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).
Don’t bite off more than you can chew with the sequel, or you’re just going to repeat history. I liked the game since launch, but it was still very evident CDPR wanted to do more than they realistically could while still actually releasing a product.
Great vision, perhaps too much; but poorly managed their time and resources. Stretched too thin on portability to every available console at the time of release. Constant changes of scope. Etc.
Just do like Baldur’s Gate and release a portion as early access, then release the full game on all platforms when it’s ready. Ideally skip early access and just release when it’s actually ready, but the early access option is acceptable.
Honestly part of the benefit of early access is the diverse hardware and diverse playstyles being tested. I’m sure part of BG3’s success was due to them taking feedback and bug reports from the early access players that submitted things and implementing the fixes and changes based on customer feedback. It definitely gives unique insight for the developers while the game is still being made.
As time went on, he developed a reputation for big promises and hype and underdelivering - viewed by some as straight up lying. He arguably killed the Fable brand. He presented a tech demo for the launch of the Kinect that was thought to be a real game, that was mostly smoke and mirrors. Following Fable 3’s poor reception, he makes his own company and hypes up “Curiosity”, essentially a bad clicker game with a promised prize to the person who gets the final click. The tech was bad, and the “prize” was supposedly a share of the revenue from their following project Godus. That project was not good (which was only expected to be at all due to his penchant for inflating expectations), and the cherry on top was that the person who won the prize for the aforementioned Curiosity game never received a dime.
A bad clicker game that you could pay money into to make your clicks worth more, might I add. And I believe that the words “will change your life” was used to describe the prize. And that part of the prize was to play Godus early and they got bored pretty quickly of it.
And that part of the prize was to play Godus early and they got bored pretty quickly of it.
The guy didn’t even look like he had any interest in that kind of game to begin with. And, really, why would he? He’s just a random bloke who tried playing a brainless clicker game, and won the jackpot. There’s nothing that predestined the prize winner to be into any of this. Even Molyneux’s greatest hits in the god game/management genre are still *very" niche games.
Also yeah, Godus was a disaster on many, many levels and very far from those.
The whole thing was very flawed from the beginning.
Even if you know nothing about the past of this guy, the fact that he made a blockchain-based business sim should tell you all you need in order to form an opinion.
He exaggerates or straight up lies about the games he has made. Despite some of them being very good, they still under delivered on many outrageous claims Moleneux has made.
Like with Fable, he once said shit ranging from that you’d be able to do shit like carve your name in a tree and watch it grow and the scar evolve over time and even seemingly minor things like fighting a dragon as a boss which didn’t come to fruition.
Originally he was a well liked, well respected autuer game designer from back in the days when that was still a thing. He made games like Populous, and people thought he was pretty cool.
Around the time of Black and White, the cracks started to show. He had bought into his own hype, and had a real tendency to over promise and under deliver. But, even though it didn’t exactly match up to some of his more grandiose descriptions, Black & White was still a very good game, so people didn’t mind.
Fable was where things really went off the rails. The thing is, Fable was a very good game, a fun but largely quite contained RPG, feeling more like a western take on a Zelda game than anything (as in the N64 Zelda games).
But it was not the game that Molyneux promised. Not even slightly. The game he described was one that would have nearly photo realistic graphics, and a vast open world where you could literally see a distant mountain peak and set off to climb it. A world where you could kill a man in a duel, and his son would grow up dedicating their life to one day hunting you down and killing you. A world where you could conquer whole nations with armies of darkness at your command.
Think Skyrim crossed with Mount & Blade crossed with Crusader Kings crossed with Star Citizen. Now imagine that game releasing at the same time as Morrowind.
So by this point people were starting to understand that Molyneux was fundamentally incapable of a) reigning in his imagination, and b) operating in the modern world of game development.
And then we got to Curiosity. If you don’t know, it was a mobile game where all you did was tap on a big cube made of layers of little cubes. Every time you tapped on a little cube it got destroyed, and everyone was working together on this, so each cube was destroyed for everyone. The goal was to destroy all the layers and reveal the centre, and whoever destroyed the last layer would win a prize. Kind of dumb, very simple. But Molyneux, Molyneux hyped this to the heavens. This wasn’t just a “game”, oh no, this was a grand social experiment the likes of which the world had never seen before, and the winner would recieve something “truly life changing.” Molyneux hammered that point a lot. “Life changing.”
What they recieved was that a character would be named after them in Godus, the Kickstarter game Molyneux was making. Oh, and they’d get “a portion” of the revenue from the game (it was never publicly stated how big that portion would be).
That was back in 2013. Ten years later Godus is still in early access, backers are clamouring for refunds after basically none of the Kickstarter promises were met, and the winner of Curiosity has not been contacted by the company since 2016.
He has never seen a cent of the money he was promised.
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.
I would say, being even more pedantic, that the game uses a blockchain (which is just a different type of database) to record in game digital asset ownership. This game could have been made with a normal db taking that roll and would probably run no differently.
He is mentioning and using a blockchain over a normal db for no other reason that it probably helped to secure funding in 2017 as it was a massive tech buzzword at the time.
It could, sure, but I’m positive the only reason he’s making it is because of blockchain. I seriously doubt Pete was rolling around a game idea for online real estate separately and just threw blockchain in as a way to get funding.
Who the fuck genuinely cares about a digital plot of land? The only reason stuff like this attracts people is the hope to make money, and therefore only people who only care about the monetary aspect play games like Legacy.
I highly suggest the YouTube channel “Jauwn”! The dude plays nft games “frome the perspective of a gamer”, so he tries to give those games a fair shot (although he is clearly biased against nfts in general). To no one’s surprise each and every nft game is just a grift to mine money in the pockets of idiots who think they are smarter than the rest.
pcgamer.com
Aktywne