f13.net

I dLed it within the first few hundred downloads when it (finally) went live on Play.  This game has me.
I was skeptical during the early access and held off until it went mobile, but I must say they did a helluva good job.  Small indy team from a small town in England, very soon to have likely a top 10 game on their hands.

Anyways, it's a god-builder like Black and White, Spore, etc.  only not.  The difference here is the terrain itself is the main game mechanic (somewhat of a puzzle).  You mold it to open up new settlement space, to create safe pathways, to get to new areas, and so forth.  This costs you 'belief' to do, which in turn is generated by settlements, destroying rocks, and various other means.  As you grow, you gain cards (powers ranging from new housing types, to growing trees and so forth) which in turn are activated by placing stickers on them of varying types.  You find these stickers on 'adventures' (large puzzle boards essentially) and exploring the map, uncovering chests.  Or of course you can buy them.

There is of course a friend mechanic.  Builders in the game will be named after your friends that play and supposedly if you visit eachother you get stickers.  So unfortunately yes, ideally you'd link the game to FB, but it's passive so it's entirely up to you how annoying you want to be with it.

Building is partly automatic based on radius to other structures (you must task them though), but you can path your builders wherever you want for a cost; ideally to a plot that you will eventually build out.   There is a subtle but nice mechanic with this.

Game is very ambient.  Music is soothing, there are weather effects, and so forth.  Very pleasant game to play.  Love it.

Fuck Peter Molyneux.

I was at Gamelab in Barcelona this year and he was giving a talk (via Skype) on Dynamically created content. Except what happened was that he rambled for a bit about his studio and then took the webcam on a tour. Which wasn't exactly fascinating to people who already work in a games studio.

Yah well, aside from the politics of the game and how it was made, I'm having a decent enough time with it.  It's free too... that helps.   :oh_i_see:

I bought this and played it a bunch earlier in the year.  Maybe more features have been added since then, but my main concern was that the game felt like a terrain flattening simulator.   Watching my stuff build up, unearthing the chests, making little "towns" etc was all neat.  But at the end of the day the really neat game world ended up just being paved over into a parking lot.

Maybe I was doing it wrong.

Steam still shows it as being a $20.00 Early Access title, weird (and the reviews on the store page are not kind).

edit: didn't look at the forum this was in, derp  :uhrr: Sorry!  Never mind!

It's free on Google Play; on your mobile/tablet (as of last night).   They've obviously injected the microtrans though.  As a PC game I'd say it's unmentionable, but as a simple mobile/tablet game I think it's a nice title.  Definitely not a $20 game.


The more flattening you do, the more belief you use.  My strat so far has been strategic "valleys" and pathways.  Also, supposedly some of the structures only build on higher (different) terrain, but I havent confirmed that yet.  The builders do indeed build at somewhat random... sometimes a grass hut, sometimes a grass cabin.  Not sure how that works at higher levels.  I just bronzed.

I played Godus for a while when it came out for iOS a while back.  The interface is crap, but I was able to forgive that until the difficulty started jacking up so that failures to pick the right pixel to drag would cost hours worth of belief or a chance at a time-limited puzzle -- oh and would you like to buy a do-over on that for $5?

Fuck Molyneux.

I gave this a try on my ipad, what a fiddly annoying piece of shit this game is.

Yah, once you get to midgame it quickly turns to shite.  That can be said of most mobilegames though.  :oh_i_see:
Most fun I had was annihilating the local tribe with fire and meteors; turning them into a steaming pile of unhappiness.  After which, of course, they were mysteriously happy again.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/09/oh-godus-what-the-hells-going-on/

Godus won't complete the KS goals.  I know its been said Molyneux is a tool before, but this really hammers it home.  Established designers really shouldn't be using KS.

No, I don't think that's necessarily the case, though I do agree anyone with big publisher ties should fuck right off KS right now. No, I think the best lesson to learn is NEVER FUCKING TRUST PETER MOLYNEUX. Do not give this French fuck any more of your money unless you consider it a donation for past works. He will NEVER deliver a promise.

Meh - you don't have to back. At least a major publishers or established designer will likely deliver the thing. That said,  I have a broader rule of no video games on Kickstarter ever ever ever.

Also the rule about not giving Peter Molyneux money applies regardless of Kickstarter.

Good god he is a fuckwit.

He pretty much said it himself in the quote they pulled from Techradar (http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/molyneux-kickstarter-is-a-destructive-force-that-damaged-godus-1275205).


Yeah Peter, it is indeed a harsh rule that they won't let you take money from people despite it not being enough to actually complete the project according to the target you yourself set. It's totally kickstarter's fault that you had to lie in order to sidestep the one tiny way KS actually attempts to protect people from getting ripped off.

Reminder this rule also applies to Tim Schafer/Doublefine.

Ahhahahahahahahaaha Peter Molyneux, hahahahahaah

He just reeled in a bunch of suckers (no surprise!) (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/09/oh-godus-what-the-hells-going-on/)


Abandons his game, takes the money and runs.

I hope he ends up flipping burgers.

No, generally con artists on that scale always tend to land on their feet. Their victims and the people roped into their spiel tend to end up flipping burgers.

I recently found a few old game mags and read through a lot of reviews from the "golden age" of PC gaming and I realized that Molyneux has alway been that way.

- Dungeon Keeper
- Magic Carpet
- Fable
- Syndicate

He overpromises and under delivers. Totally hypes up games during the PR and trade show circuit. Takes years longer than initially promised and ends up delivering games that are missing core features, are weird mash-ups of half thought out concepts and that sort of peter out half way through.

Fucking black and white.  I have never forgiven him for that - he suckered me in on that.

Never again.

I completely forgot Black and White

Black and White.  A game that I believe I may have pirated, and still ended up feeling like I'd been ripped off.

The Movies. It was over halfway there and then just... stopped.

Black and White is also where I parted ways with Molyneux. Fuck that asshole, go work on Madison Ave.

Dungeon Keeper and Syndicate were awesome games, even if he over-promised like crazy on them.

I liked Black & White well enough, but probably just because I discovered it in a vacuum.  First I ever heard of it was when I saw the box in a store.

The controls were pretty garbage, though.

