Molyneux boasts about his post-Fable 2 project

by Ross Miller { Mar 10th 2008 at 7:00PM }

Mad scientist extraordinaire Peter Molyneux has made a great discovery! In an interview with GamersGlobal, the Fable 2 designer talked about an AI-focused experiment codenamed Dmitri. The experiment became a game six months ago after "a discovery was made." Said Molyneux, "I think that discovery is so significant... This discovery has lead us to start a game and that game will be on the front cover of Nature magazines and Science magazines." That's assuming the AI project doesn't develop self-awareness and kill us all.

As for a release date, Molyneux said it would come out when "trees still [have] leaves, but with a brownish tint." Though our first thought is September, we've gone ahead and sent to Microsoft a picture of the official Joystiq elm tree spray-painted with the proper color in the hopes of an early review copy.

Tags: ai, aritificial-intelligence, dmitri, fable-2, molyneux, peter-molyneux

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

John McPoop @ Mar 10th 2008 7:11PM

Didn't we hear these empty promises before from Molyneux??

Fable was supposed to have much more content than it did and I am sure he is exagerating again....

I swear the fish I caught was thiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiis big

Tiptup300 @ Mar 10th 2008 8:05PM

(not to scale)

Dr. Stabbingworth @ Mar 10th 2008 7:14PM

Doesn't this guy also do Bungie's marketing?

Ryan @ Mar 13th 2008 11:48PM

Molyneux is the game industries Dean Kamen. Over-promise and under-deliver.

Marty @ Mar 10th 2008 7:16PM

Hehe, say what you will about Molyneux, empty promises, and what have you, but you can't deny that the man loves what he does, and certainly gets excited about it.

Jason @ Mar 10th 2008 7:21PM

I agree. At least he wants all these cool features to be there, but because of whatever resource limitations some have to be removed or scaled down.

John McPoop @ Mar 10th 2008 8:27PM

wanting something to be in a game and claiming it will be there are two different things

Nick the Hero of Canton @ Mar 10th 2008 10:03PM

Everything The Molynator promised was made, doesn't mean that it can make the final cut for various reasons (including time and hardware support)

tmacairjordan87 @ Mar 10th 2008 7:17PM

next gen chess...confirmed??

HighFiveJesus @ Mar 10th 2008 7:18PM

Jeez Molyneux, shut your friken gob ok?

Digital Fox @ Mar 10th 2008 7:39PM

+1 for Juno reference.

Jeff @ Mar 10th 2008 8:14PM

-1 for Juno Reference.

HighFiveJesus @ Mar 10th 2008 8:46PM

i bet you guys just looooved transformers, that pile.

AoE @ Mar 10th 2008 9:03PM

Nah, Juno was... here my favorite reviewer was too on the money for me to not quote: "Juno drops a Dumpster-load of references on you—from McSweeney's to Herschell Gordon Lewis to Sonic Youth—all of them torn from the headlines of 1997's weekly newspapers. Nothing can disguise the sitcom ping-pong of wisecracks traded and parried. Slightly more literate than the average TV show, the film ends up slower than many. It's like a half-speed episode of Gilmore Girls."

And Transformers? That was crap too! Not liking a bad dramedy doesn't automatically imply that someone will instead like a bad action film HighFiveJesus ;)

HighFiveJesus @ Mar 10th 2008 9:17PM

i didn't say not liking [this movie] automatically meant you loved [that movie], i was just being playful with both comments. i said i would wager the risk of being a snob to make a conclusion i think was pretty safe, if you don't like movies like juno, you probably ate up movies like transformers. sorry for the ghey pep talk, its pretty clear how gamers feel about it already.

StrangeBum @ Mar 10th 2008 11:34PM

I will come right out and say it. I'm a film nerd before a game nerd, and I happened to like Juno. I actually liked it alot.

So I say awesome reference, have a nice night, and go fuck yourselves San Diego!

c what I did there?

Silly Sauce @ Mar 10th 2008 7:29PM

I HOPE HE BRINGS BACK B.C.!!!

eugene @ Mar 10th 2008 7:31PM

yeah, this is the same load of crap he's been shoveling for the last decade.

Cabcru @ Mar 10th 2008 10:43PM

Didn't he promise to stop hyping his games into the stratosphere a while back?

Why is it that if anyone else spews empty promises they label them BS artists but when it comes to Molyneux... oh, visionary! Got to love his drive, oh, his reach exceeds his grasp! etc.

Brett Parsons @ Mar 10th 2008 7:52PM

Nothing new to see here. Just Peter, selling his next game.

playwhutyalike @ Mar 10th 2008 8:00PM

my comments working yet?

playwhutyalike @ Mar 10th 2008 8:01PM

Holy crap, they are! I guess you can't have Crackdown in your name, eh?

