Is Godus actually like this?

[BrotherRool]

So Peter Molyneux is up to tricks again [http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/08/godus-preview-ambitious-expansive-and-absolutely-crazy/]

But it's even better this time round because he seems to be accidentally parodying himself

"I think Godus is going to be the best game I've ever worked on, Fable was an epic RPG, but I think the best, most obsessively designed game I've ever done is Godus.

(For reference, Peter Molyneux was the man who announced to interviewers that in Fable you could carve your initials into a tree and watch it grow in real time in a dynamic world where every single plant was meticulously simulated. Of course when people played the game it bore 0 correlation to this)

And it's even pretty much the same thing this time round too

"What I said this time around was 'I want everything to be simulated?every drop of water and every grain of sand, When I'm doing this, I'm changing the tidal pattern, and the tidal pattern affects the wind direction, which affects the weather patterns on the entirety of the planet. So you affect your little strip and that effect has a knock-on effect all down the way."

and of his Gods of Gods he said he can change everything from

the trivial ("I'm just a bit pissed off today, and I want everyone to experience the weather in Edinburgh") to the gameplay-centric ("How much belief you get from fighting?") to the moral ("Would it be right to introduce contraception into the world. What effect will that have on the world?")

Except I noticed this time that players are already playing his game in various pre-release stages as part of their kickstarter rewards, so this presents a unique opportunity (providing you're not NDA'd). Is the King of Lies lying again? Can you sculpt the shape of your seashore which will affect the tidal patterns which will affect the wind patterns which affects the weather across the entire planet?

Or is Godus another Fable, a solid game but completely disconnected from whatever Peter M. is telling journalists this week?

 

[Cabisco]

I never minded the guy, he seems to genuinely love and care for what he makes and thats commendable in my books. I don't know many people who actually buy a game based on what he says, perhaps these were ideas that were in the game but got cut from the final product (refering to the tree thingy).

I dunno, I find it pretty hard to hate the guy.

 

[BrotherRool]

I never minded the guy, he seems to genuinely love and care for what he makes and thats commendable in my books. I don't know many people who actually buy a game based on what he says, perhaps these were ideas that were in the game but got cut from the final product (refering to the tree thingy).

That's the biggest problem with him though is that there is absolutely no way that could be the case. I really do love enthusiastic and I'm fine if a creator gets over-passionate about his game because it shows that the game is coming from a close and personal place.

But the thing is, Peter goes so far that the only possible way he could believe what he's saying is if he's horribly horribly incompetent at his job. For the Fable 1 example, he was saying in 2004 that his game had technology that we've not seen in any game a decade later. It was not technologically possible and the game doesn't even come close to trying to do it. When you get the game there are no features which are different from any other ARPG released, the trees do not grow from acorns, they don't grow at all, in fact they're mainly just bad textures slapped on the background of objects you can't reach.

If his team were working on all these features then they must have spent 90% of their time on material that never makes it into the game.

And he sells it as though they were features already in the game, this interview is described as a "preview". How does that work? Oh yes we spent all our time on a complex modelling system for tide shape and weather patterns but then as we came closer to release we decided to throw all that out and implement a system where you fart at NPCs to change your relationship status with them (which is how communication in his game where 'every tree was going to be grown from an individual acorn' works)