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The veteran games designer and Lionhead chief says he wants to prove himself after being awarded a fellowship

Peter Molyneux has admitted to having moments of doubts about his future as a games designer. After accepting his Bafta fellowship to a standing ovation at the Bafta video game awards on Wednesday, the industry veteran told the Guardian that some disappointing reviews of Fable III had led to him questioning his abilities.

“The Fable III the reviews were, justifiably, not what I’d hoped for,” he said. “We just weren’t good enough with the craft of what we did. That always makes you reflect. And I said to myself late one night, ‘Have I already created the greatest game I’m ever going to create? Is the rest just a downhill struggle?’ And the next day a letter came through the post telling me I’d been nominated for a Bafta fellowship. And I just thought, ‘I am going to prove that I haven’t done my best.’ Everything I’ve done up to this point is just training for what I should do.”

Molyneux also admitted to being overwhelmed by emotion when accepting his award. “I feel unbelievably humbled. As I walked up on stage I almost fainted. There was this sea of faces, and lots of people I’ve worked with before, and everyone stood. I was choking up. It was an incredible feeling, and I do immediately want to go home and start proving that I’m really, truly worthy of this.”

The industry veteran also took the opportunity to praise games in general and spoke about an “energy in the air” right now for developers. “Tens of millions of people are choosing games as a medium of entertainment. Over my career I’ve gone from selling games on trestle tables at royal horticultural halls in London to a night like tonight. I remember standing in front of the press in 1991 arguing that computer games are art by any definition, they have cultural influence! But what should worry people in film and TV is we’ve only just started. Only now, when you see social gaming, mobile gaming and Kinect coming on, you think, Jesus, where is this all going to go? That’s what’s exciting.”

In his acceptance speech Molyneux humorously touched on his reputation of over-promising on his games, but denied it was a PR tactic. “I’m not over-promising, I’m over-believing. I always truly believe that this is going to be the greatest game of all time – I wouldn’t try to do it any other way. But now I’ve come to realise that, you know what? It’s all about the execution. You can be super-passionate, but you need to execute on it.”

When asked how his current game projects will be affected by the Bafta acknowledgment he said: “At Lionhead, we always have a meeting on Fridays and I think I will stand up and say, ‘This award is for everyone.’

But I’ll also say to them, ‘Let’s ensure our next game is nominated next year!’”

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Keith Stuart

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Some fresh info on the capital’s month-long gaming jamboree.

The organisers of the annual London Games Festival have been releasing a steady stream of intriguing announcements over the last week. Running from September 30 to November 4, the festival is a collection of events taking in the Eurogamer Games Expo, the Golden Joystick Awards and the MCM Expo, which covers games, mucis and manga. There are also plenty of more esoteric options, including BoardGameCamp, a day-long spin-off event form the annual GameCamp looking at, yes, board games with lots of practical sessions and the chance to design your own game.

The big news, perhaps, is that Sonic the Hedgehog creator Yuji Naka will be there in the first week, presenting his new game Ivy the Kiwi and then holding an audience Q&A session. Naka left Sega back in 2006 and set up Prope, a studio dedicated to supporting offbeat and indie game projects. The date and venue are yet to be confirmed by check the website for more details.Meanwhile, the huge Eurogamer Expo, which takes over Earls Court between October 1-3, has just announced that Peter Molyneux will be kicking off the first day with a demo of Lionhead’s Fable III. If it’s anything like the talk he gave at this summer’s Develop conference, it’ll be worth the entry price alone: Molyneux is a great speaker and fabulously indiscreet, so you’re bound to pick up a few secrets that’ll have Microsoft execs shuffling uncomfortably in their seats. Talking of Microsoft, it seems Gears of War 3 will also be on the showfloor in playable form, joining the likes of Gran Turismo 5, Killzone 3, Medal of Honor and Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.

Finally, the festival has also announced a competition offering two lucky winners the chance to go to every event on the calendar and blog about them all for the official website. “We’re looking for two enthusiastic gamers, who are keen to join the games industry, to become the festival’s official ‘voice’,” says director, Kirsty Payne. “This is a fantastic opportunity for an aspiring writers and bloggers – not just to see the inner workings of all aspects of the games industry, but to get their work in front of a global audience.” If you’re interested, you need to email Kirsty (kirsty dot payne at ukie dot info) outlining in 200 words or fewer why you would be an ideal candidate.

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Keith Stuart

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The game design legend ripped into his own RPG at Develop, while also introducing his new one.

Say what you like about Peter Molyneux, the veteran British games designer is unsparingly honest about his mistakes. In his keynote at the Develop conference yesterday, he admitted that his epic RPG sequel Fable II, “had some terribly messy things about it”:

“As we always do in development, we rushed at the end. And you have this terrible phase, which we all know, where the world looks this beautiful with this many game features, and it slowly transitions into something less beautiful with less gameplay features, because you’ve got so many bugs. And on Fable II at one point we had about 67,000 bugs. The Microsoft test team rated us ‘super black’. No-one had even been black before – they’d had red and orange and green. But we were super black and it was considered utterly impossible for anyone to come out of that. And that’s why we had to scale down.

But he wasn’t finished there. “And there were also huge design flaws in Fable II – we had a lot of game features that people just quite frankly didn’t use, or just used once. A great example of that was getting married. It didn’t mean anything, it didn’t add anything to the game, it was just an excuse to have sex; people wanted to find out whether or not sex in Fable was going to be another Hot Coffee. That was a huge problem. There was this piece of research that came out which basically said, more than 50% of the people who played fable only used 60% of the game features. So 40% of the content in Fable II people didn’t use.”

Molyeneux was at the event to run through a new demo of Fable III. Here, you play the son (or daughter) of the hero from Fable II, and must now usurp your evil brother for control of the kingdom of Albion. We’ll run a proper preview soon, but things look very promising with a revised combat system (your weapons morph into new variations depending on your individual combat style), and a new visualised inventory: menus and sub-menus have been completely abandoned, in favour of explorable areas in which your items, clothing and power-ups are stored on screen. In the demo, we saw a vast cavern complex, and an icy mountainous forest area, both of which offered up a huge vista of navigable terrain. Certainly, whatever lessons Lionhead have learned from Fable II, they’re not cranking down on the epic-o-meter. That Microsoft test team had better brace itself.

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Keith Stuart

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More news from the festivities at Microsoft’s X10 event last week: it seems Peter Molyneux has confirmed a whole new continent (in addition to Albion) for Fable III, as well as new races for the next instalment in the RPG series.

Molyneux told IncGamers that the new continent (called Arora) will be accessible from Albion. “It will have new races and a whole new environment,” Molyneux confirmed.

This news follows Molyneux’s revelation that Lionhead is doing-away with the HUD for Fable III.

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