Collecting money for stretch goals then not delivering them seems to be veering into outright fraud territory.

The Movies seemed to have so much potential, yeah. Right about where you were really ready to do some fun shit with the actual movie-making, the game just basically slipped out the door and said, "See you later baby, it was great while it lasted."

Bwahaha, you guys remember that dumb cube thing Molyneux did? Well, the guy who won never received his prize.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-11-the-god-who-peter-molyneux-forgot

That's about as surprising as the gutting of SOE.

Peter Molyneux is a complete wanker.

Always was, always will be.

Peter Molyneux seems to be imploding (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/13/peter-molyneux-interview-godus-reputation-kickstarter/). This interview is super hard to read, he just doesn't seem to understand what the problem is.


Even The Guardian (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter-molyneux-game-designer-interview-godus) got a few digs in.

Speaking of Molyneux:


Bahaha (http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/13/peter-molyneux-interview-godus-reputation-kickstarter/).

brill

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter-molyneux-game-designer-interview-godus

"Molyneux has handed control over to a fledgling designer Konrad Naszynski, who joined the team after being a passionate fan on the game’s forums"

"Peter Molyneux has admitted regret and culpability; he was clearly in distress throughout the interview – an interview he told us would will be his last. An hour before publication, however, we discovered that he had spoken to the gaming news site Rock, Paper, Shotgun the day before, and had given their interviewer the same impression – that he would no longer be speaking to the press (that interview is now online). He has also spoken to at least one other site, seemingly on the same afternoon as our discussion."

To be a designer without any comprehension of budget is fucking irresponsible.  He didn't have to be an accountant.  However, he should have had at least a ballpark idea of what it would cost to make, then multiply that by 3. 

I don't work in game design, but I know what my ballpark team costs are to my company.  It's a great way of knowing how to expand or contract the scope of our influence.

This is a great use case for anyone studying business or game design.  I hope the schools are watching.

to repost.

"Molyneux has handed control over to a fledgling designer Konrad Naszynski, who joined the team after being a passionate fan on the game’s forums"

A Dreamer with Big Ideas meets Reality.  Pretty much my bosses.

At least he wasn't blaming underlings.  That's kind of different.

To quote George Costanza:

(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1739972/web-images/lie.jpg)

"I'm not a liar, I'm just delusional"  -Peter Molynuex

That's not my takeaway from this article. My takeaway is why would _anyone_ ever give Molyneux a dime?

People with one skill set, like game designer, do not automatically have the skill set of game developer. Molyneux's developer skills are so lacking as to be venturing over into fraud territory.

After reading Molyneux's excuses for why he fails so hard, it's a wonder that anyone ever meets a deadline and delivers a project. Fortunately, most project managers have skills. What a narcissistic con job.

The thing is, if he would ever just SHUT THE FUCK UP about his games until they are a definite 3-6 months from ACTUAL release, he'd probably get a lot less shit. His biggest problem has always been that he promises pie-in-the-sky shit years in advance of any of the creation of the tech necessary to bring those promises to fruition. If he'd kept his mouth shut until some of these things were actually fucking built, he could temper expectations better because he'd know what he created. He's a victim of his own success and of the insatiable need for the industry to hype shit way too far in advance.

Hey, something from RPS that's actually sort of worth reading. That's a first.

FIFY.

Time for a KS lynching.

Peter Molyneux: Well, I think if you talk to anyone, and this is the advice I have given to people about Kickstarter, is to not ask for too much. You cannot unfortunately ask for the actual amount you need.

RPS: You asked for less money on Kickstarter than you knew you were going to need because you didn’t want to ask for too much money.

Peter Molyneux: No, I didn’t say that.

Cocaine's a helluva drug.

(http://media.giphy.com/media/Krt7EB2hj3vaw/giphy.gif)

I love that interview, He's savagely and unapologetically asking the hard question and he is giving Molyneux just enough rope that he then gladly takes to hang himself with.

It's also another damning evidence that there is no such thing as game journalism because everyone knew how Molyneux acts yet until now no one had the balls to that what RPS just did.

Sounds like a "three-star ability with five-star drive" situation all over again.  That and it allows him to push the blame off to the new guy.

In a move that is as sad as it is totally unsurprising in this industry, game devs and fans of Molyneux are now berating RPS and Walker on Twitter, Facebook and other sites for "being confrontational", "bullying" and "unprofessional behavior" towards Molyneux. Also RPS seems to be down atm.

Bunch of wet blankets and brown noses they are.

Lol what the fuck.

Journalism!

There is not enough  :facepalm: in the world for that shit.

Really?  I mean, I know 'lol game journalism' and all that, but RPS always seemed like one of the better gaming sites to me.  They tend to do better reviews/interviews that actually examine things (such as this interview) instead of the usual 100% knob polishing most of the sites do.  But I don't read it that much, so maybe I'm missing it.

RPS should have accused him of sucking a bunch of dicks.

That RPS interview was hilarious, and any game developers attacking RPS for it are idiots.

But at the end of the day, I honestly feel nothing but apathy towards the whole issue.  Every time I see Molyneux's name I see everyone moan about over promising shit that anyone with half a brain should be skeptical of (even if it wasn't coming from him directly with his reputaiton).  The only reason he has the reputation he has is because people still believe his shit and still throw money his way.  This whole Godus thing would be a non-issue if, you know, people hadn't kickstarted it.  At the end of the day I'm going to carry on happily ever after only paying for games after I see legitimate reviews that say it's a game that should live up to my expectations, and only spend money on what's there now instead of what's possibly there in the imaginary future.

People who pre-ordered this shit and bought into someone's pie in the sky concept deserve to be parted with their rmoney.  They made a terrible choice, and they enable people like Molyneux to make a ton of money off of them.

This goes for Molyneux, Chris Roberts, any kickstarter, Blizzard, etc..  It's all bullshit until something ships.  If you pay for an unshipped product and that product sucks, you are to blame, not the creator.

From what I read, a bunch of them is seeing PM getting shit for the fail with this project and they take it as if they are getting shit personally because hey, they are developers too, and who didn't ever overpromise and underdeliver shall be the first to cast a stone and, and... completely missing that they are nowhere near the level of the notoriety for that kind of behavior that PM has at this point and so no, it's not about them.

tl;dr: #notyesalldevelopers

Well, it's not as if PM is the only developer to over-promise and under-deliver. Most of them don't openly and knowingly lie about it to get money though, or at least if they do they're better at it than he is and don't get caught.

