musk if he dies before he manages to get to Mars.
hrnnnnnn 3y ago
If you want to see a hardball-by-the-standards-of-the-games-press interview with Molyneux, this one from rockpapershotgun starts with the question "Do you think that you're a pathological liar?" https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-godus-reputation-kickstarter https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
- surgical_fire 3y ago
  This kind of interview is awful. I mean, I'm not even a fan of Molyneux. The only game from him I truly enjoyed was Dungeon Keeper. But this kind of interview feels like it just wants to drag the guy for some public humiliation. And it is not like putting the person being interviewed on the defensive will result in anything but self-defense when responding. Beyond that videogames are just entertainment - if you play one and it is a disappointment, just go play some other one, there are plenty of games out there. It's not like the guy was a corrupt politician who stole hundreds of millions, or shit like that.
RockRobotRock 3y ago
HN seems to love polarizing game devs. Phil Fish, Jonathan Blow, Casey Muratori.
gettodachoppa 3y ago
We are so back!
MrJagil 3y ago
if anyone is nostalgic about dungeon keeper, note that's it's actively being worked on by a group of passionate fans: https://keeperfx.net https://keeperfx.net

36 points by raytopia 3y ago

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.

tmikaeld 3y ago
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..
bastawhiz 3y ago
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.
keerthiko 3y ago
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.
- 3seashells 3y ago
  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.
  - gs17 3y ago
    Curiosity was literally a giant lootbox with nothing inside.
    - Hamuko 3y ago
      No, there was something inside: a broken promise.
- barrysteve 3y ago
  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.
  - Lacerda69 3y ago
    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.
thomasz 3y ago
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.
- Lacerda69 3y ago
  > 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.
  - thomasz 3y ago
    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.
- seanthemon 3y ago
  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.
- usrusr 3y ago
  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.

Rebelgecko 3y ago

Didn't he say the same thing about Godus?

COGlory 3y ago

He's mostly missed, in recent years, but in a weird way I've missed him. Whether he can live up to his own hype, whether he is as much a legend to others as he is to himself, whether he's pushing the boundaries of art and interactivity, or simply making all the obvious mistakes and claiming it's something new, he's fantastically entertaining in the process.

kmeisthax 3y ago

I'm confused. What exactly is Project MOAT? All this article says about MOAT is that it's set in the Fable universe, which I assume means Molyneux is working with Microsoft in some capacity again.

phire 3y ago
That appears to be all the infomation, got to start building that hype early. On the plus side, Molyneux can't follow his normal MO of over-promising if he isn't providing any details.

marcus_holmes 3y ago

So conflicted about this guy. Dungeon Keeper is right up there in my all-time best games. Black & White was great, but there was always something just not quite right (or not quite complete) with it. Really enjoyed the Fable games, but they still didn't live up to the hype. And then there's the Godus saga, which I played a lot but ultimately gave up on. It felt like backing a particularly doomed Kickstarter for a game I really wanted to play. He talks the talk, and then stumbles the walk. And I'm a total sucker for his vision of what a game should be. But almost always disappointed by the execution (Dungeon Keeper was the exception - almost perfect execution on that). It's like he has a vision of a gaming paradise that humans can't actually build. But he never seems to acknowledge the amount of pain that his failure to build causes. And he never seems to learn to under-promise and over-deliver. Every new game is going to be this amazing work of art, and then what emerges from the development process is like a poor shadow of what he describes. I'm not falling for it this time. And I don't believe a word of "this is my last game, so I want it to be amazing".

Pungsnigel 3y ago
Fable 1 is among the best games ever in my opinion. Still holds up decent as well. Insanely good atmosphere.
- Aeolun 3y ago
  I mean, it’s pretty good, but I wouldn’t describe it as the best game ever. It did have a lot of at the time revolutionary ideas though.
- KeplerBoy 3y ago
  True. And I foolishly have some hopes for the next Fable, but it's been 20 years and I'm not even the targeted audience anymore. Who else gets a bit emotional knowing their personal gaming enjoyment peaked 20 years ago in front of a CRT?
  - geoah 3y ago
    Sigh. I miss those stupid point and click adventure games so much. I hoped for a closure to the monkey island series for so long. And after getting it I’m full of regret. Nothing they did would have made me happy. Nostalgia is what it is.

epaga 3y ago

This headline summarizes everything I admire about Molyneux. When he does a thing, it becomes all-consuming to him. Whether or not he actually achieves that goal becomes almost secondary to the process of working toward it, for him. And he’s able to communicate that passion so well, and each time you find yourself hoping he succeeds

loa_in_ 3y ago
He should have trusted support people around to aid him. Is he rich? Does the company he works at care? Why doesn't he have everything he needs?

Lev1a 3y ago

> to represent his life's work So it's gonna be a monument to "Over-promise and under-deliver"?

indigoabstract 3y ago
That's a great way to make a comment 50% mean and 50% hilarious. In the same way, I think a lot of people are going to roast Elon Musk if he dies before he manages to get to Mars.

hrnnnnnn 3y ago

If you want to see a hardball-by-the-standards-of-the-games-press interview with Molyneux, this one from rockpapershotgun starts with the question "Do you think that you're a pathological liar?" https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-godus-reputation-kickstarter https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...

surgical_fire 3y ago
This kind of interview is awful. I mean, I'm not even a fan of Molyneux. The only game from him I truly enjoyed was Dungeon Keeper. But this kind of interview feels like it just wants to drag the guy for some public humiliation. And it is not like putting the person being interviewed on the defensive will result in anything but self-defense when responding. Beyond that videogames are just entertainment - if you play one and it is a disappointment, just go play some other one, there are plenty of games out there. It's not like the guy was a corrupt politician who stole hundreds of millions, or shit like that.

RockRobotRock 3y ago

HN seems to love polarizing game devs. Phil Fish, Jonathan Blow, Casey Muratori.

gettodachoppa 3y ago

We are so back!

MrJagil 3y ago

if anyone is nostalgic about dungeon keeper, note that's it's actively being worked on by a group of passionate fans: https://keeperfx.net https://keeperfx.net