Gavin @ Mar 10th 2008 8:04PM

The minute they see me, fear me
I'm the epitome - a public enemy
Used, abused without clues
I refused to blow a fuse
They even had it on the news
Don't believe the hype...

Markusdragon @ Mar 10th 2008 8:11PM

"a discovery was made." Said Molyneux, "I think that discovery is so significant... This discovery has lead us to start a game and that game will be on the front cover of Nature magazines and Science magazines."

Global warming solved.

Jeff @ Mar 10th 2008 8:13PM

That guy is fucking hilarious.

As far as I'm concerned, Fable sucked massively, and he has not contributed one good thing to gaming.

Geist @ Mar 10th 2008 8:53PM

Oh good, a 12 year old.

At least, only someone who is 12 would not realize that Molyneux invented the God-game genre with titles like Populous, Dungeon Keeper 1 and 2, as well as creating the tycoon genre with the original Theme Park.

Protean @ Mar 10th 2008 8:55PM

Good Lord, man... are you serious? Your memory must be short, indeed.

Fable, Black and White... I'll give you those, no problem.

Populous, Power Monger, Syndicate, Theme Park, Magic Carpet, Dungeon Keeper... those you cannot deny. Those are pure gaming brilliance. Peter Molyneux has proven himself. Now he's trying to play with some new ideas. Cut him some slack (and take everything he says with a jar full of salt... he's a bit big on the hype...).

Silly Sauce @ Mar 10th 2008 9:16PM

Molyneux has contributed more to gaming than most designers ever will...

Populous
Theme Park
Magic Carpet
Black & White
Fable
The Movies
Fable 2

Each one of these games has had some kind of positive effect on the entire gaming industry. You all should be happy that we have a designer like Molyneux who isn't trying to make you a cookie cutter game like most other game developers have been doing for the past 8 years.

bigsofty @ Mar 10th 2008 8:17PM

"Molyneux", he great a blowing his own trumpet... not much good at designing games, they all end up in terminal repetitive game play boredom half way through... a name on the box, I've grown up to avoid... Zzzzz!

Nando @ Mar 10th 2008 8:37PM

He probably red about artificial life and genetic algoritms...

Ihavepants @ Mar 11th 2008 12:00AM

read*

ThornedVenom (Harley Quinn Defense Force) @ Mar 11th 2008 5:40AM

Looks like SOMEONE needed to -red- more!

Nando @ Mar 11th 2008 8:53PM

I'm pretty sure red is past for read, and english isn't even my mother language...

Courtney @ Mar 10th 2008 8:53PM

Apparently, his greatest skill is in talking about things he's not supposed to talk about while not actually talking about anything at all.

From a previous Joystiq post on Fable 2:

"He's only talking about half of the co-op..."

"...which makes us wonder if the half of co-op he can't talk about is that it can sometimes be competitive."

"He tells us that he's not, actually, allowed to talk about it, but it has to do with how Fable will touch more of the outside world."

J.Goodwin @ Mar 10th 2008 9:27PM

Peter's a good guy, perhaps a bit too good for his own good, and he's a visionary who gets carried away in his own dreams when he talks. He's constantly spinning out new ideas, which is great, except when the media decides to take you to task for things that were said off the cuff that they regarded as promises because his PR handler didn't immediately come down and say that they weren't actual features.

Dmitri is a project that was in the works before Fable 2. We know that it started, and was mothballed because at the time it was not technically feasible.

If it comes back, it will be worth paying attention to, like anything that comes out of Lionhead. If anything, their greatest fault all along has been the last two months of development, i.e., they typically don't get the last two months of development time that's needed to take their great ideas to final fruition.

Batzarro @ Mar 10th 2008 10:01PM

Molineux + Midnight Bliss confirmed...also horrifying.

gLitterbug @ Mar 10th 2008 10:15PM

It seems that Mr. Molyneux transformed into a bit of a mini-Bethesda around the time of Black & White. Meaning all he does is reiterate a certain idea until he will reach his holy grail of making that perfect game he has in his head.

That said, the similarities end there though, as he, all the promises and boasting aside, is actively trying to get his ideas somewhere and make games about feeling connected instead of making yet another sandbox but with next gen graphics and in a slightly different designed setting.

Purple Haze @ Mar 10th 2008 11:58PM

He probably just made realistic tree AI.

Ihavepants @ Mar 11th 2008 12:14AM

Yep, previous comments he has said about this is that its main feature is AI approximately 8x as advanced as the creature AI in Black and White 2.

He also said that this game will be about you being able to live through your own life, in the game.

This may be interesting.

Bluebrake @ Mar 11th 2008 12:53AM

Dimitri was Lionhead's super-secret project back when I was a member of the pre-release Black & White community... in 1999. I think that's kind of funny, but I'm not being cynical. Molyneux is a visionary, and sooner or later one of his games will match his vision. I plan to be there when it happens.