Peter Molyneux has discussed a new project, The Trial, at the Fun and Serious Game Festival in Bilbao, Spain. The famous game developer and former head honcho at Lionhead Studios (Fable) has expressed his interest in creating a game that utilises social media interaction and high score leaderboards.
Project currently codenamed MOAT.
Imagine a game where Peter Molyneux presents an extraordinary set of ideas that players will enjoy for years to come. Now imagine that this particular game will come out because it will never exist.
One of the biggest reveals at this year's Xbox Games Showcase was the latest Fable trailer. After a lengthy stint of silence, Playground Games gave us a look at bits of the title, albeit in a trailer that was mostly made up of CGI nonsense headlined by comedian Richard Ayoade, who is playing a rather frustrated giant.
Molyneux asked about what he thought about the Fable reveal.
From GI.biz: "UK developer 22cans has suffered a round of redundancies, GamesIndustry.biz has learned.
The studio, founded by Fable creator Peter Molyneux, has laid off multiple employees, although an exact figure has not been disclosed.
A spokesperson said: "Unfortunately, due to a number of factors including projects reaching a certain stage in their development, we can confirm that a number of roles at 22cans have been made redundant."
Doesn’t that always happen with every studio lol? Contract workers for certain stages.
Seriously, what is Peter Molyneux up to these days? In his prime, he was the most famous western developer in the world. Now he's doing f all.
They're not actually layoffs, they're fantastical multi-faceted journeys into lands of unimaginable unemployment giving the worker near-infinite freedom of choice.
I'm not the biggest fan of Molyneux, but he always manages to create a storm of intrigue about any project he works on. Colour me interested.
Did you see his tweet the other day about being a kid in the back seat of a car, falling asleep and then all of a sudden you were driving. I thought that was a bit whatever
I'd rather listen to Molyneux speak than play his games. He seems to have an interesting mind and way of thinking about things but those things don't seem to get translated successfully into the games.
For anyone who grew up when Populous was launched and every Bullfrog game was gold, Molyneux will always be one of the great developers and 'ideas-men'.
It's just unfortunate that what he's done in recent times (everything since Black and White), has been more hyperbole than delivery.
It's a shame, as if you gave the guy a budget of $10,000 he'd make an interesting game of 10,000 underdeveloped ideas. If you gave him a budget of $10million, you'd get an interesting game of 10 million under-developed ideas. He doesn't seem to know when to focus on a few things until they are perfect, rather than a bucket load that are half baked. His experimental games are interesting, but they are little more than tech demo ideas that should not get past internal prototyping.
Godus for me has been the single biggest disappointment - for a guy that invented the god-game genre, to see his return to the genre be little more than a Facebook game was awful. I'm supposed to be a god, and yet I'm collecting cards!?, and putting stickers!? on them to unlock powers... And I can only collect faith on a timer... so my population are like little faith bubbles that need to be popped... Half baked!