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Peter Molyneux IS BACK - Talks Microsoft, Milo and No Man's Sky

LewieP

Member
am i the only one who can't decipher what exactly is being said here? yes, he got the prize? as in, a percentage of the profit from a game that made no profit? fuckin' a! :) ...

I had the same reaction.

Also Peter Molyneux is a multi-millionaire who once did an interview with a national newspaper about how fantastic his multi-million pound mansion is. He could afford to give Brian a life-changing amount of money if he wanted to.
 
I dont get why you guys dislike him so much, does he over promise? Yes and hes admitted as much. Whever ive listened to him in interviews hes always seemed just incredibly genuine. Its just videogames, some times you need to remember there are people behind them who get genuinley excited about what they are making. Can they use a better pr department? Absolutley. But i really dont feel that him or sean murray ever tried to rip us off. Merely got overly ambitious and were set back when they realized they could not do it all.
 

jesu

Member
What is so outlandish about Milo recognizing numbers, and letters, and shapes?
Doesn't sound at all far fetched to me.
 

Mael

Member
He's selling products, nothing wrong with that.
Miyamoto has been known for selling smoke and mirrors too.
I mean remember Pikmin 3? or some features in Zelda or whatever?
The difference? Miyamoto has a team that can back up his 'lies' and he WILL push his team to make sure he's not a liar (and he usually doesn't promise stuff he knows he can't deliver, he's not daft).
Molyneux DGAF and just spout nonsense at journalists and then never deliver on his promise.
Like the current US president, he's a bullshitter and some have a problem with that.
 

BajiBoxer

Banned
I dont get why you guys dislike him so much, does he over promise? Yes and hes admitted as much. Whever ive listened to him in interviews hes always seemed just incredibly genuine. Its just videogames, some times you need to remember there are people behind them who get genuinley excited about what they are making. Can they use a better pr department? Absolutley. But i really dont feel that him or sean murray ever tried to rip us off. Merely got overly ambitious and were set back when they realized they could not do it all.
They outright lied about things. Saying something exists when it doesn't, and that something is one thing when it isn't, is not being overly ambitious. It's lying.
 
A lot of bashing going on in here but I totally like the guy, and regardless of broken promises or whatever I enjoyed his games (Fable).
 

Haunted

Member
petermolydeux.jpg
:lol

Molydeux twitter account has so many good ideas, too bad its game jam didn't really produce a hit.
 

GoaThief

Member
I mean, he also says:


So, who knows?
Theme Park was one of my favourite games way back when, so good.

I hope he can recreate some of that magic again. Looking forward to seeing what he comes out with next; at the least modernised spiritual successors on current consoles/PC would be an easier start paving the way for more ambitious titles.
 

tsundoku

Member
I dont get why you guys dislike him so much, does he over promise? Yes and hes admitted as much. Whever ive listened to him in interviews hes always seemed just incredibly genuine. Its just videogames, some times you need to remember there are people behind them who get genuinley excited about what they are making. Can they use a better pr department? Absolutley. But i really dont feel that him or sean murray ever tried to rip us off. Merely got overly ambitious and were set back when they realized they could not do it all.

He doesn't over promise, he pathologically lies.

What is so outlandish about Milo recognizing numbers, and letters, and shapes?
Doesn't sound at all far fetched to me.

Here's an example of tech that would be behind milo, running off of a literal google server farm, and what its capable of, today,
https://quickdraw.withgoogle.com/
the milo """""demo""""" read: animated fake as fuck video wasn't reading your direct drawn input from your computer, it was using an incredibly shitty low resolution camera with bad capture speed to take a picture of a moving paper that was shoved way too far close to the camera to read anything
 
Polygon's Article on the story behind Milo is a fascinating read. It might have ultimately been a bunch of tech demos in search of a broader game, but they had over 80 people working on it for years; it wasn't just a smoke a mirrors cobbled together E3 video a lot of people seem to assume it was. And that's not to say it all worked as advertised, just that they were actively in development trying to get it all to work.
 

Alx

Member
I dunno, I can believe it. But the juxtaposition of him being enamored with tech for tech's sake and then later on judging VR and AR as half-baked currently got a chuckle out of me. Milo was never anything but a fancy tech demo without readily obvious applications, sort of emblematic of Move and Kinect insofar as motion control gaming never took off.

It's not that difficult to believe actually, OCR is hardly a new technology, even back in 2010. As usual it's all about how Molyneux words things, that makes it sound so much more than it is (hence all the trouble he gets).

PM : "The game has OCR features"
Gamers : yeah, so does my phone. So what ?

PM : "Milo is so smart it can look at a picture of a letter or a number, and he recognizes it; it's magic !"
Gamers : Bullshit !
 

Maledict

Member
I dont get why you guys dislike him so much, does he over promise? Yes and hes admitted as much. Whever ive listened to him in interviews hes always seemed just incredibly genuine. Its just videogames, some times you need to remember there are people behind them who get genuinley excited about what they are making. Can they use a better pr department? Absolutley. But i really dont feel that him or sean murray ever tried to rip us off. Merely got overly ambitious and were set back when they realized they could not do it all.

Because he doesn't "overpromise". I've been following Molyneux for over 20 years now. He lies. It's a con. No-one wants to believe it because we love a good conman, but the fact is Peter Molyneux is a liar who was only successful through the teams behind him that made good games despite him. Note how once he lost those people, the quality of his games went through the floor.

Let's remember, his Milo demo was a flat out lie. He stood on stage and lied - he didn't over promise, he told mistruths to deceive the audience. The entire demo was staged and fake.

People have to stop thinking he's a good natured guy who overpromises. He is a conman.
 

