Peter Molyneux Says Sorry, and Women in Games

If there's a word to describe my general lack of energy today, I think I'll choose *yawn*.

Anyway. As any gamer worth his/her salt will be able to tell you, very often features that are promised in upcoming games have to be dropped out of the final product, for many reasons. Some of these are technical in nature (current PC limitations), while others are rushed out to meet a particular deadline, like Christmas for instance. In any case, very rarely do established game designers/developers apologise to their buyers who find that the hype rarely lives up to the final product. Fewer still even acknowledge said flaws, hoping that the positive buzz they generated months or even years back will help smooth over any hiccups buyers get once they actually play these games.

Not so with Peter Molyneux, developer of the recent RPG hit Fable, and the older Black and White. Recently Molyneux posted an open apology to gamers in his development studio's message boards, and I quote:

"For example, three years ago I talked about trees growing as time past. The team did code this but it took so much processor time (15%) that the feature was not worth leaving in. That 15 % was much better spent on effects and combat...I have come to realise that I should not talk about features too early so I am considering not talking about games as early as I do."

The full text can be accessed here.

If only more developers were as quick to apologise as they are to hype up a product beyond reason (Mace Griffin: Bounty Hunter, anyone?) or just plain relax about their products, we'd get less people complaining about how this-and-that feature was never implemented, or if it was, how shoddy the implementation was. Fable is already a good game, if not great, but it's good to see that the developers are aware of the negative consequences of their pre-release hype. Maybe this will lead to other apologies as well (I'm still waiting, Eurocom). Yeah right, but one can hope.

One more thing, I've gotten some interesting responses from people who insist video games are exclusively the domain of adolescent males with fantasies of half naked women in leather running around. Just so you know, one of the first major game designers in the world was a woman. Her name is Roberta Williams, and she was responsible for some of the best adventure games I've ever played since I was a kid. Just ask anyone who's ever played King's Quest (if you don't know what that is, then stick to your CounterStrike servers, kids). Like anything else, stereotyping never helps, and since I'm feeling charitable, here's a link to an old interview waay back in 2000.

Right, I'm off. Laters, people.