- Joined
- Mar 10, 2003
- Messages
- 2,923
This is something I found on the LoinheadHead site (not LHS) which I found interesting. It's an interview with Peter Molyneux where he makes a few comments on BW2
http://www.loinhead.net/2007/05/20/exclusive-with-molyneux
You’ve said why you felt it went bad, but what was actually bad about the game itself?
Right. That’s a list, and it’s a list of kinda my failures - which I have to take responsibility for, obviously - but also just the position and situation that we were in and you know, forced to finish the game. And that’s the biggest flaw, not having the time to finish the game. Even though it was in development for a long time. It was rushed at the end, we didn’t have time to balance it and play it.
Is it true that you had to start again from scratch after a certain time in development?
That, that - it sounds like a really bad thing, doesn’t it. Starting again - we didn’t actually start again - that implies that you walk into the office one day and you haven’t got anything, but there were certain features that had to be thrown away and redone, and the reason for that was that, this is what’s so stupid about games development, it can be one tiny little decision that you make that can end up totally ruining the entire thing. And one of the tiny decisions that we made in Black and White 2 was to use Black and White 1 as the foundation stone for all the code for Black and White 2, and what we found was you had this massive amount of code and you were putting an even more massive amount of code on top, and underneath it was this quite shaky foundation stone, and that meant we had to rewrite quite a lot of stuff. And then it came down that the original plan for Black and White 2 - we thought we had it on time, but we didn’t, we ran out of money to produce really - was that it was gonna be twenty-five lands, I think, fifteen to twenty-five lands, the creatures’ intelligence could have been much more, we had a real plan to stretch the features out so that you didn’t get them all by land, you know, third land I think it was, stretch those features out, there was an awful lot more about the RTSy side of the game, an awful more about the army side. So you know, if you were going to turn round to me now and say, what are your biggest regrets? I think one of my biggest regrets is that whole time of Black and White 2, you know, I wish I could go back to the start of the development of Black and White 2, start from a blank sheet of paper and plan to make it better.
How do you feel, now, about the creature sliders to control the mind?
Well, it was a really good idea, if it had been implemented fully. What that turned out to be, that idea wasn’t balanced enough I don’t think. That was a leading question, wasn’t it?
Yeah.
What did you feel about the sliders?
I don’t think they worked. They ruined the creature as a person.
Agreed.
http://www.loinhead.net/2007/05/20/exclusive-with-molyneux
You’ve said why you felt it went bad, but what was actually bad about the game itself?
Right. That’s a list, and it’s a list of kinda my failures - which I have to take responsibility for, obviously - but also just the position and situation that we were in and you know, forced to finish the game. And that’s the biggest flaw, not having the time to finish the game. Even though it was in development for a long time. It was rushed at the end, we didn’t have time to balance it and play it.
Is it true that you had to start again from scratch after a certain time in development?
That, that - it sounds like a really bad thing, doesn’t it. Starting again - we didn’t actually start again - that implies that you walk into the office one day and you haven’t got anything, but there were certain features that had to be thrown away and redone, and the reason for that was that, this is what’s so stupid about games development, it can be one tiny little decision that you make that can end up totally ruining the entire thing. And one of the tiny decisions that we made in Black and White 2 was to use Black and White 1 as the foundation stone for all the code for Black and White 2, and what we found was you had this massive amount of code and you were putting an even more massive amount of code on top, and underneath it was this quite shaky foundation stone, and that meant we had to rewrite quite a lot of stuff. And then it came down that the original plan for Black and White 2 - we thought we had it on time, but we didn’t, we ran out of money to produce really - was that it was gonna be twenty-five lands, I think, fifteen to twenty-five lands, the creatures’ intelligence could have been much more, we had a real plan to stretch the features out so that you didn’t get them all by land, you know, third land I think it was, stretch those features out, there was an awful lot more about the RTSy side of the game, an awful more about the army side. So you know, if you were going to turn round to me now and say, what are your biggest regrets? I think one of my biggest regrets is that whole time of Black and White 2, you know, I wish I could go back to the start of the development of Black and White 2, start from a blank sheet of paper and plan to make it better.
How do you feel, now, about the creature sliders to control the mind?
Well, it was a really good idea, if it had been implemented fully. What that turned out to be, that idea wasn’t balanced enough I don’t think. That was a leading question, wasn’t it?
Yeah.
What did you feel about the sliders?
I don’t think they worked. They ruined the creature as a person.
Agreed.