Honestly, anyone who had hopes that Godus would be anything other than a heap of turd should have had those hopes dashed as soon as they saw that his great, revolutionary mobile experiment was... clicking squares on a giant cube.

This is exactly how Master of Orion 3 was developed! A superfan with no development experience was given the role of lead designer. That turned out great!

That said...random schlub with no experience vs Molyneux - who knows? Sidegrade.

PM has gotten by for years with people making excuses for him because he is "ambitious" and has "vision." But his games are not ambitious - at least not in the last 10 years or so. The last few games he's made are a F2P Populus thing, a game where you click on cubes, and a Kinect rail shooter. It's easy to be "ambitious" when all that means is making dumb promises you aren't going to follow through on.

I just don't understand why anyone ever had faith in Molyneux. Dude has been creatively bankrupt since before the Clinton Administration. Its not as if anything that happened has been surprising. He practically invented over promising and under delivering in gaming.

Yep - I wish I had still had the interview he gave to ST Gamer after Powermonger's release, where he apologised for not delivering on what he promised, blamed the publisher for forcing it out early, and then promised everything would be better in his next game. Replace the words and it could be any interview he's given in 20 years. From his own admission the guy got into computer games through lying and fraud, and clearly carried on in that way (Seriously, he conned Commodore out of machines because they thought his fish importing company Taurus was the network company torus). It's not a new thing that started with Black and White - heck, even Dungeon Keeper was NOTHING like what he promised beforehand. the fact it was a good game is testament to the clearly underappreciated, unsung heroes at Bullfrog.

There's also some culture clash going on here - in the UK, journalists do this sort of interview. Ministers get harassed like this when they are caught out. Our best journalists are renowned for this - Paxman and Jon Snow both will go off on a minister if they get the opportunity.

So why are you saying he's not creative?  :why_so_serious:

I know it's a popular thing to do, but maybe these people shouldn't over-promise in the first place.

Every time my bosses get some fabulous new idea it's because someone made a pitch that's too good to be true.  And they don't learn, no matter how many times it bites them in the ass and they ignore the people telling them some concerns.

Oh I wasn't defending it, far from it, sorry if it came across like that :-)

I think it's a shitty thing to do and I think PM is up to his neck in shit and I'm hoping we never hear another thing from him again. I can dream can't I?  :awesome_for_real:

I learned my lesson with Molynooooooo with Black and White 14 years ago.

I can understand if people weren't playing games at that point they might be fooled now, but man. If you were there, you learned your lesson.

Fable was the one that did it for me; after that I knew he was not to be trusted.

I assume everyone's seen this comic, but what the hell, it fits here.

(http://i.imgur.com/cRuKbFr.jpg)

The gaming media have always been happy to build Molyneaux up, so it's nice to see them tear him down a bit.

Of course, if someone starts an interview with, "Are you a pathological liar?", that's pretty much a sign to end the interview right there.

And he even managed to fuck up that.

I don't know; given this is pretty much what everyone is thinking and/or saying about him at this point --just not to his face-- that is a valid question (that doesn't even have to be the interviewer's own view) and instead of playing a wounded drama queen one might as well roll with the punches and answer it straight. Seems even PM realized that.

I prasie that interviewer for bringng to Peter Molyneux the first and most crowdfunded question: "are you a pathological liar?" It's what a lot of people would have wanted to ask him, regardless of the bullshit answer.

This is so fantastic.

I recall this as well and was amazed that people - sometimes even the same ones - swallowed all the same bullshit when Fable was announced and then The Movies.  True believers will always be true believers, I suppose.

The whole affair is another indictment of a business that is just fucking hopelessly pathetic.

Fellow game journalists, designers, publishers and "gamers" keep piling on Walker on social media. Developers openly vow to never talk to him again, fellow journalists criticize him for being antagonistic and unprofessional, fans side with the "naive but well meaning visionary" over the interviewer that just made it so PM could expose and essentially hang himself.

Fellow journalists from other game sites are apologetic on Neogaf and try to explain why they never do such interviews and why being another PR outlet for the publishers is a customer service instead of being a corporate shill.

Developers go with the "over promising and under delivering is part of the business" excuse and try to tell us that being a designer means that most of the things you claim to do will never happen anyway and why this somehow doesn't make them clueless bullshit artists. They also claim that actually holding designers responsible for their promises is naive, immature and unrealistic.

..and many, many gamers side with them.

Turns out they don't actually want ethics in game journalism after all.

This business is shit and everybody involved really, really deserves that it is shit and should never ever be allowed to complain about it being shit ever again.

I wish RPS had asked him how much money his stupid cube game had made off microtransactions. I expect it was a decent amount.

Anyway, Peter's mom loved him too much. Case closed.

Edit: I would have RELISHED critics jumping at me for McQuaid, but beating up on an idiot manchild isn't exactly hateful behavior. Molyneux was beloved. I'm not sure why. He hasn't actually ever made a GOOD game. He made some ideas, but his games are shit.

I liked Populous when it came out. The very first one. Haven't really liked any of his games since. Played a few of them a couple of times, and stopped buying his games.

The games I want the most in life are

- the game Molyneaux said Fable was going to be

- the game that you thought Spore could be based off of that video of that demonstration by will wright that one time

those games would be kickin' rad

Fucking gaming industry. Kick all the old people out. They're awful. Universally.

 :cry: :cry: :cry:

Both Populous and Syndicate were good games. The Movies was an amazing machinima engine (the game part was meh) that had it been developed fully apart from the game, it would have been something people would use for the next decade. Hell, even if they'd built it with full modding support, it would have been spectacular. Fable was fun if not even close to what was promised. Black and White sucked monkey balls and I haven't played anything else he's been involved with, nor do I want to.

I have fond memories of Syndicate.

I loved Black and White 1 and 2. Dislked Fable.

