Tough Times for Lionhead Studios 43
Alice, over at the Wonderland blog, discusses Lionhead's decision to reduce the size of the company. The maker of The Movies and Black and White 2 has apparently not been doing so well financially this year. From the article: "Over the last few months Lionhead has been working on plans for a new AAA world class game. As work on a number of its titles draws to a close, a pool of 100 super talented developers at Lionhead are available to create a new super team at Lionhead. This will be in addition to an existing team which is working on an amazing next generation title. This strategy was presented to Lionhead this morning in a company meeting but sadly it will mean some redundancies."
Re:No Great Loss (Score:1, Informative)
They're just crap at executing the ideas (Score:3, Informative)
Nintendogs was already mentioned, and it's not only selling like crazy, it's also helping sell the DS big time. I know people who had no intention of getting a portable console, but ended up buying one anyway because their kid wanted Nintendogs.
I'll add titles like Catz or Creatures. I don't know the exact sales numbers, but I'd assume it must have been enough to be worth making sequels and console ports. Creatures was up to number 3, last I checked, and it had spawned user mods and a free semi-online expansion. And, oh, you could train them. In fact, you pretty much had to.
And then there's The Sims Unleashed, and expansion pack which did amazingly well given that almost all it gave you was cats and dogs for The Sims. And yes, the dogs had to be trained.
So basically enough people _do_ want a virtual pet, but it still had to be fun. That's where Black And White fell short. For most of us was about as much fun as a trip to the dentist.
"The games are excellent in the most abstract and fundamental sense. Be a god, good or evil as you choose. Be a villian or a hero. But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. I would say that Fable is probably Lionheads most commercially viable franchise. Black and White and Movies are just too hard for marketing to sell."
Marketting it had in spades, and in a sense that's all it had. PM hypes any half-baked idea he ever has, and EA was more than happy to act as the amplifier for that hype.
His games since Populous weren't even that innovative. Training a creature had been done before (Creatures 1 to 3 already existed), creature fights had been done before (Pokemon), Movies style games are a dime a dozen (look for anything with "Tycoon" in the title), and good-vs-evil is a _stapple_ of RPGs and several other games. I mean, seriously, whop-de-fucking-do, a RPG where you get alignment and a good-or-evil choice at the end? It describes almost half the RPGs ever made. Vampire, KOTOR, you name it.
That wasn't as much innovation, as just hype.
But that's not the real problem. The real problem is just that: "But the gameplay often falls just a bit short. ". No, make that: falls very much short compared to what's already on the market.
See, making games isn't all about having a crazy idea, but also then actually making a game that's fun to play. Any gamer has some crazy idea of a game. Ask anyone. (And see if it doesn't involve good-vs-evil too.) What makes a great designer is then putting some good gameplay around it, giving it some interesting content, and polishing it all into a gem. _That's_ what game design is all about.
Now let's look at Lionhead's games.
Black And White was a micro-management nightmare, and an _intrusive_ nightmare at that. (You know it's bad when even the fanboys tell you to use the turbo-click infinite-resources _exploit_ to keep the worshippers fed or to have enough wood. Or for fuck's sake, literally, the villagers wouldn't even reproduce unless you personally assign them to.) It also passes swift good-or-evil judgment on the _player_, based on some idiotic criteria that don't even follow your actions. (E.g., failing to save the villagers from someone else's attack, even if you did try to save them, makes you the spawn of satan. Sorry, that's just bullshit. Incompetent, maybe, but no way that counts as evil.) It also doesn't help that both sides are a grotesque carricature that boggles the mind. There is no good or evil in that game, there's just playing a micro-managing retard versus playing a self-destructive retard that's damaging his own power pool.
The execution also basically sucked. The game was launched missing features that were hyped to hell and back, the AI for the creature (i.e., the main hyped feature) was a sick joke, save and reload were broken by design (wtf is the point of save and reload if half the game, e.g., the creature's state, _isn't_ saved or restoreabl