Project Godus: Don't believe his lies

[Thrik]

Also, I must be defective in the brains, because I updated my Godus today, and played a bit, and still kind of enjoyed it. It's not great, sure, but it's got a nice tactile feedback with the audio cues, and it's pretty soothing.

I'm mostly avoiding discussing this whole palava because I haven't played Godus, and I expect that the same applies to at least half of the people lambasting Molyneux about its lack of quality or broken promises. In other words, a lot of people getting angry on other peoples' behalfs.

Regarding the whole F2P thing, that's disappointing but unsurprising considering what mobile games have to do in order to be profitable. The community funding the game was just to get it out the door — and even that was clearly vastly underestimated by the ludicrously optimistic Molyneux.

One very personal thing that repeatedly stops me from laying into Molyneux too much is that — as an apparently sometimes frustratingly optimistic person — I see a lot of myself in him. I too am often borderline stupidly over-ambitious when it comes to project timeframes and what I can achieve, even though I have the experience and sense to know better.

It isn't born out of a desire to dupe people, it's actually more of a personal motivation technique to make something lovely. I guess the problem is that Molyneux also lets the world in on this, whereas if he just kept quiet people would probably be legitimately impressed by the random wares he shares once they're ready.

Oh, and I also think that putting the game on Early Access was a huge mistake that it seems clear sapped a huge amount of momentum and motivation out of the development team. As a developer and creative I personally can't think of anything that I'd want to do less than ship out an unfinished work that will inevitably cause lots of disappointment unless it's basically just a beta, so why this has recently become seen as a good idea baffles me. If cannot go well!

[Ozzie]

Molyneux is the kind of guy who never feels the need to change his behaviour, even if it leads to monumental screw-ups. As long as he apologizes afterwards, everything is fine again in his eyes. Learning from mistakes? Coming down to Earth once in a while to get a realistic assessment of a situation? That's not for him. Don't hold him accountable to his mistakes, don't point out his contradictions, because if you do you obviously want to hound him out of the games industry.

 

He is unwilling to learn. He will never learn. I never had a problem with his overexcited visions for his games, as long as he made clear that they were merely that. But this time it feels to me like he made a game, called Curiosity, that merely served as a marketing tool for his other game, Godus, since the prize Curiosity offered was to play a special part in Godus and to get a cut of Godus' profits as soon as the part is taken. But, that part doesn't exist. If it ever will is extremely doubtful. So the guy who won was merely utilized for marketing, and all the people who paid to heighten their chances to win the prize in Curiosity were defrauded, too.

In my eyes this is fraud, and if Peter sincerely feels at fault, then he will put this right.

 

Maybe fraud is too strong a word, because it wasn't Peter's intentions to defraud anyone? Yet, before the recent articles about the debacle were published, he didn't seem to care about the state of things and was ready to jump ship from Godus. How is this not incredibly irresponsible?

[Merus]

Having considered this for a little bit, I think Twig has the right of it: most of us in this thread, myself included, are being barbarous fuckwits, and we should knock it off. We're ginning each other up to keep our righteous mob anger going for no real reason other than it makes us feel good that we're saying how bad Peter Molyneux is. We're being a mob.

 

I don't think there's a single person here in this thread - a thread that is literally called Project Godus: Don't Believe His Lies - that is unaware Peter Molyneux misrepresents what he's working on. The only new bit of information that's really come to light is the winner of Curiosity was kept in the dark for a year. Are we going to believe anything he says about his next project? No! We didn't believe a word of his last pitch either! We're not raising awareness here, nor is it within the power of the mob to turn back the clock, get that kid his money, or make Peter Molyneux be modest about his accomplishments. John Walker's leading the mob, but he's a mediocre writer at the best of times that has never understood actual development, and it shows when he mixes actual points about Molyneux's track record of misrepresentation with demands to explain why development hasn't gone smoothly, as if you just have to put enough Development Points in and you get a game out the other end.

 

So what are we actually trying to achieve here other than pointless, righteous anger?

[Ozzie]

It doesn't make me feel good. It makes me sad. I want that we don't excuse his actions, that we don't let his misdemeanors slide. I want him to change. I don't want him gone.

People always want to believe Peter, enough did to get sucked into Curiosity and the Godus Kickstarter. Are we the enlightened bunch and no one of us fell for him or what? Somehow I doubt that.

