Nimzabaat said:
My belief is that he never worked with a studio that could make his promises come true. All his promises for the Fable series could have been done by Bethesda. Hell 38 Studios did Fable much better than Fable. I had my hopes up since he was out of that creativity crushing environment and now he only promises one game? Sigh.
I've worked with Pete over the years, and it's not necessarily the studio's fault, but rather a combination of things.
Here's what happens: he comes up with a grand and intriguing idea that is (quite often) vast in scope. This is broken down into individual gameplay elements that people start prototyping. Quite often, these elements are pretty novel and haven't always been done before, or done in the way he envisions it, so this means it's going to take a LOT of iteration to see whether it'll pan out or not.
All good so far, but then his obsessive personality kicks in, and he'll have a stick up his ass about one particular part of one particular gameplay element and will then constantly revise and change what it is, and that has the knock-on effect of the original idea never having had time to actually be iterated on to a point where it becomes clear whether the fundamental idea is good or bad. Pete just keeps changing it and changing it, and obviously the prototype team can't get the code written at the same speed as his brain works, so concepts never get fully prototyped.
And then, stage 3 of Hurricane Pete, is he'll show up one morning after having had another epiphany during the night, and will scrap that entire gameplay element in favor of a new one he's dreamed up.
This then goes on until the publisher forces him to actually release a game, which ends up being full of interesting ideas that never got the development time they needed to be any good: a bunch of half-baked failed promises.
But it isn't from lack of talent or effort from either Pete or the dev team. His style of working is now counter-productive for much of the time.
