Godus preview: Ambitious, expansive, and “absolutely crazy”

“I think Godus is going to be the best game I’ve ever worked on,” Peter Molyneux told me during a recent interview. “Fable was an epic RPG, but I think the best, most obsessively designed game I’ve ever done is Godus. It’s the game I’ve played the most, for sure.”

The storied creative mind behind Populous, Black and White, and the Fable series, among other games, seems to realize how this statement sounds when it comes out during a pre-PAX interview and demo of the Kickstarter project. After all, Molyneux has developed something of a reputation over the years for promising lofty development goals and gameplay revolutions that don’t always shake out in the final product.

But he just can’t help himself. Molyneux’s enthusiasm for his return to the “god game” genre, the genre that he built his career on, is infectious. He told me he wants to reinvigorate the genre that has suffered a bad name from being applied to social games like FarmVille and CityVille. “That just pisses me off,” he said of the mischaracterization.

A real god game, Molyneux said, is an open world based on simulation and emergent gameplay that lets you “find ways to play this game that us as designers maybe have never thought of.” Indeed, the sheer level of simulation in Godus seems to border on the obsessive.

“What I said this time around was ‘I want everything to be simulated—every drop of water and every grain of sand,’” he said as he carefully sculpted the edge of a shoreline ridge with a mouse. “When I’m doing this, I’m changing the tidal pattern, and the tidal pattern affects the wind direction, which affects the weather patterns on the entirety of the planet. So you affect your little strip and that effect has a knock-on effect all down the way.”

That planet, by the way, has a massive scale that Molyneux said is “about the size of Jupiter, 1,321 times the size of Earth.” You can play alone, offline, a single lonely god on your own massive planet, but the real focus seems to be the online game where you and every other player have to learn how to share a single massive ball of land (and where your ridgeline can apparently affect another player’s rainfall patterns thousands of miles away).

Each player starts with a buffer zone of about 100 square kilometers, but after about a week, Molyneux says you will inevitably bump up against another player. At that point, you can choose to be an isolationist (throwing up an invisible wall around your hemmed-in bit of the world), you can go to war, or you can join forces to be cooperative gods of a new, larger plot.

“It’s going to be very interesting what actually happens,” Molyneux said of this open-ended multiplayer interaction. “I have a prediction and it’s a very depressing one: I think that everyone’s just going to be sickeningly nice. I find it depressing because we put so much effort into the evil side, just like in Fable where only five percent of people ever actually did it.”

Machu Picchu before…

…Machu Picchu after.

“There is only one time through”

The core gameplay motivator in Godus, Molyneux said, is taking your small band of followers and shepherding them from the primitive age all the way up through the space age. The basic way to do this is by collecting “belief” that your citizens create while in their houses, then using that belief to do everything from shaping the land and extending roads to poking followers with a “finger of God” or raining down meteor strikes on enemies or threats.

Initially, you just have to build up your population to move on to the next “age” of human development, but those goals change as the game progresses. In the bronze age, for instance, you need to produce a certain number of tools to move on. In the imperial age, your progress is based on the number of weapons you’ve made.

These changing goals can lead to some unintended effects on your progress if you’re not careful, Molyneux said. For instance, the trees and rocks that can be destroyed for some quick belief early on are actually important natural resources in a later ages. By the time you realize that, though, you might be saying, “Shit, I’ve just deforested the whole world because I quite like the sound of the trees being knocked down,” as Molyneux colorfully put it.

And the game won’t hold your hand and explain this give and take, Molyneux said. “One of the principles of the game—and this is crazy, it is absolutely crazy, I don’t know why… well I do know why—we don’t tell you anything about this game at all. It’s all about discovery. It’s all about realizing—It’s the old world of choices and consequences.”

When I pointed out that this will probably lead to a lot of trial and error learning your first time through the game, Molyneux replied bluntly, “There is only one time through.” While you can technically start a new civilization, Molyneux says he wants to “actively discourage you from restarting, because the joy of this game is so wonderful as you go through and have that point of realization, it’s just a joyous thing.”

“I don’t like this word ‘resetting,’ because to me, what we’re trying to do here is give you a hobby, not just a game,” he continued. “When you talk about resetting, that’s saying, ‘Oh, this time I want to do it perfectly.’ And I’m not sure there is a perfect way. You can do some really cruel things to your people, and they’ll be more obedient to you, but is that really better than being a green god and not knocking down trees?”

“There’s no perfect solution to this stuff, and the easier we make it for people to think, ‘Oh, I’ll just load in an old game,’ the more we break the metaphor.”

Don’t worry about what’s going to happen when you reach the end game, either, Molyneux said. Once you reach the Space Age, the sculpting tools you’ve been using on cliffs and trees can easily be applied to things like mountains and planets and more. “Space is a big place…” he said cryptically.