 

To make myself more clear: I don't think John Walker conducted the interview well. I found it distasteful how he was cheered on in the comments section. His questions were filled with righteous fire that was inappropiate. I would have liked the interview to be conducted in a more matter-of-factly manner.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I think something that people don't really seem to think about is the fact that Molyneux has lost years of his life into this endeavour. Most backers paid at most maybe £100? The absolute highest they could pay in was £5,000 but that's not really comparable to the years of work being put in by the team. When you quote the cumulative amount it is a lot for them to have raised but that's not what any individual can lay claim to. Someone who backed at the £30 level has a tiny stake in the project that's wholly incomparable to what Molyneux himself has desperately poured into this.

 

I'm not claiming that he should be absolved of mistakes because the failure has hit him hard, but calling him a pathological liar seems to imply that he doesn't care at all. Maybe some people really think he just loves the media hype and doesn't give a shit about the games but I'm not inclined to think that. Realistically, anyone who was excited about this game had only a fraction of Molyneux's excitement but not many people seem to see it that way.

[Ninety-Three]

I don't think there's a single person here in this thread - a thread that is literally called Project Godus: Don't Believe His Lies - that is unaware Peter Molyneux misrepresents what he's working on.

 

I backed Godus, not much, only 20$ or so. My reason for doing so is that I like Molyneux and I think he's a game designer with a lot of fun and unconventional ideas, but he lacks restraint. My thought was that while he was at Microsoft and had such massive budgets he easily let himself get distracted. My hope was that with a limited budget and a set list of features he'd focus more and not chase whatever whim or inspiration that hits him.
So much for that. It seems his problems lie elsewhere. What a shame. I was really rooting for him to prove us wrong.
This is utterly trust eroding. I've lost a lot of respect for him.

 

I present to you, a single person here in this thread who, while aware of Molyneux's habit of exaggeration, expected Molyneux to deliver better than he did with Godus. That's me as well. I never think his games will be as "revolutionary" as he likes to claim, but I still sometimes believe a thing he says.

 

What bothers me about a lot of the "In Peter's defense" arguments I hear is that they seem to say "Yeah, but we all know he overpromises and underdelivers, so why are we talking about it?" Because it's bad, that's why! Should he be absolved of his failures simply because they were predictable?

 

As for what we're trying to achieve, this is a forum on the internet. Two threads down you'll find someone saying "I really liked this thing and it was cool" just to share their opinion, and nearby is a page of posts on the pronunciation of "senpai". We're not trying to achieve anything, we're discussing things because we like discussion. No one asks of any of the other threads "What are we actually trying to achieve here?"

 

I'm not claiming that he should be absolved of mistakes because the failure has hit him hard, but calling him a pathological liar seems to imply that he doesn't care at all.

 

I think your wording has helped me understand why other people are angrier at John Walker than I am. He didn't tell Molyneux "You are a pathological liar", he asked him "Would you say that you are a pathological liar?" To me, there's a significant difference between asserting it to be the case and asking it, but a lot of people seem to be reacting as though Walker opened with an assertion. As a question, it's certainly floating the possiblity (you don't ask someone if they're a murderer unless you think they may have committed a murder, after all), but neither is it insisting it to be the case.

 

Would you say it's the case that to you, the distinction is less important? If so, I understand the reaction to Walker: outright calling Molyneux a pathological liar would be pretty shitty.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Would you say it's the case that to you, the distinction is less important? If so, I understand the reaction to Walker: outright calling Molyneux a pathological liar would be pretty shitty.

 

My initial response was less severe of that, I did think Walker's intention was to float a possibility. After reading the later questions I didn't feel like that was asked in good faith so much, because it seems like Walker has already concluded for the most part that Molyneux is the centre of blame (whether you agree or not it does seem like he's decided this before the interview). The interview in general read as an interrogation into why Molyneux has deceived people, and basically runs with the presumption that there was conscious motivation behind it rather than the possibility that sadly these things just happened and Molyneux passively tried to roll along with what happened without the usual structures and supports he's had on his previous games.

 

What bothers me about a lot of the "In Peter's defense" arguments I hear is that they seem to say "Yeah, but we all know he overpromises and underdelivers, so why are we talking about it?" Because it's bad, that's why! Should he be absolved of his failures simply because they were predictable?