Biggest problem with B&W was that the creature "programming" system was ass and generally resulted in a crap missprogramed creature that did nothing you wanted and you wound up ignoring it. It didn't help that the story took it away from you twice so you learned to work without it. B&W 2 solved this problem, but was a crap wargame and an ok sim city type game, which was the side i liked.

Also, B&W tried to hide the keyboard shortcuts for no good reason, and those that found those fast had a chance of loving the game, whereas the people who didn't would always hate it.

Anyway people seems to have missed the video sent out on Godus by PM, which is hilarious in its pure sleaze

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0P9yYG0G5I

For those that don't want to sit through that, here's an overview

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/02/10/22cans-confirm-godus-team-shrinkage-admit-mistakes/

I love how "passionate" seems to be the buzzword for "such fanatical devotion to a project that is quite clearly being made by utter incompetents that we can pay him peanuts" - it really is five-star drive with three-star talent.

Lionhead doesn't even have five-star drive. They have five-star childlike desire and dreams.

The thing that pissed me off the most about Molyneux's earlier work, before he really just became a ridiculous serial sleazemongering liar, was that you could sometimes see something that could work in there, if only there had been good project management and a good understanding of how to build an actual game. Black and White is the best example--the creature was actually great, but then there was this absolute oozing sore of a game that it was dumped into that actually broke your relationship to the one good element of the whole thing, plus they evidently let the crack-addled monkey on the team design the control system. And yeah, then when you dug deeper there was nothing under the hood in lots of parts of it. But basically if Molyneux had been one guy in a project team that was run by somebody else, he'd have been a useful source of design ideas. Nobody ever, ever should have let him run anything.

This is a recurring theme.  "Idea" guys should never be allowed to run the whole project.  Ever.

The difference between Wright and Molyneux is that when Wright didn't deliver the game he wanted to, he left the goddamned building. I get the feeling he was more crushed than we were at how Spore became such a Sporbortion.

Molyneux just keeps on rollin'. This spate of interviews as his new company implodes is the most entertaining thing he's done since Bullfrog.

Especially because it was the actually-make-shit-work guys who constantly end up getting rammed full speed into the real life consequences of his overambition and pipe-dream management. Probably having to have their worth challenged over and over again when they are constantly having to bring the reality of the project to attention over and over again. He delivered nearly nothing promised in Fable. He said you could go so far as to poison a town's whole water supply, or carve your initials in a tree that would grow over ten years like all the foliage, and it would still be there. He said you could go anywhere and there would be no limitations on where you could travel. The game came out and it was a highly segmented handheld experience down a series of open world corridors where you were penned in very tightly and the world was a series of small paths where you could walk inbetween two hip-level fences and that was all.

Throughout all of that there had to have been a million uncomfortable 'we can't do that' messages.

You know, the Spore authoring tools would make Molyneux instantly look like less of a fucking phony if he'd ever delivered even something that useful. That's the point--even his best stuff is buried in six layers of shit intended to disguise that's it's not finished. Wright actually wasn't hiding anything with Spore--he just didn't know how to go from the great tools to a game worth playing. But at least he made the tools! Molyneux couldn't ever do even that much.

Wright's threshold of understanding that he was not up to snuff for this anymore was when he dropped to a point that was still better than much of anything Molyneaux still offers was a radical paradigm-smashing game changerer.

I don't know if you ever played the expansion to it, Creature isle, but it was really well done. It took the best element of it, the creature, and let you play with it trough 20 or so minigames. The creature was the focus of it with minimum God management. Great fun.

As we all know Molyneux was always that way. Hell he even started out in this business by defrauding Commodore out of ten Amigas. From the horse's mouth himself "Due to the game's failure, Molyneux retreated from game design, and started Taurus Impex Limited — a company that exported baked beans to the Middle East. Commodore International mistook it for TORUS, a more established company that produced networking software, and offered to provide Molyneux with ten free Amiga systems to help in porting 'his' networking software.'... it suddenly dawned on me that this guy didn't know who we were', Molyneux later said. 'I suddenly had this crisis of conscience. I thought, 'If this guy finds out, there go my free computers down the drain.' So I just shook his hand and ran out of that office'." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Molyneux)

He also always has been the 'ideas guy' and also the guy shamelessly hogging the limelight. He isn't even credited as developer on Populous 'only' as designer/producer.

To see that PM was never a "misunderstood creative soul" and that he always designed games the way he does still to this day I'll leave you with this gem from the wikipedia entry on Populous: "Initially Molyneux developed an isometric landscape, then populated it with little people that he called "peeps", but there was no game; all that happened was that the peeps wandered around the landscape until they reached a barrier such as water. (...) The endgame – of creating a final battle to force the two sides to enter a final conflict – developed as a result of the developmental games going on for hours and having no firm end. Bullfrog attempted to prototype the gameplay via a board game they invented using Lego, and Molyneux admits that whilst it didn't help the developers to balance the game at all, it provided a useful media angle to help publicise the game. During the test phase the testers requested a cheat code to skip the end of the game, as there was insufficient time to play through all 500 levels, and it was only at this point that Bullfrog realised that they had not included any kind of ending to the game. The team quickly repurposed an interstitial page from between levels and used it as the final screen." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Populous)

One example of the way 'game journalism' generally sides with the perpetrator instead of their customers is Kyle Orland's piece for Ars Technica written in the wake of this week's disclosures about 22 cans and Peter Molyneux On Kickstarter, everyone is Peter Molyneux (http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/02/on-kickstarter-everyone-is-peter-molyneux/).

Never mind the countless success stories like Psychonauts, Banner Saga, Shovel Knight, et al.. Never mind that 37% of all Kickstarter projects deliver on time and on budget and another 8% 'partially deliver' - an amazing success rate. Never mind that Molyneux himself admitted to outright lying in his kickstarter pitch to get funding even though he knew that the funding goals were impossible to implement on the proposed budget. Never mind that Peter Molyneux admitted that he has no clue how to manage a project or a development team and has no idea how to estimate efforts and calculate an initial budget even though he has 30+ years of experience in the business.

No, blame it on kickstarter and the naive and greedy fan base: "The site has gained a reputation for lofty promises that often don't pan out the way the backers or the developers expected."

Except that statement is completely true. The site has in fact "gained a reputation". You can have a reputation that's not actually accurate in the strict sense.

