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Re-posted from my blog:

I follow gaming pretty closely, you know, running a blog and all.  Over the years, it has never failed to amaze me how full of shit Peter Molyneux is.  Despite this, most of the gaming media still pays attention to him.  Recently, gaming sites have been running stories about Peter's new technology called Dimitri.  Molyneux describes the technology as "a moment in time that happened six months ago when a discovery was made."  He says that "This discovery has lead us to start a game and that game will be on the front cover of Nature magazines and Science magazines."  Really?  Am I supposed to believe that?  I'm sorry, but I've been spoonfed this crap from Molyneux since Bullfrog Productions started in 2001.  The guy talks a big game, but has he deliver on that?

Let's look at Black & White, Bullfrog's first game that Molyneux made.  The idea was to play as God reining over a population of humans and manipulating them to your will.  The game was supposed to be the ultimate in "god games" and give the player total freedom.  The thing was hyped to hell, winning award after award, including E3 Best of Show 2000, a BAFTA, and a bnch of Game Developers' Choice awards, prior to it's release.  After release, well that's a different story.  After release, the score were under 75% and GameSpy has gone on to call it the most overhyped game of all time.   Molyneux 1, Gamers 0.

Next, Molyneux started work on Fable.  Fable was touted as the ultimate in open ended gaming.  The idea was to make an action RPG in which the player could choose to be good or evil.  Through the use of decision making trees, the players physical appearance would change to portray their level of evil or good.  Molyneu spouted off about being able to even go so far in realsim as to have the ability to reproduce, which never happened.  The game received generally positive views, despite letting down many gamers.  The end problem being that the complex decision trees ended up being simple black and white choices, allowing the player to never question their actions and offering no complexity.  It basically came down to this:

You see a person getting robbed, do you stop the robber or kick them in the dick?

Hmm... wonder which one is more evil?

In 2005, Molyneux produced 3 games.  There was an expansion to Fable, The Movies, and a sequel to Black & White.  The Fable expansion was more of the same, The Movies was a fairly standard Sim game, and Black & White 2 didn't fair much better than the first outing.

Now Molyneux is promoting Fable 2, which maps all combat to a single button, gives you a pet dog, the ability to gain scars, and the ability to start a family (maybe it could happen this time).  And then there's Dimitri, the mystery technology that will make the most amazing game in the world appear out of thin air by the simple utterence of it's name.  I'm sorry, but Molyneux has to do better.  He's been full of shit for years, time for him to do something worthwhile.

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