Lionhead Studios - Criticism of Peter Molyneux

Criticism of Peter Molyneux

Leading up to several Lionhead Studio game releases, Peter Molyneux's enthusiasm for talking openly about the development and design process of his games caused outcry online when certain features did not make it or were changed during development. He made a rule that he would not talk about game mechanics unless he could show them in game or present certain ideas as prototypes and/or experiments.

Several products such as Black and White 2 and Fable had features changed or lacking in the final product.

Peter Molyneux said the following on the issue:

After Fable, there was a pretty dark time where people looked at the game and compared it with what I said in the press, and they felt cheated. I realised that we just couldn't keep on doing that. But that was very much a reflection of how we worked, because what I was talking about in the press was what we were experimenting with at that moment, and a lot of those experiments would sort of come out as you were making the game. So I'd be talking about trees growing, and then we'd cut trees growing, and people would, of course, feel cheated. So I made a rule: I will not talk about any concrete mechanics unless I can actually show you them in game. I'll talk about our ambitions to make the best role-playing game of all time, but if you see Fable 2 press you'll see that I talked about stuff as I demoed it. People understandably get enormously upset about it—it's like seeing a trailer for a film and seeing Batman die, but then he doesn't die in the film; it would just be wrong. So I think a lot of what we do is realise what we’ve done wrong and work to try and make that right. It's far better than thinking that we get things right all the time.