I'm also not sure why a success rate of 45% overall is anything to write home to Mom about. It might be if most of the rest were good ideas that just met reality and reality won, but I would say that with games at least, the lion's share of the remainder are either conscious con jobs or are the equivalent of Glitchless promising to make Dawn, a kind of psychotically naive group of friends who have two character models and think that's a game.

None of which excuses Molyneux--but a fair number of people on KS are his descendants. And I think the issue with Molyneux for some time now has been why anyone lines up to buy a product he's associated with. It's not like it's a secret that he's a fraud.

In R&D - where I come from initially - 90% of all greenlighted projects fail. They either fail directly or get to a point where you realize the idea itself isn't viable or there's no real business case. All companies that are R&D heavy survive on the remaining 10% that actually succeed. In angel investing or VC the rate is even worse with less than 5% or even 2% of the funded projects ever turning out to be successful.

Usually you'll never hear about those failed projects, they'll quietly get cancelled at some point and the company, investor or publisher eats the costs, relocates or fires the project team and moves on. If that happens too often or the projects involved are very costly the company will get shuttered. Once in a while you'll hear about a 'project from hell' that will get media coverage or a highly publicized CEO driven milestone project fails and you'll hear about it but most of the time those failed projects just get quietly buried with no one outside of the company ever hearing about it.

KS might be more of a patronage platform than a place to meet investors or VC firms (most backers see it more like a shop to preorder stuff anyway) but a 1 in 2 success rate is actually quite good.

Molyneux doesn't just promise features that don't quite work as well they should on release, or deliver them late, or have to scale them back a bit due to technical/budget constraints, or just take longer than usual for entire projects. The guy promises stuff that literally cannot be done within the scope of the technology or budget he has, as loudly and as often as possible.

I dunno why people give Molyneux's horseshit so much credit every time he pulls this. It's either because of his record (seriously?) or because it seems like he really believes his own bullshit and people somehow pick up on that and trust it.

What Fab said. He's been in fantasy land a long time, but for the first few years before he became a 'gaming god' or whatever, he was still delivering some pretty decent games despite his nonsense.

As far as over-promising on KS, well yeah. Look at Divinity Original Sin. The over-promises were definitely do-able in the reality we live in, but they honestly fell short with resources (day night cycle AI for instance). People bag on KS, but it's only as bad as the people you're handing money to. Hand it to competent people that know what they're doing and good things happen, I've had way more success stories than failures (especially if you remove the ones I knew were gambles like TUG), and I've backed a shitload of stuff on KS.

It's really been awesome for exposing the frauds in the minis industry, and getting a feel for how each sculptor works (some guys are sooo slow, but still awesome...impatient people hate them!).

It is this.  My boss displays this same behavior all the time.  He'll believe the passionate presenter over the dour one if they say what he wants to hear.

The writer of that article needs to be punched in the dick. He is literally apologizing for the willful fraud of Kickstarter backers by saying "it's Kickstarter's fault for making it so easy to lie." Or you know, a developer could just be goddamn realistic, honest and open and if he knows X amount might make the KS goal but still won't be enough to do the game, DON'T FUCKING DO THE GAME. That's not Kickstarter's fault - KS may be the enabler, but the one fucking lying their ass off is the developer. Or in this case, Peter Molyneux.

We all know that Molyneux is a fraud, the generation after us doesn't necessarily. It's easy for the press to now come out and say that 'well everyone kind of knew that Peter Molyneux is a bullshitter'.

Except no, not everyone knew because those drooling cockgobblers from the gaming press never thought of telling anyone that wasn't around during the Populous and Black and White era. Worse they made themselves again and again part of his bullshit PR and were fawning over his every word and giving him all kinds of compliments (legendary designer of hits like...) instead of maybe asking about whether or not he is still full of shit. This makes Mr. Walker's question "are you a pathological liar" not only valid but pertinent to the debate, because he is, provably so. And 'everyone kind of knew' even the people that now give RPS shit over the interview style and his 'unprofessional' behaviour.

This is a failure of the enthusiast press even more so than a failure on the part of the backers. Caveat emptor all you want if nobody tells you that the person you give your money to has a history of lying and bullshitting even though they knew. Even worse if the people you maybe trust to tell you something like that actively legitimize his bullshit claims by giving him a platform where he can spew forth his bullshit uncontested.  Every time that an outlet ran a godus preview without telling people about PM's history of lying and bullshittery or calling him out on his totally unrealistic claims they legitimized what is essentially a con artist. Even though 'everyone kind of knew'.

I know and you know. I'm 40, I have a background in SW development and I can look back on nearly 3 decades of bullshit artists promising the moon as far as games are concerned. The 16 year old game enthusiast that just built his first own PC might not because he has no outlet that would tell him that. Yes people should have known better but it's not like they had any help from for example professional journalists that report on the game business and might know about PM's shenanigans. That's because everyone is too afraid to bite the hand that feeds.

Shitting on the people they failed because 'they should have known better' is low though.

Didn't Peter promise some idiot who won a box game that he'd be part of the Godus process and share in the profits? That guy should check his asshole to make sure he's not the hook for the losses.

The God who Peter Molyneux forgot (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2015-02-11-the-god-who-peter-molyneux-forgot) (Eurogamer)

Kyle Orland sucks Jeff, stop it.

You're right, I probably should.

It would be easier though if he just wasn't so obviously and unpretentiously partisan - and mainstream - though. He's no outlier, no black sheep the rest of the business ridicules or ignores. He's just less subtle than his fellows, so even easier to get angry about.

What I can't get over though - although I probably should for my own sake - is that the whole business is pretty open about being useless. They right out tell you that they won't do their jobs because they fear developers and publishers would freeze them out if they did. Yet they are the first to blame every failure on the consumer. It's one thing to admit you're a toothless tiger it's another to also shit on the people that pay your salary for being naive and expecting you to do your job.

To be fair, the readers of gaming journalism aren't paying the journalists salaries. It's actually getting paid by the advertisers who also happen to be the beneficiaries of the journalist's coverage. So we probably shouldn't be surprised that the "journalists" don't bite the hand that feeds, because that hand sure as fuck doesn't belong to us.

Video gaming journalism is almost purely advertorial and always has been.

