Microsoft's Peter Molyneux
The creative director on the industry's need to change the way it works, Fable III and the iPhone's future
One of this year's big pillar releases will be the next in Lionhead's RPG series, Fable III. While the game was first revealed last year, new details released at E3 this year have given fans a better sense of how the game will pan out.
At last week's Develop conference in Brighton we spent some time with Lionhead founder-turned-Microsoft Game Studios creative director Peter Molyneux, who explained his thoughts on why the industry needs to change its working practices, how Fable III is shaping up, and why next year could see a host of iPhone apps that cost $5 million to make...
It's very, very tough. Again - Fable, because it is part-simulation, part-roleplaying game, part-action-adventure... it's got more voice acting, a bigger cast, more musical scores, a bigger, freer world - more so than any other game in the whole of Microsoft Game Studios' portfolio, full stop.
It's got more bugs, more active bugs, than any game that MGS has ever had in its history - and the team of over 100 people are working insanely long hours, and they're coming down. That's the way it is.
Here's the issue which I hate, Phil - again, we're in the same position as many, many other developers, if you read the post mortems of Uncharted 2 or any game, they all say the same. We find our game so late on in the process, that it's very hard to pull it all together - and that has to change.
We cannot do this - we can't keep turning up this late. A film analogy is me turning up with a camera on set and saying: "Okay, I'm not sure what the story is, but let's turn the camera on anyway."
We've got to stop doing this, because 1) It's too expensive, and 2) Our consumers, the people that play our games, are too demanding of the quality we have to deliver. We just have to work on a different way - it's got to be the case.
Well, it's not. It's very difficult - the huge supertanker that is the launch platform is very hard to switch off once you get past a certain point. You've got to book your TV adverts, your creatives have to get together and do your advertising campaign - that happens way, way before you know whether you're really going to get to the right quality bar.
And again - I just feel that the way that we developed Fable I and Fable II - and a lot of our games - all of our tech reaches up to a certain line when we can actually play the game... and that line seems to be so late on, it's just frightening.
You'd think that would be true, but the problem is that with great knowledge comes great opportunity - and there's your problem. If you know the GPU so intimately well, you're not going to say: "Oh, that's not any problem any more." You're going to push it harder, and that's what we do.
The demo I've shown of Fable III - those levels are four times bigger, and we've got true dynamic lighting. We didn't do any of that before, but if we hadn't done that our problems would be so much simpler... but we push ourselves, over and over again.
There's always this curious thing that happens with consoles - you tend to find that the most spectacular looking games and tech comes after the end of the generation. We're still yet to discover where the 360 can go in graphical resolution. We're still inventing stuff.
Actually, I'm going to argue that point a little bit, because I think it's as easy - because we've been worrying about the Uncanny Valley, not only with the other project we're working on [Milo and Kate] but also with Fable. It's not the human face that's the problem, it's the way that your characters act.
I've seen the Uncanny Valley - those painful, crucial, embarrassing, unbearable moments - with cartoon characters. You only had to turn on kids' TV a few years ago to see some pretty atrocious Uncanny Valley moments.
So I just think that what Pixar does is make characters that you just fall in love with, and that avoids all the problems.