I always go to see Peter Molyneux talk. It’s getting to the point where I’m not quite sure why I persist, but I do. This year I made it to half of his talk, since I was at the Nintendo keynote which ran over since it took some time to stuff the thousands of us into the auditorium. But this is not a post about the keynote, so on to what I saw of Molyneux’s talk.
He’s worked on some of my favorite games - Populous was truly revolutionary, I loved Dungeon Keeper, and many of his other titles were quite exciting. But in recent years, he’s been known more for talking about his games than for the games themselves. He’s a very impassioned speaker, and he clearly is excited about his projects, so I do like to go and see him speak, just because you never do know what he will say.
In the portion of the talk that I saw, he was talking about his goal to evoke emotions in Fable 2. There was some talk about how you can actually have sex in the game (um, ok, not too exciting) and have a child (hmm, maybe sort of interesting) who will then be waiting for you when you come home from adventures and say things like “Daddy, daddy, great job killing those orcs!” to tug at your heart strings. As you become evil, so does your kid, or the other way. Well, sounds ok, but show me the goods. No deal. But what he did show was actually much more interesting to me, probably because I’m a sucker for any cute little fuzzball: you can have a dog in the game.
“So what?” you ask? Well, it’s not just a pet, it’s a character. Taking some concepts from Black and White, I’m sure, the pet will morph depending on your good or evil choices. If you choose to be bad, he’ll look all mean and fierce and doberman-like, if you’re nice he’ll be a kind and adorable sheepdog-type.
Then he showed the game (after lots of warnings about unfinished visuals, etc etc). This is pretty much what he said, so you can watch it yourself if you’d like. Skip to about 4:30 if you just want to see the dog and skip the lead up.
The animations were well done, and the whole persona of the dog was very well done. He’s adorable and really does have an emotional impact. It’s something that movies learned long ago - audiences will tolerate (perhaps in revel in) much mayhem and violence, but don’t mess with dogs, we love our animals and will react quite vehemently if something threatens a fuzzy one (note movies such as Michael where a cantenkerous woman can die and no one cares, but a dog dies and divine intervention is a must). This doggie sidekick travels with you and has in game utility such as scouting ahead, pointing out danger, and even attacking your enemies. The demo they showed was very tight and displayed this all to great effect. I know it’s not the real game yet, but the huge challenge of creating a realistic and affecting animal is already done - the demo brought out chuckles and ooohs from the crowd. I’m very interested to see how they manage to integrate this into larger gameplay.
Interesting from a control standpoint - there are not buttons to control the dog. You interact with the dog in the same way you interact with other characters in the game, which is the expression system. It’s really just some basic emotes, like telling him “No”, which is displayed in the video. Other than that, he figures out what to do by your actions. We’ll see if that ends up feeling like he’s just a part of the scenary outside of your control at all, or if he really comes across as a pet.
Hmm, I wonder if they played the new Bard’s Tale that came out a few years ago. I played a demo and seemed to remember you had a doggie sidekick in that game too. Well, as I said, we love our dogs!
After the dog, Molyneux talked a bit about how you can buy anything in the world. Yes, anything. Any shop, house, castle, or dungeon can be yours if the price is right. By owning it, you’ll unlock quests related specifically to that location. Given the fact that the world is going to be of some size larger than 10 items, I cannot imagine that these quests will be all that meaningful. There cannot be huge, unique, hand-scripted story events tied to every place that you probably will not end up buying. I’d imagine there’s a quest generation system or something that just gives you rather general quests, otherwise the burden on the content creators would be enormous. I’m a skeptic, what can I say. I’ll have to see what they did to determine if I really even want to own a dungeon after all. Unless they embed some secret Dungeon Keeper gameplay, I’m not all the interested.
Overall, it was, as usual, hype-tastic. I’m trying to reserve judgement! Really! I think he has great ideas and his games are always quite polished, with very high production values. I just think there’s a danger in talking so much about your products that we get over-excited. That all too often leads to disappointment.