Orca

Member
No idea why people keep thinking Milo 'recognizing' numbers/letters/shapes is so far fetched when this exists and has for a while.
 

paulogy

Member
So not having been personally burned by any of Molyneux's games, and actually rather liking No Man's Sky for what it is, I actually have some sympathy for these game creators.

If an artist created a piece we didn't like, or a musician made an album (or many) we didn't like, we would be disappointed and eventually move on. Why do we take things so personally when it's a game instead? What is it about the anticipation/expectation/release/disappointment cycle for games that leaves people feeling so betrayed? I would say buyer's remorse, but the ample collection of reviews should prevent most people from buying something they ultimately hate.

Creators have hopes for themselves, often incredibly high hopes, they make promises, and when they fail to deliver on them usually they are the first to be disappointed. They have to make peace with what they created and ultimately either work to improve them (as they have been with NMS) or they try to learn from the experience and move on. Why can't we?
 
So not having personally been burned by any of Molyneux's games, and actually rather liking No Man's Sky for what it is, I actually have some sympathy for these game developers.

If an artist created a piece we didn't like, or a musician made an album (or many) we didn't like, we would be disappointed and eventually move on. Why do we take things so personally when it's a game instead? What is it about the anticipation/expectation/release/disappointment cycle for games that leaves people feeling so betrayed? I would say buyer's remorse, but the ample collection of reviews should prevent most people from buying something they ultimately hate.

Creators have hopes for themselves, they make promises, and when they fail to deliver on them usually they are the first to be disappointed. They have to make peace with what they created and ultimately either work to improve them (as they have been with NMS) or they try to learn from the experience and move on. Why can't we?

The musician probably didn't go into stark detail about how the album was going to be classically inspired and have over thirty tracks and then release a five track reggae album.

It's not that Peter's games were simply disliked, so that's not a fair comparison. It's that he never delivered the games he was literally advertising.
 

Nerokis

Member
All Molyneux interviews these days have the feeling of interviewing an ex-Congressman who was convicted of something. Still has a certain polish, along with a desire for attention, but it all feels somewhat forced, somewhat disconnected from their current situations. "Yeah, I flew too close to the sun, but I must have something to contribute if I managed to get up there, right? Believe in me again."

I wish him all the best.
 
Multimillion dollar liar that somehow instills enough confidence in strangers to defend him, it's a weird phenomena for sure. That self imposed press exile lasted what, less than two years?

And yeah it's hilarious he's literal neighbors with Murray, can't make that shit up either.

Edit: LMAO Milo applications, what the absolute fuck would a Milo even do? You just uh talk to an animated chat bot on your new Xbox 360? About what, the latest arcade deals that week?
 

spineduke

Unconfirmed Member
I was 100% sure if he ever spoke about Sean, he would relate and give him a sympathetic shoulder. They should collaborate and make a game together.
 
His games weren't what he promised, but they were still, largely, extremely good. An earlier poster put his success down to his team, and ignore that both Bullfrog and Lionhead fell apart very shortly after he left each team. He's a visionary - not even close to perfect. He aims for the stars and misses - but I'd rather play a game that does that (Fable 2) over something lacking vision (Fable Legends).

These are my reasons for sticking up for him a bit. He's pushed teams to make some fantastic games across generations. Like him or not, he's absolutely been a positive force on the industry, and his games have inspired many to become a part of it.
 

MattKeil

BIGTIME TV MOGUL #2
I was 100% sure if he ever spoke about Sean, he would relate and give him a sympathetic shoulder. They should collaborate and make a game together.

You and your friends all plant an acorn in the same online garden. Everyone's tree grows procedurally in realtime and in a different way, but nobody can see anyone else's tree.

But seriously, I think Molyneux's heart has always been in the right place, he just gets ahead of himself and doesn't put his own expectations in check before passing those expectations on to us. I still like the guy.
 
Glad to see him surface again, He over promised but he did make some great games.

Fuck the haters, the industry is worse off when he and people like him are not around.
 
No Man's Sky, like some of your games, didn't live up to our fantasies about it. Did you have empathy for what Sean Murray and Hello Games went through?

Absolutely. He lives two miles away from me. I worked with his wife on all three of the Fable games, incredibly closely. I went to see him. I really felt for him. People don't realize, for me and for him, it was like an ice-cold dagger in the heart. Every game that I work on, I put so much of my heart into it. And always, it's never quite what it should be.

Sorry, but this is hysterical. Not only do they live so close together and but they've worked indirectly together in the past. I can't stop laughing.
 

Northeastmonk

Gold Member
I have enjoyed his games for many years. It's just... he sold his dreams. But that doesn't mean he can't resurface. He just needs to tap into what made him great to begin with.

Outside of that.. there's no excuse to why Fable hasn't come back.

I thought Milo was some tech demo with auto generated responses to certain actions and not a fully functional simulator?
 

Maledict

Member
It astonishes me that despite direct evidence to the contrary, people still ignore everything in front of their eyes and think he means well but over promises.

It's true, people prefer a nice sounding lie to an ugly truth.
 

WarRock

Member
I thought Milo was some tech demo with auto generated responses to certain actions and not a fully functional simulator?
Looks like it's something in between, per Polygon's article:

Polygon's Article on the story behind Milo is a fascinating read. It might have ultimately been a bunch of tech demos in search of a broader game, but they had over 80 people working on it for years; it wasn't just a smoke a mirrors cobbled together E3 video a lot of people seem to assume it was. And that's not to say it all worked as advertised, just that they were actively in development trying to get it all to work.
 
The smartest thing he could've done would've been to shut up until his next game is out. I don't understand why he's talking to anyone now. Boredom?
 

RPGam3r

Member
I'm glad he's back. Actually MS get Peter back in house, build out another Fable with all the hype and I would consider a Scorpio.
 
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