Molyneux is the Shyamalan of video games. He’s done a couple of brilliant things, some decent stuff, and a lot of batshit crazy cringe-fests.
New titles are like Christmas poppers. You look forward to them because you remember that first time they were fun, but then you crack one and remember they’re mostly a mix of disappointment and the faint waft of gunpowder.
I really like this comparison. Dude has publicly gone on record about how he regrets utilizing hype irresponsibly. I think acknowledgement is all we want, and plenty of people still like fable and black and white. I would root for him to have a bit of a comeback.
Molyneux’s great sin is the inability to shut the fuck up while he’s ahead. lt’s hard to explain how much weight this guy carried in the 90s/very early 00s but he was the guy that did Populus, Dungeon Keeper, and Syndicate. And then he just kept over-promising and fucking up for a whole decade.
If he’d kept it reasonable he might still carry some of that weight but he cannot stop promising the moon and then delivering mediocre shit. It would be like Miyamoto releasing flappy bird with NFTs instead of the next Zelda game. God he’s so frustrating.
Most of “his” genuinely good games seem to deliver despite him, not because of him. Beyond his ability to deceive enough investors/gamers to get funding for other people to pull something good from the fire he creates, what else does he do.
Only this motherfucker could make a blockchain based product in 2023 and think he’s still ahead of the curve (and not, y’know, turning up to buy tickets on the Titanic after it hit the iceberg).
they require a massive dataset to do so. much much much more than an individual person’s playthrough
They actually suck at learning compared to us, in some ways. If I show you a car, and tell you, only once “this is a car” you will start recognizing other cars, of different sizes, colors and models, from any orientation.
Meanwhile, look at something like tesla cars. they have been gathering data for years, and the ai still has issues recognizing cars sometimes.
“I do think, though”, he concedes, “we have stumbled, and it feels like stumbling on a mechanic that has never been seen in a game before.”
“And a lot of this is very mystical because I’m trying to avoid to tell you what it’s like. But it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience”
I’m not really familiar with those games, only with the infamousness of molyneux, but wasn’t the player’s actions leaving behind a pretty clear effect on the world a common theme in those games? That may have been what he was referring too.
It may also be him naming those because those games were the heights that he wants to go back to. The games he had made when he was still relevant must be much more present in his mind than they are in ours.
it’s going to be a lot more like a kind of Fable - Black and White - Dungeon Keeper kind of experience
Based on this description and given the only thing two of these games have in common, I can only conclude his latest project is a game focused on using your floating god hand to slap the shit out of your minion(s). I’m just not quite sure about the Fable connection…
It’s definitely not starting from scratch, it’s just throwing away what they built so far.
To be honest though although I’m not a game dev it does seem like a pretty reasonable decision given presumably the difficulties of maintaining your own engine. This will hopefully allow them to invest more time into different parts of the game and avoid a repeat of the Cyberpunk launch. I wonder if that launch and issues that lead to it was a big part of the drive behind the decision.
That said, I am a bit worried about what seems to be a bit of a consolidation happening with game engines after Unity burning a lot of bridges and now CDPR not moving forward with their in house engine. It’d be nice to see some more competition in this space I think. That’s my layman’s take at least, maybe there are already plenty of options that I’m just not aware of.
The stuff you can do in UE5 just makes it a no brainer for everyone. Especially if you want an object and detail dense environment where lighting is super important. UE5 and cyberpunk is a match made in heaven.
I do home Godot can get similar features to UE5 one date. I’m rooting for those guys.
I’m also a little sad that REDengine is getting scrapped after seemingly finally getting to a pretty decent spot, and I definitely wish there was more competition for Unreal.
That being said, it’s a very understandable decision given not just the capabilities and ease-of-use of UE5 but also its popularity, which means finding new developers competent with it is easier and onboarding is faster.
And as you say, it lets them focus on actually making games.
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