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."
Alkaline, meet Halogen (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Alkaline, meet Halogen (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Alkaline, meet Halogen (Score:1)
Especially Fable, which had a lot of really cool ideas being thrown around early on and somehow shipped without any of them in the final product. Maybe they need to step back from trying to make "amazing world class AAA" games and just work on getting one out the door feature complete.
Re:Alkaline, meet Halogen (Score:2)
Fable 2? (Score:1)
Sure hope so
Re:Fable 2? (Score:1)
Re:Fable 2? (Score:1)
Way too short, and way too easy. But thats the way I like em.
Re:Fable 2? (Score:1)
Gamepad support would have been nice on the PC, though.
Re:Fable 2? (Score:2)
Re:Fable 2? (Score:1)
Oh Peter (Score:5, Insightful)
Its no wonder that Lionhead has to downsize; they're not trying to make 'popular' or 'successful' games... they're still trying to make 'innovative, groundbreaking games' and failing. Mabye they should take a que from Will Wright with his new SPORE [google.com], which is the sort of thing that I used to expect out of Lionhead or Peter Molyneux.
Re:Oh Peter (Score:2)
Fable was a successful game, it got good reviews and had very good sales, I liked quite a bit... I shudder to think what the development costs were, I've heard development was so unfocused they tried out lots of features that they ended up ditching (real time tree growth? a dog that shows you around instead of using your map?
Re:Oh Peter (Score:2)
No Great Loss (Score:4, Insightful)
Let me open by saying that Populous (sp?) is one of my favorite games of all time, even to this day. It's the game that really defined the "god game" genre and in my opinion, the only game better than it is for the time in which it was released is Populous 2.
Since then, however, it's been a downhill slide for Peter. This was made most clear to me when Populous 3 came out and totally ruined the gameplay model. The overly-curvy 3D interface made it far too difficult to see what you were doing. I would have honestly preferred another 2D iso-view game.
Black & White was a horrible, terrible bugfest, and it was slow and chunky even on fairly high-end hardware. A god game should not be that demanding, because it doesn't need to be, unless you're reaching too far.
Reaching too far seems to be Molyneux's current M.O. Fable did about 25% of the stuff it was supposed to do. Black & White 2 was a step backwards in playability, from all I've heard - I wasn't even motivated enough to hook up my desktop system, which currently is sitting in a corner, in order to play it based on the reviews.
As long as Molyneux is unwilling to actually finish a game, I couldn't give one tenth of one fuck if he never makes another one.
Re:No Great Loss (Score:2)
I just want them to make a new version of Syndicate dammit! Is that too much to ask??
Re:No Great Loss (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No Great Loss (Score:2)
My bad. I actually knew that EA owned (in the leet sense) bullfrog, but I forgot completely.
Guess that's the danger with being identified with a franchise.
Re:No Great Loss (Score:1)
Amen.
Re:Lionhead: always promising the world (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Lionhead: always promising the world (Score:2)
Re:Lionhead: always promising the world (Score:2)
-1 Overrated (Score:2)
> a pool of 100 super talented developers...
> a new super team...
> an amazing next generation title...
Sorry, Lionhead forfeited the right to all those adjectives when it made Black and White.
Re:-1 Overrated (Score:2)
Re:-1 Overrated (Score:2)
The Movies (Score:4, Funny)
hey I liked black and white (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes it might be a bit buggy sometimes but for something you pickup from the $5 shelf
its not all that bad.
[sVen]
Re:hey I liked black and white (Score:2)
As much as I loved it, the bugs kept you from actually enjoying it once you made it past the vortex. That seems to be where the 'save' glitch started to kick in, along with random freezes that just killed the gameplay.
First to be axed: The Obnoxious Narrator (Score:2, Funny)
Re:First to be axed: The Obnoxious Narrator (Score:1)
"Hello brother. Thanks for coming. Now, go back to the Guild and read the Quest Card I left with all the information I *should* be relating directly on it."
Or, upon entering a new story arc, you h
Lionhead is not so good at creating monster hits (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
The simplest way to create a monster hit is to have fundamentally solid gameplay mechanics paired with a style and tone that both compliments that gameplay, and that the intended audience can identify with even without being hard core gamers. I believe that most of Lionheads problems are primarily stylistic.
END COMMUNICATION
Re:Lionhead is not so good at creating monster hit (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know. Nintendo has done a good job sucking people into NintenDogs...
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 numb
The problem lies with Molyneux (Score:2, Insightful)
Dungeon Keeper 2 (Score:3, Interesting)
What's Black and White... (Score:1)