Serial over-promiser Peter Molyneux promises to stop over-promising

Designer breaks a year of self-imposed press exile with reflective interview.

Kyle Orland – Feb 3, 2016 11:36 am | 100

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Nearly a year after promising to “completely stop talking to the press,” famed game designer Peter Molyneux is… talking to the press. Specifically, he’s breaking his silence in a wide-ranging and reflective interview with Eurogamer to promote Godus Wars, a new real-time strategy twist on the faltering god game.

To be fair, a year is a long time for a serial over-promiser like Molyneux to keep publicly quiet about what he’s working on. The direct cause of the long silence, as Molyneux himself admits directly to Eurogamer, was a February 2015 Rock Paper Shotgun interview that led off with the blunt question “Do you think that you’re a pathological liar?”

“It was one of the most bruising moments of my life,” Molyneux told Eurogamer. “My world changed after that interview. … That was the point where I said, this is just not going to work. To be called a pathological liar, which he said at the start… it’s just not going to work, because how do you ever gain people’s trust and belief after a journalist says that?”

That moment only came after a week full of bad news for Molyneux and the Godus development team at 22Cans. Reports from inside and outside the studio at the time suggested that the company was dropping promised features for the crowdfunded god game in favor of focusing a new mobile title, The Trail. Then Eurogamer published a report detailing how Curiosity winner Bryan Henderson had seemingly been stiffed on a promised role as the lucrative “God of Gods” in the game.

After “a really tough couple of days” following the RPS interview, Molyneux said he seriously considered retiring, like many of his contemporaries who made their game development names in the 1980s. He says he decided to stick with his passion, though, in part because he didn’t know what he’d do with his free time (many members of the battered 22Cans team did decide to leave in the interim, though).

The new Molyneux seems committed to breaking his habit of making lofty promises about games long before they’re done (he said he had to fight an “almost impossible urge” to talk up The Trail to Eurogamer). Now, Molyneux says he’ll only talk about games that are complete and playable by the press at that very moment. “The solution to the problem is to do a great game rather than talk about doing a great game,” he said. “My strategy is this: you can’t say anything to prove I’m not a liar. The only thing I can do is hunker down and strip myself back to what I really am, which is someone who just loves what he does with a passion that is often misinterpreted by people.”

To that end, Molyneux is now talking up Godus Wars, a just launched, early access RTS twist on the existing god game. The plan, he says, is for this release to lead to promised multiplayer features and then to the “God of Gods” powers long promised to Henderson (who, for his part, told Eurogamer that “to be perfectly honest, I’m almost past the point of caring about this whole thing, you know?”).

Even in talking up Godus Wars, though, Molyneux seems to be straining to rein himself in. He stresses that the “game-changing update” is “not designed or meant to be the next StarCraft 3… I’m not portraying this as the greatest game of all time. It’s charming. It’s lovely. I loved playing it. I loved working on it. And that’s what it is.”

Frankly, there’s a part of us that hopes Molyneux can’t stick to his new, less-fabulist persona. The straight-talking, pie-in-the-sky enthusiasm of the old Molyneux could be quite infectious and was always good for some fun headlines. From a game-development point of view, though, it’s probably better for Molyneux and everyone around him if he’s able to keep his focus where it belongs: on making interesting games rather than talking about interesting ideas.