Loinhead

GameDaily.com has a user-submitted interview with Peter, mostly about him as a person and the ideas behind Fable 2.

GameSpy has a short showcase of three environments, including screenshots, and a three-page interview with Ian Wright, Art Director at Lionhead.

IGN has a feature today showcasing three NPCs and a Denerview. It is quite nifty and the NPCs are not core-storyline significant. The interview ends with a joke – how ridiculously unprofessional.

In the super-short superficial entirely worthless “Players Only” series, this week dealing with the console race, Peter Molyneux is featured for a whole thirty seconds saying he likes the Xbox because of Live. (The only actually interesting comment is from Michael Pachter.)

Peter Molyneux has said something again about the games industry today. The Guardian’s Kieron Gillen asks him about the (non)visibility of games designers.

“This produces twice as many column inches in a magazine or online… and suddenly they can literally quantify the benefit from getting stars out there,” he says.

Clearly having a celebrity touch gets newspaper articles twice as many column inches too.

Gamasutra have a 5-page interview with the Molynator. Here is a brief selection of tantalising phrases which may or may not be related to the interview or, for that matter, Fable 2: henchmen that can do everything you can, Peter playing with and designing for his wife, finding the middle ground between arcade and hardcore and the audience to go with it, something about “women” having “insight”, the industry, the past of Bullfrog yet again. Also he likes Phantom Hourglass.

Yarr.

Much as we at Loinhead feel obliged to hate MTV, their multiplayer blog has a writeup of one of the endless GDC press sessions Molyneux gave. What he says about aging reinforces that the game takes place in episodic sections of the character’s life. There’s nothing groundbreakingly new, but rather everything again from a different starting point.

After Chris Faylor got fairly thoroughly owned, Microsoft felt bad for the little chappie and let him have an hour with Peter Molyneux. The first half of the interview is up today, consisting of about 1/3 banter and 2/3 talking about the previous revelations about Fable 2. Noteworthy is that it’s close to code complete and Molyneux is confident of the exact dates they’ll be shipping, the second half of the co-op feature is too unconventional to find out about with traditional questions, and that Molyneux is better than you at board games.

Part two gives some talk about acorns and how they’re necessary to the main storyline (as a hat-tip to Fable’s acorn controversy) and some general knickknack questions.

Peter Molyneux, presumably feeling that he hadn’t done quite enough teasing about the second game, gave GamersGlobal some new hype. The basic gist is that tinkering with Dimitri never stopped, and about 6 months ago they had a breakthrough around which a new game is being written now - one that will make the cover of Nature (magazines) and Science (magazines).

I’m saying absolutely nothing. I’ve been sat down in a room by the head of PR [of Microsoft Games, --ed.] and been told to not talk about it.

Since Black&White, we’ve been thinking a lot about AI, Lionhead was founded with that thought of AI in mind. In terms of the core or the theory of the AI, we’ve moved from Black&White onto a project called Dimitri, which I’ve been tantalizing you about for a long time. And that team kept on researching. Dimitri was always an experimental thing, which is why I never showed it.

And then it moved from that experiment to a moment in time that happened six months ago when a discovery was made, and this discovery has been so exciting that it has lead to Lionhead focussing on it and sculpting a game around that. I think that discovery is so significant… This discovery has lead us to start a game and that game will be on the front cover of Nature magazines and Science magazines.

[Release date:] “trees still having leaves, but with a brownish tint”.

The magazine 360 interview Lionhead and a few other British game studios. Via Develop. Part 2 is here.

How are UK developers placed in the competitive world of the games industry?

Peter Molyneux: The merger of Activision/Vivendi, and the continual shrinking of the development pool with companies like BioWare/Pandemic, Travellers’ Tales and Bizarre Creations all being snapped up (and if the rumours are true a few more announcements to come) mean the landscape of developers is changing more rapidly than ever before. UK developers need to increase their ability to be competitive and there is a lot of talk about developers in Canada and the Far East who are treated far more sympathetically by their governments in terms of subsidies and tax breaks. Where British developers can still compete is in terms of originality and innovation.

Is there any concern that cheaper production costs abroad will push publishers away from the UK? What can British developers do to make sure they offer more than just cost effectiveness?

What can British developers do to make sure they offer more than just cost effectiveness? I kind of answered this above but we can’t compete on production cost so we have to compete on quality and what UK developers are good at is uniqueness and our ability to solve design problems – UK developers still have a lot to offer.

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