Also the Lionhead boss admits his Black & White weather idea, about it mirroring your local area, was a really ”dumb, stupid idea.” He ‘woke up’.
”You’d think that would be true, but the problem is that with great knowledge comes great opportunity - and there’s your problem,” Molyneux told GamesIndustry.biz, asked if studios became more production efficient over time with a platform’s hardware.
”If you know the GPU so intimately well, you’re not going to say: ‘Oh, that’s not any problem any more.’ You’re going to push it harder, and that’s what we do.”
”The demo I’ve shown of Fable III - those levels are four times bigger, and we’ve got true dynamic lighting. We didn’t do any of that before, but if we hadn’t done that our problems would be so much simpler… but we push ourselves, over and over again.”
”There’s always this curious thing that happens with consoles - you tend to find that the most spectacular looking games and tech comes after the end of the generation. We’re still yet to discover where the 360 can go in graphical resolution. We’re still inventing stuff.”
Trust man to finally get to grips with something only for us to go and do something silly like try and push the boat out. Remember back when the God sim Black & White was fresh faced and it was ‘okay’ to draw the prophet Mohammed on your Etch A Sketch?
Yes those were exciting, unoppressed times. Well you may also remember that Molyneux talked about Black & White able to copy weather just outside your window?
”I’ve got a Fonz ‘shark moment’ - you know, where he’s jumped over a shark on his motorbike… and after that Happy Days was s***,” the veteran creator said.
“My inverse one of those was when I thought of the idea in Black & White of introducing weather patterns in the game that were the same outside your window, that was my ‘shark moment’.” The feature never materialized in the game at launch, but they did add an awesomely creepy bit where your name gets whispered after midnight.
”Fortunately I woke up and thought: “Why the f*** did I do that?” If you lived anywhere in the world, you don’t want the weather in the game to be outside your window… you want the opposite. It was a dumb, stupid idea,” admits Theme Park creator Molyneux.
Lionhead Studios is super busy right now with Fable III which releases on Xbox 360 and PC this October, and it lets us lead a revolution and even become King or Queen.