Which isn't the case when actual news outlets cover it like Forbes, which is why I like that they can Call out developers for saying extremely stupid shit about their own games. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2015/02/16/the-order-1886-developer-makes-a-flawed-argument-about-game-length/)

When you have a big backer that doesn't need handouts to survive, you can say what's true. As in the case of the Order, pointing out a game that's so short with absolutely no multiplayer for a $60 price tag.

I'll tell you what word has gotten under my skin until the mere mention of it in any article about games makes me want to throw my mouse across the room: "Entitled". No shit, the people who paid for Mass Effect 3 feel they were entitled to an ending that didn't leave them scratching their heads? I *get* what the ending was trying to do, and even liked it, but writing off people who didn't like it as "entitled", as if being unhappy with a product you paid for was some kind of crime against humanity, what the fuck?

People who don't like a product or service have a right to bitch about it. You can say they're making too much of a fuss over a game, or that they don't understand, or that they are not actually paying more than pennies (if anything at all) and therefore not worth serving. But if you're going to look at the people whose attention and dollars represent the entire justification for your career and dismiss *them* as acting "entitled" and therefore you don't have to pay any attention at all, you can fuck off.

People who backed Godus were taking a gamble, and it didn't pay off. That's too bad, and it's certainly not a Great Crime. But you're damned straight they are entitled to bitch about it, and make sure that every future project associated with the same creative team is dogged by reminders of how this one went.

--Dave

Agreed.  Games journalists are probably a pretty entitled lot. I sense it when they make references to their degrees or old games played or anything to bolster why their opinion matters.  It doesn't.  Their skill with social media, popularity or attention, is what has replaced expertise for their authority to be listened to. They know it and it's uncomfortable for some. 

I wonder how frequently he has made promises which, looking back, were beyond the capacity of any game publisher at the time and/or simply impossible given available technology

I'd guess since he started out. Take a look at the PR campaign and preview cycle of Dungeon Keeper or Magic Carpet. You can see PM's mode of operation even this early. Or Powermonger which should have been everything Populous was not.

Dungeon Keeper was especially blatant. By the time he gave the first previews the game should have come out the following year, it came out three years later. He made a concerted PR effort with some gaming mags even publishing dev diaries. One mag I knew ran the dev diary for 18 months until both sides agreed to cancel it because the game was still a year from release and they didn't even know what to talk about anymore. Also Dungeon Keeper never turned out to be the game PM promised when he first talked to the press. He also since confessed that they integrated the battle against other dungeon Keepers RTS style because the game was only half finished and they realized that the 'build a dungeon' mechanic got boring half way through the game.

The main difference was that - while he was even then promising the moon and lying his ass off - what his company delibvered where decent if flawed game experiences. Dungeon Keeper is fun, Syndicate is fun, Magic Carpet is fun. They may be all flawed, they may be not what he promised they would be but they are at least finished products and decent games.

Black and White is not, Fable is not and everything he made after B&W is successively worse.

There's a reason he 'left EA of his own accord' and then 'left MS of his own accord' and has to go to kickstarter to get funds and the reason is that he is already completely burned and no publisher wants to work with him because they all know that he is a habitual liar that can't deliver a finished product and throws his partners and publishers under the bus after.

I should have wrote 'pretend to be'. Fact is that this line of reasoning will get people in the business extremely mad at you. They all believe they are consumer advocates, so I will judge them by that measure.

Jim Sterling explains PM pretty well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGo63oAEN20

The final 30 seconds of that video are hilarious

The original Dungeon Keeper was supposed to be utterly awesome.  I was so looking forward to it.

Then it came out and it was utter pish.

Magic Carpet was awesome.  Magic Carpet 2 was more so.  Loved those games.

I didn't know anything about Dungeon Keeper before it appeared and I picked it up.  It was fun/different.  Played for awhile, got bored, moved on - but I can say that "got bored" part about most all games I've played.

Not a fan of PM, and agree that he over promises to a pathalogical degree.  But Dungeon Keeper was "utter pish"?  Get a grip.

When you expected the final game to be what he promised and hyped the game up to be for three years then yes it was "utter pish".

The idea spawned some good games down the line though. People that could actually execute ideas learned something from Dungeon Keeper.

It's not just the journalists that are saying that word - the developers are too. A certain one that F13 knows very well used that exact term while discussing this whole fiasco on Facebook.

If Jim Sterling found success with Jimquisition, and the history of his production was anything like that video, then god bless him. Not for me.

I think the whole 'entitled' thing is muddied by the whiny, loudmouthed 'entitlement generation'. If the slightest part of anyone's day goes slightly less perfect than their little internal compass dictates, it's time to bitch about it loud and wide. It gets fucking old, and some people with legit complaints will take the heat for it. The signal:noise ration is worse than any time in history and getting worse quickly.

While your legit complaints might not be entitled tantrum-throwing, the vast majority of complaints are.

And honestly, the complaints about the end of ME3 were pretty fucking stupid. It's a game. Do you go complain to Hollywood studios when you don't like the end of a movie? Why, when I was a kid we just said, "well, that ending sucked," and got on with life. Which is too short to waste on shit like complaining about how some stupid video game ended.

Anyway, the plot for Adventure on the Atari is a fucking mess, I can't figure out what's going on with the castles and this bat is written like a fourth grader on methballs. Anyway, Mahrin's career has been all downhill since that screencap app :p

That's true for some movies. On the other hand people will be talking about how the Star Wars prequels sucked till the end of time.

I feel like this is why F13 is great.

To everyone here, every game is terrible and thus my expectations are set so low that I end up enjoying my time with most games  :why_so_serious:

So true.

Yes.

Oddly, it was the only lesson I needed about him, even all those many, many years ago.


Carpet and Powermonger and Syndicate and even Black and White  I actually liked because, you know, I didn't follow what they were GOING to be and instead played them for what they were.

But Dungeon Keeper broke my heart.

That's not even remotely true.  So you're liking f13 for the wrong reasons.

Yes, I went there;  you're doing f13 wrong.

You muppet.

 :why_so_serious:

Yes, only my complaints are usually in the form of Twitter posts, blog reviews and never spending money with that studio again. I haven't bought a Bioware game since ME3 because that ending SUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKEEEEEEEEEEEDDDDDDDDDDDDDDD it.

