I remember the pax where Peter Molyneux was the keynote talking about godus "the rebirth of god games" he had some wonderfully elaborate far reaching plans with a persistent game world the size of Jupiter and donkeys ... I might be misremembering the donkeys. It all sounded interesting and the early access of the game (which was originally a kickstarter that raise 500k) was released to coincide with the talk so when myself and byrnie retired to the hotel room after a days PAXing I picked it up.
Thus I spent a couple of hours playing Godus 1.0 or clickfest 5000 a game of clicks. You had to click the land to shape it click the rocks to destroy them click the houses to get the people click repeatedly to collect mana bubbles to fuel more click related terraforming. That was the whole game my fingers started to bleed towards the end and I needed to replace the micro switches in my mouse.
I didn't try it again.
Then came Godus 2.0 in march of last year "Now with 50% less clicks!" but also still not much in the way of gameplay. You could shape the land with less clicking to make the automagic people make houses and had a few god powers now relegated to a sort of pvp mode. The lack of clicking in some ways made the game worse in that now you weren't distracted by the horrible pain in your abused finger joints the lack of any meaningful gameplay was blindingly obvious. There was no sign of the grand overarching themes or the persistent world where peoples little societies would rub against each other there was not much in the way of anything worth your time.
After that second disapointment I uninstalled it and never went back. Sounds like things have gone from bad to worse in that respect the dev on it's last elbows Molyneux off to a new project. It's looks like far from being the rebirth of god games it will just end up being the death of this little dev that got put together to make it. This sort of thing is not uncomon on the kickstarter front I've seen projects I've backed run completely off the rails crash and burn. With Molyneux at the helm a man notorious for overpromising and under delivering it was perhaps a perfect storm of kickstarter over extension with overly grand and unrealistic initial goals. Though for the most part Molyneuxs games even when they turned out to be a lot less than promised were at least a bit of fun to play. This was rubbish maybe his riding the wave of nostalgia for the bullfrog days has finally come to an end.
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And now there is an apology video. Oh deary me. Excellent picking apart by RPS.
It sounds like the kind of toxic war I've seen time and again where someone senior speaks a bunch of imaginary bullshit to meet a goal. "I've never done a kickstarter before". No, Molyneux, you've not; but you have delivered a scoped bit of software to a deadline, you insane bag of fuck. This time, you don't have the safety net of Bullfrog to stop you going mental. Molyneux looks like a fucking nightmare to work with.
I hope Naszynski pulls Godus around and props to him either way. I want there to be a good God game, there needs to be one. The technology is rife. The art looks good. Let's have it actually fun FFS.
I have been disappointed (very disappointed), but not surprised by this. It did feel a bit like Peter Molyneux had just seen a Facebook game for the first time before drawing up plans for the Godus game play ... and I am pretty sure if I were a god, I would NOT want to play Facebook games all day. And that is where is seems to be lacking the most, nothing about it seems to make the player god like ... unless a god is meant to spend eternity going around tapping on peoples roofs in the hopes of someone believing in them.
There is a follow up on RPS and another piece on eurogamer about the guy who won curiosity and his prize was to be god of gods in godus. Second prize a kick in the teeth. Since they have yet to (and probably never will) implement mulitplayer that kid is likely never going to be god of gods he was also offered a cut of the profits but since they worded it to "once they add multiplayer" theres no cash there. Sounds like they've basically forgotten about him and stopped answering his emails. Not very nice really.
Oh but Molyneax has a new project The Trail ... coming soon to kickstarter near you!
Reus was a pretty good modern god game and there was that one with the dirt From Dust
I really enjoyed From Dust, but it did have the feel of more of a proof of concept\tech demo for me given game world felt quite small; I am guessing because of the vast processing required to handle all the potential physics calculations. But it was fun solving each level with ... dirt.
I had the same feeling about "From Dust"...it didn't feel like a game, just a toy.
I think generally Molyneux has this problem...he comes up with novel idea, but he's no good at turning them into a playable game. This would be fine if he worked in a normal game studio...he'd kick out ideas, then others would take them, turn them into viable game mechanics and wrap an enjoyable playing experience around them...but as he sits alone (probably on a giant throne, surrounded by his grovelling minions), instead the raw ideas get spewn forth, and the end result is intellectually interesting, but dull prototypes.
Molyneux is still going on. He's now said that he's not talking to the press. In fact, he did so three times.
Guardian ... http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/13/peter-molyneux-game-de...
There's also one on RPS but the site is down through too much traffic.
If you fail to deliver over and over, you will lose all your customers. Do it in games, enterprise web, firmware, mobile apps, enterprise mobile, it doesn't matter. If you deliver to the public, they're going to complain publicly. If you deliver to enterprise, you'll find the market is made up from people who all know each other and failing to deliver means that doors will suddenly close without obvious cause.
As a "big ideas" person, I understand his desire to have big ideas. They are important. What goes on the whiteboard should be wild. What leaves the building should be deliverable in time and budget. I learnt that in a relatively short period in my career. He's had 35 years. He should know how to deliver software by now.
If you join a start up and put capital from your mortgage on the line, you take a risk. If you use your name as capital, you're risking that.
I feel sorry for all the Devs who put their faith in him and time out of proper careers to work on a game that really should have been good.
Molyneux is notorious for this overpromising and I wonder how much of it is a factor of him being so successful in the early days when delivering anything was probably good enough. Then he got lucky with bullfrog which must have been a great team producing some amazing games. Then it started to go down hill a bit black and white (super AI monkey!) the fable series (which was fun but nothing like the premise) weird experiments in cube tapping with curiosity more tapping in godus.
I suspect ballanced with the right sort of project manager and not given too much control he wouldn't be a bad influence on pushing the boundries going for crazy ideas that are mostly unachievable in this case it seems he was given too much control and there wasn't someone with the common sense to make the game fun in and of itself
I've just read the whole RPS interview and I think there is a fine line between constantly making mistakes and misleading people to get their money. I think he has mislead to take their money and that's lying. Eg:
1. He knew the Kickstarter would not be enough cash.
2. He knew that the only other money options were VC funding and Publishers.
3. He told everyone in the Kickstarter that there would be no publishers.
4. He then signed a publisher.
When he signed the publisher, what he should have done is acknowledge his previous plan "We said we wouldn't sign a publisher" and then explain why we they now needed to. It's a broken promise. He doesn't do that. He doesn't answer the question directly, which makes him appear dishonest.
I'm glad RPS took him to task, no other gaming mag has the balls.
It's kind of interesting comparing this to say broken age by double fine they too ran out of money and they did discus adding a publisher but felt it was betraying the principle of the kickstarter. Their openess and careful consideration of their fans is almost the polar opposite of the godus debacle.