 

He shouldn't and isn't, but it is unfair for the gaming community as a whole to put large expectations on him, create a large sense of entitlement and then wish for him to be villified for falling short of that. I argue in his defence because I don't see the central problem being anything malicious in Molyneux. I think he should consider the consequences of his actions more both in terms of the overpromising marketing and his poor management skills. I also think there are plenty of things that went wrong here, wouldn't be traced back to him and aren't exclusive issues to this Kickstarter but because of the confluence of them all, people are focusing on criticising Molyneux himself..

[Twig]

a page of posts on the pronunciation of "senpai". We're not trying to achieve anything, we're discussing things because we like discussion. No one asks of any of the other threads "What are we actually trying to achieve here?"

 

I'm sorry are you implying that this isn't an important discussion?!

[Ninety-Three]

 

My initial response was less severe of that, I did think Walker's intention was to float a possibility. After reading the later questions I didn't feel like that was asked in good faith so much, because it seems like Walker has already concluded for the most part that Molyneux is the centre of blame (whether you agree or not it does seem like he's decided this before the interview). 

 

I definitely agree with this part, Walker was going in with a list of points to address, and each of those points was one of Molyneux's perceived failures. However, as Walker put it:
 

Peter Molyneux: What are you trying to do? You’re trying to prove that I’m a pathological liar, I suppose, aren’t you.

RPS: I’m trying to establish that you don’t tell the truth.

 

I feel like that was Walker's goal, to get Molyneux to recognize his tendency to overpromise, and hopefully do something about it. Unforunately it's a matter of discerning the intentions of someone we've never met, so I'm not sure how much further a disagreement over those intentions can go. If you read it as Walker setting out to make Molyneux look bad, I understand the reaction.

 

He shouldn't and isn't, but it is unfair for the gaming community as a whole to put large expectations on him, create a large sense of entitlement and then wish for him to be villified for falling short of that. I argue in his defence because I don't see the central problem being anything malicious in Molyneux.

 

I agree that Molyneux is (seemingly and probably) not malicious, but I don't think that alone is reason not to villify him. These expectations weren't put on him unexpectedly by the gaming community, every expectation arose because of a promise Molyneux made. If it's not his fault through malice, it's still his fault through incompetence. The central problem is still Molyneux. If he could rein himself in and think through "Okay, can I actually deliver this?" before promising, we wouldn't be here.

 

I'm sorry are you implying that this isn't an important discussion?!

 

I'm saying that asking every discussion to have a purpose is unfair. People can aimlessly discuss important things.

[Twig]

Yes I know what you were saying I was jokingly overreacting...

[Ninety-Three]

Ah, hard to tell on the internet. I hear the Unicode company is implementing a sarcasm font next year, that should make things a little better.

[Twig]

But for real it's se-n-pa-i.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I agree that Molyneux is (seemingly and probably) not malicious, but I don't think that alone is reason not to villify him. These expectations weren't put on him unexpectedly by the gaming community, every expectation arose because of a promise Molyneux made. If it's not his fault through malice, it's still his fault through incompetence. The central problem is still Molyneux. If he could rein himself in and think through "Okay, can I actually deliver this?" before promising, we wouldn't be here.

 

See personally I think you shouldn't villify someone for honest mistakes, criticise plenty but villification feels too harsh. That's just me though. I do agree that he was incompetent (though I would say carelessness was the main problem with marketing stuff, he was presumably incompetent with management since that's not his usual focus).

 

I also can't help but think the gaming press and community at large could have reined in their expectations too? This is a recurring narrative, Watchdogs fell prey to the same thing in a totally different circumstance but had the same resulting game that didn't really perform what people ideally wanted. I think it's totally fair to say that gobbling up what the games industry feeds you without thinking about it is behaviour that people ought to try and break out of.

[Ninety-Three]

See personally I think you shouldn't villify someone for honest mistakes, criticise plenty but villification feels too harsh.

 

It's not so much the mistakes as the fact that he seems unable or unwilling to change the behaviour that leads to the mistakes.

 

though I would say carelessness was the main problem with marketing stuff, he was presumably incompetent with management since that's not his usual focus

 

That's fair, it may have been poor word choice on my part. I'd meant to suggest that he was incompetent about marketing, but careless is probably a better way to describe it.