There's only one way to do f13. The wrong way.

Any way but the schild-way is the wrong way.

I don't disagree with that, but if you're going to discuss how fun Mass Effect was (for example), to discount certain people's opinions as "entitled" kind of negates the point of the conversation.  It's a big huggy circlejerk until some entitled trolls come in and say things they DIDN'T like, how mean.  One of the worst things about the internet is it's tendency to echo-box people in to extreme positions, but someone who thinks the ending to a video game sucked should be able to say why without people implying that HE'S the crazy one for wanting something he'd like.  Maybe we're coming at it from different angles, I didn't see the maelstrom that probably erupted on the bigger boards about the topic, but if you're making a product, finding out why people don't like it is at least as important as finding out why other people did like it.

I mean, if we're talking about threatening violence on people or doxxing them or whatever, that's one thing, and way outside the "helpful debate" zone.  But if we're in a conversation about Mass Effect then some people are going to dislike Mass Effect and calling them "entitled" for feeling that the ending sucked goes from a possibly valid discussion ("I hated the ending because XYX") to a completely invalid one (ad hominem "your opinion is irrelevant because you're entitled").

At one extreme you have people who start petitions on change.org because they didn't like a video game ending.  

At the other you have people who react to any negative opinion of anything as if you'd dug up their great-grandmother and raped her corpse.

I guess those are actually the same extreme of "people who take trivial shit way too goddamn seriously."

As far as I'm aware, some of the features he touted for the first Fable game still aren't feasible even today, or only in very limited form.

Is there, like, a compiled list or something of claims he's made about his games?  That sounds like it would be some interesting reading, but I'm having trouble finding anything concise amid the ocean of PR material for all this stuff.  I never caught much of the pre-release hype for anything before Fable or B&W so I'm kind of adrift when it comes to stuff he claimed about Populus or Syndicate or whatever.

If you were going to pie chart them, most of them would be claims about AI and about some version or variation on procedural content.

a bit of google-fu later on PM claims.

http://kotaku.com/the-man-who-promised-too-much-1537352493

http://www.nowgamer.com/the-five-greatest-peter-molyneux-quotes/

This poll has lots of claims of PM dishonesty and idiotness http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.136679-Poll-Peter-Molyneux-Idiot-or-Liar?

I just wanted a living breathing dungeon that I could build full of lovely monsters that I could grow and towns around I could terrorise with heroes that I could entrap.

THAT WAS ALL I WANTED.

Of course, to chime in on the actual discussion ;  none of this is possible with current tech either.  I was played.

Just out of interest, why not? What's missing from current game tech? Is it AI? Background processing?

Will.

I'm sorry, Dave.

Molyneux was only a producer on Syndicate - he had nothing to do with the design or programming. I like to think that's why it was one of Bullfrog's better games.

I'm so glad I didn't know, because like Syndicate, I loved DK and DK2 for what they were.

But then I didn't even realize he was involved with Bullfrog, so I am blessed in my ignorance.

Seriously ?

Maybe she's bullfrogging you.

I didn't follow gaming news prior to college, and even to a large extent before reading f13.  I just found games with cool boxes at the brick and mortar or on a BBC.  I had a couple of companies I'd browse a catalog for, like Interplay, but that was about it.

So there's a reasonable chance of me not knowing any specifics pre-2004.  (Wasteland and Wizardry devs probably being the biggest exceptions.)

I really didn't know who the fuck Molyneux was until Fable.  My entire awareness of him has been as a lying liar that lies.  I still liked Fable and Fable 2... ><

I really didn't know anything specific about developers until Ultima Online, where that Designer Dragon chap kept fucking with my shit.

I didn't know much specifically about developers until Ultima Online, when people kept fucking with Designer Dragon's shit.

Hmmm.  It must be a British thing then.  Bullfrog WAS PM and he was everywhere over here.  Couldn't get away from the fucker.

I guess so.  But then Falc was surprised I'd never heard of Elite prior to the crowdfunding, too.

I believe the reason we can't do a Dungeon Keeper properly at this time is because of the old saying that you have to be smarter than a dog to teach it any tricks.

I kinda knew who Molyneaux was prior to buying Black and white, but that was just from reading the odd computer gaming mag and not having any internet at all. But the reviews I saw on Black and white were talking about the actual game as on the shelf, so I loved it for what it was, not for promises made 3 to 1 years ago that were made before I was reading computer gaming mags.

So was I.  Not hearing of Elite is something unthinkable over here if you have any interest in games at all.

My first home computer had a Pentium 100.   I was mostly a Nintendo gamer until around midway through high school.  A lot of nostalgic shit you guys go on about, I never did experience.

Same here. Aside from MUDs, the only PC games I played when I was young were Blizzard titles (D2 and SC1). I was mostly a console gamer through the NES/SNES/PSX days.

i had no idea who mollynoo was back when i first got to play black and white. and honestly the tutorial section was torturous so i never got very far

I loved Populous 3, as well as Dungeon Keeper & Syndicate (in fact, most Bullfrog games). I didn't know who PM was until magazine articles for B&W.

Populous 3 was good.  Molyneux wasn't involved.

Syndicate was good. Molyneux was just a name on the credits for PR.

Dungeon Keeper was kind of OK but not that great. Molyneux was the designer.

Dungeon Keeper 2 was better, they just went ahead and fixed the problems in DK. Molyneux was not involved.

To the best of my knowledge Molyneux has led exactly 2 worthwhile projects, Populous and Theme park.

If you literally know nothing about Fable:The Lost Chapters other than the fact it's just a game, and you play it, it's a fun game.

If you knew all the promises and nonsense, it's a turd. Expectations gap.

Ha, looks like Tim Schafer has joined the Molyneux defense force. How ironic.

I never knew he made Theme Park.

Tim Schafer has made a career of over promising and under-delivering too, but mostly to management.

Game Developers stick to their own, as if their unique struggles shield them from poor decision-making, like choosing to enter game development.

Then again, it is passion making that choice, right? I'm a bit bitter about the image of games and the reality.

I had to check but PM is credited in Theme Hospital! As moral support....

