The Ego Has Landed

Xbox Nation interviewed Peter Molyneux as he was preparing to address a packed auditorium at the annual Game Developers Conference in San Jose. Between much-needed cigarette breaks and the munching of chips, he spilled the beans on what’s next for the god of god games.

Peter Molyneux is one of the biggest stars in the gaming firmament. His balding head routinely pops out of just about every European gaming magazine there is—and his Zen-like presence and considered perspectives on game design make him a favorite speaker at E3 and the Game Developers Conference. His company Lionhead Studios is now well established following the critical and commercial success of the PC hit Black and White, and his commitment to independent game development in the form of the Lionhead Satellites Program has helped a number of small outfits get their projects off the ground, not least of which is Big Blue Box’s Project Ego.

Molyneux virtually invented the genre of the god game with Populous on the Commodore Amiga, and since then his efforts have been largely confined to the less-glamorous (but no less obsessive) world of the PC. Until now. With three new projects Xbox bound, Black and White: Next Generation, B.C., and the epic Project Ego, Molyneux is stepping into a wider world.

Xbox Nation: What are you working on right now, other than Project Ego?

Peter Molyneux: Since March we’ve kicked off the Xbox version of Black and White which we’re calling Black and White: Next Generation, which is in no way like the PC version. In [Next Generation], the whole game is centered totally around your creature instead of this disembodied “God hand.” There’s this new gameplay mechanic, which we shall show at E3, where you can take your creature in and collect the villagers round him and drag them around with him. The more villagers he has, the quicker he grows, the stronger he is, the better fighter he is when he meets other creatures, the more magic he can cast. It’s much more like an RPG than a god game.

XBN: Is it a completely different game? Are you using assets from the original title?

Molyneux: [We’re using] some of the artwork and some of the animations, but every single line of code is new. It’s a totally new game. New story. New challenges. And really, the reason that’s come about is the realization—and it’s simple to put—that I’d never really tackled a console game before. I’d ported lots, yeah, -but some of them had been successful and some of them hadn’t been successful. Sitting down I’m thinking, “Well, if I want to make a great console game, how can I do that?” And the answer is by going back to school. It’s like starting again. Developing a console game is so different to a PC experience. I can’t assume, for example, that I’ve automatically got someone’s attention for hours on end. The fact of the matter is that if you’re playing a console game you might be half-drunk or half something else [Laughs] and you’re not going to be playing it for six hours straight, you’re going to be playing between doing other things.

XBN: So this is Peter Molyneux the Next Generation?

Molyneux: Yes, it is in a way. And that’s gone into Project Ego and B.C. and Black and White: Next Generation.

XBN: Why will Project Ego be the “Greatest Role-Playing Game Ever Made”?

Molyneux: The idea with Project Ego—that incredibly bold and stupid thing for me to say—that it’s got to be the best RPG ever is actually like asking, “Please Mr. Journalist-kick me in the nuts when this comes out,” because you’d love to say, “Actually it’s the shittiest role-playing game ever.” [Laughs]

So how come I even attempt to do that? Because looking back on it, there are things that we have been doing on the PC for years that have never really been tried on the console, that could make the game experience that much better. Right now, role-playing games are set in scripted worlds, where nothing changes. How many times have you walked up to a character and had them say, “You’ve got to go and rescue the princess up on the hill,” and you’ve just done the most obscene things to the person next to them, with a sword, and they still speak to you as if nothing’s happened. It pisses me off. It doesn’t feel right. We can change that. We can set this linear story in a simulated world. Instead of playing a character that is fixed and designed by some game designer, you play a character that you have an influence on—that changes and morphs as the game goes on.

XBN: Sounds like Black and White…

Molyneux: It’s the same concept. What your character is in Project Ego is up to you. He starts off as a 15-year-old kid. Whether he is a Conan the Barbarian-type character, or a Bruce Lee-type martial arts guy, or a wizard, isn’t down to a question at the start of the game. It’s down to what you do with him during the game. Whether you are the most evil hero of all time that has slaughtered young children or whether you’re going to be the most noble of knights like Sir Lancelot, is completely up to you. Is it better that those morphs and chan11es happen to a cow, or is it better if they happen to a human being? It seems more natural, obviously, if those things happen to a human being.

What we’ve done is we’ve taken some of the inspiration from Black and White, like the morphing-and what Big Blue Box has done is increase it enormously. For example, the morphing is now to the most detailed level. The character you play in Project Ego is 15 years old. You play the game until you finish it. If by the end of the game the character is an old man, then he’s an old man, and he looks like an old man, because he morphed/aged as the game progressed.