 

I also can't help but think the gaming press and community at large could have reined in their expectations too? This is a recurring narrative, Watchdogs fell prey to the same thing in a totally different circumstance but had the same resulting game that didn't really perform what people ideally wanted. I think it's totally fair to say that gobbling up what the games industry feeds you without thinking about it is behaviour that people ought to try and break out of.

 

Sure, "hype" is an overall unhelpful thing. I remember Spore where in retrospect, nothing could have possibly lived up to the vague imaginings I had based on that initial one hour E3 demo (and that didn't even really misrepresent anything). That said, I think there's a big difference between Watchdogs hype and Molyneux hype. Watchdogs was a pretty disappointing game, but I can't think of many (any, actually, but there were probably some) PR promises the game broke, it just wasn't as good as people had hoped. Molyneux, on the other hand promises specific things. It's not "This game will be great and you'll enjoy it", but "Knock off an acorn and you can watch it grow into a tree!"

 

Getting let down on a promise of "This will be good" is something we're all used to, and it's an inevitable consequence of marketing (no one's not going to say their game is good), but when they say "This will have X" and it doesn't, it feels worse. It's not fair to say "They could have made it good if only they'd tried harder", but regarding something like acorns, it's not as if they failed because they simply weren't up to the task, they chose not to invest the work to implement it. Now maybe they decided it wasn't a good use of their time to add acorns, but the point remains that if keeping their promise was important to them, they could have put in the effort to do so, and they didn't.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I think at this point we're just disagreeing on philosophies. I could see why explicit particular promises would come off as more dishonest, but a year+ long media marketing hype blast to purport something as Game Of The Year before it's out bothers me way more... in part because other people aren't as bothered by it.

 

At the very least, we can both agree that Molyneux is to blame for repeating this cycle again and again without addressing the issue as it comes up every time.

[Gormongous]

It's not so much the mistakes as the fact that he seems unable or unwilling to change the behaviour that leads to the mistakes.

Yeah, that's why I'm defending the use of the word "pathological." It might not be something you'd want to say to someone's face, but it's hard to deny that spending several decades making the same "honest mistake" and relying on the same apologies to make things right, to the point that it's a joke he shares with interviewers now, doesn't have some kind of dysfunctional dimension to it.

I don't know, it feels really weird for people in this thread to be like, "Well, of course it's obvious to everyone that Molyneux can't help getting overenthusiastic to the point of making promises he can't keep, but don't suggest that he's a pathological liar, that's unfair." The conversations over whether Molyneux can keep from misrepresenting himself to the public and whether that misrepresentation makes him a "bad person" or whatever should not be conflated.

EDIT: Well fuck, that's a nicer bow to put on it, SBM.

[Ninety-Three]

The traditional AAA hype model (perhaps best exemplified by Destiny) is definitely gross, it just seems to me like a completely different thing. I think it's the fact that AAA hype comes from marketing departments, faceless corporate entities composed of people doing their jobs to make a game as popular as possible. It's hard to feel like I've been deceived when I can't point at a specific lie, or a face that made it.

[dartmonkey]

I've realised the only Molyneux game I've ever played is Fable II. And although flawed, it was pretty special. Damnit, I really did love that dodgy clipping-riddled dog.

[Thrik]

I've realised the only Molyneux game I've ever played is Fable II. And although flawed, it was pretty special. Damnit, I really did love that dodgy clipping-riddled dog.

 

I've thoroughly enjoyed every Molyneux game I've played apart from Curiosity, and I haven't played Godus yet. But I've never really paid much attention to Molyneux's ramblings, and in all honesty they're pretty much inconsequential. Lots of developers oversell their games prior to release, not to mention their marketing campaigns. While Molyneux has clearly struggled with 22cans, I think that throwing in his prior actions like he's the worst man in the world and some serial master manipulator who's been getting away with it for years is over the top. This is what's always distinguished Molyneux for me, and is undoubtedly why he is so revered despite his problems: he strives for perfection and achieves merely greatness. Still more than most designers manage.

 

At present I'm affording 22cans the same courtesy as Double Fine, which is letting them finish their significantly delayed game and I'll judge the end result. The slow development sucks, and there might be less resources attached to it than is ideal, but the same goes for all kinds of projects. To continue with the probably inappropriate Double Fine comparison, Grim Fandango Remastered looks to me like it was done with a skeleton crew (ha ha); Broken Age is also massively delayed even though the studio has lots of staff who've been working on Space Base, Massive Chalice, and whatever else it's working on. But I don't factor any of this into my opinion of what's presented to me as a finished product.