Gee, I wonder what it would then take to become in proportion to ask a man if he's a pathological liar. When over a decade long track record and notoriety to the point everyone who knows your name knows you for telling shit on the levels no one else can really boast... apparently isn't enough, yet.

Another one to fall for the "developers like Peter and I" idiocy. No, Schafer. You messed one up kickstarter. You're nowhere near PM's level of "developing".

I kind of got a "it's just video games, stop taking this so seriously" vibe from it.  Like, you can ask a politician the question but not a video game designer.  But video games are big business these days, it certainly seems fair to make developers put on their big boy pants for an interview.

CEOs don't like being questioned either.

I would add Powermonger to that list.  Still, that's only three games, and they're all more than twenty years old.

Choosing to be a video game designer is a sign of deep mental dysfunction, no rational person would do it. Staying one more than a couple of years is proof that you're not too bright. Actually interacting with the public while a known recidivist game designer is obvious grounds for institutionalization.

--Dave (they're coming to take me away, hah hah!)

I don't think video game developers HAVE big boy pants.

I'm a software developer/project manager by trade and time and time again that kind of "development is hard, man!" talk makes me angry. One of the most prevailing myths of development and one of the most prevalent explanations for all of the game dev bullshit is that 'development is hard and design is unplannable and full of unknowns so you can't even plan, great art takes time and failure..'.

This is quite frankly complete horseshit. Yes, it's how the video game business has always operated and we're now in the third generation of developers who have experienced and taken part in that horseshit. Yes, they've conditioned their customers and the people reporting on them for long enough that they even believe that horseshit.

It's still horseshit, though.

Especially since most developers fail at even the simplest tasks. Take Molyneux. 22 cans consists (at this time) of around 25 people. He stated that the average wage of his employees is around 30,000 pounds. Given the lofty promises he made I'd assume that the whole staff would need to work on Godus for any chance to be able to deliver half of it. So assuming his 30,000 pound estimate is correct he's already spending 750,000 pounds per year just for wages and salaries. Add to that standard operational costs, any employee benefits that are not reflected in the wage directly (health plans, social security, 401(k) benefits), rent for the office space and expenses we're looking more at 1 million or more. This doesn't even include expenses for the project itself (licensing costs for tools and packages, external costs), investments (computers, office furniture, company cars etc.) or legal fees and marketing.

So back of the envelope we're looking more at 1,5 million per anno just to keep the company going with the current pool of employees just to be able to work on one project. PM wanted less than 400,000 with no hint as to how he wanted to secure additional funds. For a multi year project.

Compare that to the Obsidian kickstarter for Pillars of Eternity. It had a rather sane initial pitch with a definition of a core game and the budget required to do it. Everything more lofty than that was covered by strech goals and the Pillars guys entered the kickstarter with the assurance that Obsidian would match the kickstarter sum and that the kickstarter itself was a way to gauge interest and prove to management brass that the project would be worthwile to fund.

They now have funds that can conceivably cover the scope and time frame of the project, they seem to be on schedule (well at least as on schedule as a SW project can be) and everything not covered by the initial round of funding can probably be made back with sales.

The end result might still suck but at least they'll have a finished project before time and money run out.

Perhaps he was only securing the funds for his own salary :why_so_serious:

I think he did say somewhere in there that he put up some of his own money (Molyneux that is) and then of course they got money from the publisher for the mobile version.

Same with me.  First I'd heard of PM was Black and White (and I played a number of Bullfrog games).  And first I ever heard of Elite was from everybody here going off about the remake.  At the tender young age of 31, I am perhaps not in the same age range as some of our forum members.

Elite is more a US/UK difference than an age one. I'm plenty old enough to have been in on Elite but it just wasn't real big here, not like over there.

Could be. I did get in on it because my brother-in-law brought it back to the US with him when he rotated back to the States.

As for the financials: It's not always that simple, Jeff. There are places where there are tax incentives and other funding available such that if you can get enough funding to run for a year, you can keep running on the same scale for several years thereafter just by milking various programs in rotation. Texas has a program where you can essentially get almost your entire operating budget for the prior year kicked back to you, for example. With the right setup you can potentially create a financial perpetual-motion machine.

--Dave

Yup. Plaid Hat Games just moved to Dallas I believe.

I've known of Peter Molyneux since Populous on my Atari ST. He over promised even then. That was my second computer, and probably the fourth or fifth *generation* of computers I'd played games on. Yes, I'm old.  Back then EVERYBODY over promised and under delivered when it came to games.  Rather much like now, and pretty much like all marketing.  It just seems a lot more personal when it's a repeat offender and you get a name and face to go with it AND the promises are something that you really really want. Kinda like, say, Carmack or Meier or Koster or pretty much any other con artist/Madison Avenue scumbag/politician/pitch man/dreamer.  Unfortunately, that's one of those lessons you have to learn for yourself, often repeatedly. I guess it's better if it's only to the tune of $60 at least.

Probably OT, but since it was brought up anyway, comparing the popularity of the original elite in Europe vs USA, I really think that was due to the premium price it cost plus the relative amounts of piracy going on. I think the original was overpriced, and it's probably true again. The result was that in Europe it was hugely popular because the price didn't matter since almost nobody paid for it. In the U.S., where piracy, while prevalent, wasn't as predominant, it wasn't as popular because the price was more of a factor. I apologize if that sounds racist/culturalist/elitist/whatever. Its just a theory based on personal experience and anecdotal evidence.  I'd love to collect more data, even anecdotal, to test the theory, but even 35 years later it's hard to get people to give an honest account of how many copies within their circle of friends were legit vs pirated. I'm my case of the people I knew to have it, it was 50:50, but that's from a massive sample of two.  :(

No, we pirated everything here in the US for the Apple ][ too :awesome_for_real:

We had both a 'white hat' and a 'black hat' C64 user group here. Guess which one was more popular amongst gamers? I would imagine the reason it's difficult to get an accurate accounting is that people tend to not want to admit crimes on the Internet, yeah? Because it was criminal activity. I was of course one of the white hats and a law-abiding citizen but most of the other guys in the Blackbirds may have had a couple legit copies in their disk boxes (of hundreds of games).

The name of the usergroup may give away another reason those guys were pretty cagey with information.