Another aggravation of role-playing games is that they always take place over a weekend in game terms. You started playing the game on Friday and the world had to be saved by Monday morning. It’s ridiculous. Why not set it over somebody’s life and say, yes, there is this great quest that you have to go on, and it’s a life quest, and at the end of the game, you are going to be the greatest hero the world has ever known.

Another thing we’re introducing is something that role-playing games have never had—a competitive element. You’re not the only hero in the world. You might be down at this tower where this damsel needs saving, and you look up and there’s Boris the Impaler already halfway up! And you think, “Bastard! He’s going to get all the kudos for rescuing the girl!” These are things we’ve done on the PC, and they shouldn’t be imported directly, but the underlying mechanics should.

XBN: So what about B.C.? We’ve heard some stuff.

Molyneux: B.C. is set in a prehistoric world. You play the role of a tribe. That sounds a bit weird, but you can play any member of a tribe. We don’t say: “Hey, you’re this one.” You’ve probably had drunken conversations like I have, and they go something like this: “Imagine you go back in time, and you couldn’t take a anything with you and you were naked, what would you change?”

XBN: Err…right.

Molyneux: [Laughs] The reality is that this game is going to be the most brutal, savage, gory, unbelievably gut wrenchingly bloody game ever seen on a console, and I put it to you that if you actually do get to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex, the ocean of blood that spews forth from this creature will turn your stomach. I want this to be a primitive world. It’s not cozy, comfy cushion-y land—it’s going to be somewhere that is unbelievably brutal. Arms are ripped off, and heads crushed.

XBN: Sounds like our office.

Molyneux: Well, it’s about survival. The first, opening scene of the game, is a cave with these barely human, disgustingly behaved beings, huddling—not knowing where their next meal will come from. The first thing you do is lead them out of this cave, and as you come out of the cave, you’re on top of a cliff, and below you is this enormous valley, just full of incredible life. And we’re not making dinosaurs life-size; we’re making them like Godzilla. They’re big things. I mean, I was disappointed when I went to the National History Museum in London that the T-Rex was small.

XBN: What perspective are you playing the game from?

Molyneux: Third-person, over the shoulder of the particular tribe member that you’re controlling.

XBN: A follow-cam?

Molyneux: Yes. If you do something and there are other tribe members around, then they’re copy what you do. So if you go and attack a dinosaur, they jump in too. Those characters act as lives and power-ups.

XBN: Is there a progression? “Hey everybody—I discovered fire!”

Molyneux: Yes. If you discover a bone on the ground and you decide to use it as a weapon, then everyone else will do that too. You can invent stuff—almost the role-playing elements of the game, is that by the end your tribe would have got all this cool stuff.

XBN: Nuclear weapons?

Molyneux: Not quite. But it is sort of, I know what I can do with that round thing and make a wheel. It’s the player that decides that…l mean—we highlight things, obviously.

XBN: So there’s some progression. Are you following a season or a year in this tribe’s life?

Molyneux: The story is really simple. At the start of the game you’re basically fighting for survival. You can find various new tribe members that are just wandering about, and there is a rival tribe of simians that are competing against you, who are semi-intelligent beings as well, who are always fighting you. What you’re doing is taking your tribe on a trek across this huge plain, and once you get to the plateau, you’ll be safe. And at the end of the game you get a score that says, “Based upon how you treated your tribe, your tribe will invent ‘this’ in this year, the early tests that we’ve had say that you will have invented writing by the year 2010,” and another says, “You’ll invent rocket science.” The main thing is that it’s very gory, with a little bit of tribal RPG stuff and a very soft structure in there.

XBN: Did you play Pikmin on Gamecube?

Molyneux: The thing that’s most like Pikmin is Black and White: Next Generation, because those little creatures you pick up and that follow you around is a bit like the villagers following your creature in Next Generation.

XBN: Did you like it?

Molyneux: When I first started playing it I thought, this is going to be amazing, and I really like the mechanic of things following me and feeling that I could do things with them. But it kind of lacked something…that sharpness. I was talking to someone recently who was saying that there’s no original games around any more, and I think that it’s not so much that there are no original games, but rather that there’s as much originality as there was before, but it’s not the whole thing about a game now.

XBN: So, it’s hard to invent new genres, but people are being original within the formats we’re familiar with?

Molyneux: Pikmin was probably the most totally original game—other than Rez and things like that, where the whole thing was totally new, and it lacked a bit of a story, I think. But you don’t blame God for making mistakes, and [Shigeru] Miyamoto’s God, so…it was perfect!

XBN: When we look at your games, over the years, you get a sense that each one is another step towards the big, ultimate Peter Molyneux dream game. How close are you to that dream now?

