New EGO shots and Interview..........
It's not much of a stretch to say that Peter Molyneux has had a hand in some of the most influential PC games to hit the market over the last few years. Since tantalizing gamers with their first taste of godhood in Populous, Molyneux has taken gamers to some unique and interesting places on the PC, most recently with Black & White. Console gamers first came to know his work via conversions of his PC games on home consoles starting with Populous' appearance on the Super Nintendo. While the ports did they best they could, given the limitations of the hardware they were on, they didn't quite capture the unique experience offered by the games from Molyneux and his development teams. Molyneux's upcoming console game, the tentatively titled Project Ego, is his first dedicated foray into console development, and it finds him teaming up with Lionhead satellite studio Big Blue Box to take a fresh approach to the RPG genre. We recently spoke with Molyneux about Project Ego, console development, Lionhead's upcoming titles, and the changing state of the industry.
GameSpot: Tell us about Project Ego's development.
Peter Molyneux I'll be completely open and honest about this, it's the first game I've ever designed specifically for consoles. I've been thinking about Project Ego's game design for 20 years. I've been playing role-playing games forever. I've played a huge number of them and loved every second of a majority of them. The first thing I realized coming to a console for the first time is that it's like going back to school. It's like a new job. There are assumptions you make on the PC about the way people play games (how they play games, what they use to play games, where they're sitting when they play games, what their attention span is when they play games) that you have to completely rewrite. So I found that immensely rewarding and enormously challenging.
GS: How much did you have to change your approach when you started work on the game?
PM: Well, when I say it was like going back to school, it was. Sitting down and thinking about the simple things. A really simple thing is that--and this is oversimplifying it a lot, but it's actually true--PCs are things that you set up and sit in front of and play a game for hours and hours and hours and there are no other distractions around. Console games are things that you go down to the pub, you get half drunk, you come back with your mates, and you play a game. And that is the difference, in film terms, between writing a documentary and writing a feature film. It's totally different. Console games are much more about entertainment, much more about dramatic scenes, much more about giving you a feeling of the game in an incredibly short amount of time. Thinking that the player may not have
played the game for a week and is not going to be playing it day in and day out. And that makes a huge difference. The other element, which can't be stressed enough, is that the mouse on the PC allows us to make certain sorts of games. And those sorts of games really shouldn't be brought to consoles, except in very notable cases. The gamepad on the consoles allows us to make certain types of games that really shouldn't be done on a PC. So the control mechanism, the way people play the game, the sort of content that we're providing--it's all completely different.
Now, that's not to say that we don't think, "Well what can we take from the PC? What on the PC is unique to the PC that hasn't been seen on consoles before?" And that's what is very bold and incredibly scary about the game. I'm probably going to get beat up in the press for saying this one line--I am just opening up my trousers and asking you to kick me in the b**** for saying this--but the ambition of Project Ego is to make the greatest role-playing game of all time. And that is it. It defines everything. The reason why we're making that ambitious claim is because we're taking some of the things we've done on the PC and putting them on a console, and those things have never been seen before. And I'm talking about things like not setting a role-playing game in a scripted world where one hour, two minutes into the game, this happens. We're setting it in a simulated world that reacts to what your character is doing. Your character will influence and change the world in some way. Things like the fact that a typical role-playing game is always set over a weekend! You know all these role-playing
games--you arrive on a Friday night, you realize the world's coming to an end, and by Monday morning it's all over and done with. So what we're doing with Project Ego is that the main character at the start of the game is a kid--he's 15 years old. And you play through the life of that character. By the end of the game, he may be 30 in your case, while in my case he may be 40, in another person's case he may be 50 or 60. You'll find changes that the game makes to the character are important. The character in Project Ego morphs to reflect the way you're playing. You don't have to be the good guy. You can be nasty. If you want to, if you really want to, if you want to walk into a town and think, "I don't like the way these people are looking at me. I'm gonna kill 'em all." Absolutely. Fair enough. And the world will change to reflect that. Another element is the fact that you aren't the only hero in the world. That's the other thing about role-playing games--you're the only people who realize the whole world's about to come to an end. So why not have a role-playing game where there are other heroes trying to do the things you're doing and there's a slightly competitive nature to it? You know, to put it very simply--and this is not an example out of the game, just a simple example to illustrate it--is that if you're down in a town and someone in the town says, "A princess is being held captive in a castle and we have to help her" and you look up there and you may see another hero there who's just beaten you to it and rescued the princess you think, "You b******! I wanted to rescue her!"
The whole object of this is yes to play through the story, because yes the world is under threat, and yes there's this big storyline. But actually, the key to the game is that you have got to be the greatest hero of all time. And what your hero is, how he is, what he looks like, the way his hair is cut, how many muscles he's got, and whether he's dexterous or whether he's got more intelligence and can use magic more is all based on how you play the character, not some decision you make.
Link...........http://gamespot.com/gamespot/stories...865011,00.html
continued in next post...........
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