 

Right now, Godus is just a delayed game. There have been many of them over the years, and there'll be many more. Some of what's going on within the studio might be questionable, but how many studios would we say that about if we had more insight? Obviously the release date was a broken promise, but there's a whole wagon of Kickstarter projects like that. Everything else is TBD, and actually if you go back to the original Kickstarter the game isn't a million miles away from what was presented. I mean, I for one never expected this to be the next Black & White, even if I would love it to be. Did anyone, really?

 

The only completely indefensible point is how much of a damp squib the whole 'this will change your life' Curiosity prize has turned out to be. This is obviously related to the delayed development, but I really feel for the guy whose elation turned to apathy. It's probably for the best that the guy was never much of a Molyneux fan or even a gamer to begin with, although that doesn't stop gaming journalism from trying to turn his plight into a Daily Mail-esque sob story. But even that situation could be salvaged if 22cans has indeed been stockpiling his earnings and delivers on the multiplayer feature.

 

OK, the Linux thing is pretty lame too. I'll speculate that it was probably overlooked that the engine didn't support Linux, and that with the game already being in development when the Kickstarter was launched it was too late to start over from scratch. From looking at the engine's supported platforms, it's actually really surprising that it doesn't support Linux — because it supports virtually everything else, including OS X, Android, and even Roku. This is being paraded as a shining example of Molyneux's deceit, when in reality I think that it was an honest mistake.

[brkl]

Molyneux got away with his hype earlier because his games actually were influential even in their failings. Godus' never aspired to anything and still failed, so people are not prepared to forgive. I haven't read the interview, Walker's first line is too disgusting for me to continue.

[Twig]

OK, the Linux thing is pretty lame too. I'll speculate that it was probably overlooked that the engine didn't support Linux, and that with the game already being in development when the Kickstarter was launched it was too late to start over from scratch. From looking at the engine's supported platforms, it's actually really surprising that it doesn't support Linux — because it supports virtually everything else, including OS X, Android, and even Roku. This is being paraded as a shining example of Molyneux's deceit, when in reality I think that it was an honest mistake.

From what I understand, the engine they use (Marmalade) was at one point itself supposed to support Linux, at least implicitly ("All platforms!") if not explicitly. Easy mistake to make; still, should've done the research. But yeah, once again, it's held up as Molyneux intentionally deceiving everyone.

[feelthedarkness]

How many people posting about its "failure" and all that have actually played Godus? 

 

It's not this totally dysfunctional broken thing. 

[Gwardinen]

How many people posting about its "failure" and all that have actually played Godus? 

 

It's not this totally dysfunctional broken thing. 

 

That's probably exactly how I'd describe it, actually. If I didn't know who made it I'd have written it off as a pointless cashgrab in the vein of so many other "god games" on iOS.

[Thrik]

What about the PC version which doesn't have the micro-transaction shit? I mean, how does it hold up as a computer-based alternatives to things like Populous (which it was touted as a spiritual sequel to)? I ask as I'm not playing it until it gets a final release — the iOS version surely has to be considered an alpha at best — and am curious about its current state at the time of all this controversy.

It doesn't surprise me that the iOS version is bollocks because despite iPad being the most splendid device for strategy fans ever created, I'm yet to find a good one not saturated with horrible in-app purchases and compromise. At this point I've kind of just accepted that my tablet is going to be useless in this regard until there's eventually some kind of revolution against this crap.

[Gormongous]

Molyneux got away with his hype earlier because his games actually were influential even in their failings. Godus' never aspired to anything and still failed, so people are not prepared to forgive. I haven't read the interview, Walker's first line is too disgusting for me to continue.

 

It's full of disgusting lines, from both Molyneux and Walker. It's actually quite interesting to read in that respect, because your brain's unable to settle on which one is the protagonist. Walker is mostly being uncomfortably confrontational, with a lot of questions that no sane person would answer in the affirmative, but Molyneux is... well...

 

There have been many many times, many times in my career where I said things I shouldn't have said about acorns and oak trees and dogs and god knows what else. But I promise you, John, I only said them because at that time I truly believed them.

 

That really creeps me out, too.