Molyneux: Certainly I think Project Ego and B.C. are steps along the way. I think that Black and White 2 is another step again. But really, the project that I can’t say anything about at all right now, a project called Dimitri, is stupidly ambitious.

XBN: Is this a Lionhead game?

Molyneux: Yes, What happened to the Black and White team is that a third of them went off to do Black and White 2, and two-thirds stayed to do Dimitri. Dimitri won’t even be showable for another two years. And the big idea there is recreating a scene like this [gestures to the bustling hotel lobby], down to every single detail.

XBN: Totally convincing people?

Molyneux: Totally. Every single detail. At the moment. We’ve got one scene, which is not too dissimilar to this bit of the room, where every single detail of that room has been simulated. Total realism.

XBN: Sounds like the Holy Grail of graphics.

Molyneux: Well, the face technology that we’re talking about—the feature technology is, I would say, and this is another of my bold claims—better than anything Hollywood is doing right now. When I show it, I don’t want you to be able to distinguish between a real human face and this face, which would be cool. Eyes that move and follow you, the way a face animates, and twitches and changes over time, and all of the things that make up a human face and human body.

XBN: It’s often the little gestures that make something real—the stuff that we barely register. Can they be distracted, while you’ re talking to them, in realtime, for example?

Molyneux: Absolutely. The funny thing is that the technology is achievable, I think, except one thing—it’s the number one limiting factor in an awful lot of games now, and it’s going to become more and more so-and it is this: Animation. It’s come out of left field. We didn’t predict this limiting factor and it’s a nightmare. Because suddenly we ‘ve got characters that look like human beings …

XBN: But move like cheap robots?

Molyneux: Right. We’ve haven ‘t got the skill in our industry. The people that can animate really well are at Disney and ILM, and those companies have sucked the animation talent out of the world already! And suddenly, we’ re coming along, and our characters have got—you know, every major bone in the human body, covered with muscle and flesh, but you can’t ask Al to make a dramatic motion, like picking up this glass here. It’s got to be done by an artist. We’ve got a team of programmers, a team of artists, and now, suddenly, we need a team of animators which is bigger than the team of artists and the programmers put together!

XBN: You say you can’t ask artificial intelligence to work it out, but surely, eventually, Al will be smart enough to figure out how to pick up a glass in a human way?

Molyneux: We can do that now. It’s called inverse-kinematics, but it’s a very simplistic thing, and the robot looks like a robot, not a human. The only thing we can do—and it’s what we’re looking at—is creating this soup of animations that have been created by animators, animations that are not on the whole body, broken down into the bits of the body, and then the Al chooses the most appropriate animation to do the job.

I mean—primitively speaking—just for me to get up and walk over the other side of this room, think of the number of different moves I have to made, squeezing past furniture, making sure I don’t knock over a cup of coffee—it’s terrifying!

Well, you ‘ve seen A.I., the movie? The Al portion of that I think, at least mentally, we could do a six- to eight-year-old within about two years. I could create a character on a computer that you would communicate, probably by typing stuff in, and that would be indistinguishable from that six- to eight-year-old. It would have emotions—it would have fear, it would be deceptive. In engineering terms, the idea of putting that into a robot, it’s pathetic. It’s just pathetic. We can ‘t even blink an eye in engineering terms, let alone create someone close to human. So there’s a lot of amazingly exciting stuff coming out at the moment, but there’s also a lot of new frustrations.

XBN: There is that progression, though, in your games?

Molyneux: Yes. I mean, if you look at it—if you follow the games, you’re going from up here in the heavens, down to one person—eventually.

XBN: When it’s real enough, Peter Molyneux will come down from the clouds and go first-person?

Molyneux: That has always been my ultimate ambition, to do a simulation of a world. That’s it.

XBN: So is first person the future of video games? When it becomes perfectly real, you’ll want to be in it as you—not as some third person.

Molyneux: I think that’s right. I don’t agree with people that say there’s this stagnation of stuff in the computer games industry. I think it’s just amazing. When it goes from little things—they way they just got it absolutely right about the way the enemies avoid the shots in Halo—it made it real. Just a tiny little innovation, but it will now influence every game. And all these things are happening all the time, but they’re happening on less titles, not more titles.

XBN: So has animation taken over from Al as the next big frontier in video games?

Molyneux: No, I think Al is still that—and it’s going to lead us to places we’ve never dreamed of going, by the way. But animation is the bottleneck. It doesn’t matter how detailed my character is, or how amazingly intelligent he is, because if he moves like a robot, he’s going to look dumb.

When we crack that, we’ll really have something amazing to look at.