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Joystiq interviews Peter Molyneux of Lionhead Studios
Yesterday at the Develop Conference in Brighton, Jennie and I had the opportunity to sit down and talk with the founder of Lionhead Studios, Peter Molyneux. We chatted about the issue of hype, frustrations surrounding PC gaming and Peter's early days in the industry, amongst other topics.Fable was pretty much portrayed as one of the most open games of all time, but in terms of hype, it failed to meet the high expectations that you gave the game. There was even a forum post where you apologized about this: why did it get to that level?Well, it started with this fatal line that I made and that was that I wanted to make Fable the greatest role playing game of all time. I kinda still defend that because I honestly don't see the point in making a game that you don't honestly believe has a chance of being the greatest game of all time. I meet the press quite a lot, every 6-8 weeks there's some sort of press interview. The way I work then is to get a system in, play around with it, polish it, make it better. Sometimes I leave it as it is and sometimes I throw it away.
AMD's "4 x 4" platform pairs 2 dual-core CPUs, 4 GPUs
Gamers gather 'round, for we have a tale of a new platform from AMD that will surely get your pulses racing, at least if the idea of having two dual-core processors and four graphics cards in one machine sounds as appealing to you as it does to us. Known as the "4 x 4" Enthusiasts Platform (four cores plus four GPUs -- we know, it's a bit of a stretch), the setup will allow manufacturers to offer configurations which users can upgrade over time, so consumers could start out with one dual-core chip and and one or more video cards, for example, instead of laying down what will likely be loads of cash on a maxed-out system. Another interesting bit of info revealed at the AMD analyst day in Austin, Texas was the fact that dual ATI Crossfire configurations can be used with 4 x 4, which indicates that AMD's possible acquisition target is probably working on a quad-SLI-esque solution to match rival nVidia. So start saving your pennies, dear gamers, because things are looking to get mighty interesting this year.
Mac game devs cautiously optimistic about Boot Camp
Mac gaming website Inside Mac Games has posted a selection of Mac game developers reaction's to Apple's Boot Camp software. The overall feeling from the developers is one of cautious optimism: any loss in interest for OS X specific games could be offset by an increase in overall Mac market share from casual Windows gamers flooding to the platform. Andrew Welch, the founder of Ambrosia Software (creators of classics like the Escape Velocity series of games), doesn't "view it as a threat at all... but then again, we're not in the porting business". Aspyr's Glenda Adams and Brad Oliver are in the porting business. Fortunately they also publish and port games for other platforms. According to Brad "if Mac sales tank, we've got enough revenue coming in from PC and console ports that it probably won't hurt the company too much and we'd just focus on the other platforms." Mac game sales will only tank if people stop buying Mac games and instead play their games in Windows but as Andrew says, "people will get sick of dual-booting, and would prefer to run native games, just like Linux users prefer native games". Ian Lynch Smith of Freeverse points out that this may be only the first step: "Apple is pushing the intel roll out very aggressively, and now aggressively pushing dual boot (and virtualization eventually from someone)". Hopefully in the next 6 months we'll see effective virtualization of Windows games from within OS X. That's the most desirable outcome for both Mac users and developers.[Via TUAW]
Quad SLI gaming for cheapskates
The guys over at destructoid.com weren't too impressed with Dell's $10,000 pricetag for the company's flagship Renegade system so they decided to take the matter into their own hands by collating the key components of a custom built Quad SLI gaming rig. Breaking their imaginary system down, they found that the main areas essential for building a machine comparable in performance to the Renegade were: Duh, the Quad SLI graphics cards. A budget of around $2800 should set you up with a 4 card bundle. A Gigabyte Quad SLI motherboard to stick those four cards in, $240. Pentium 3.73GHz Extreme, $1300. 10,000 RPM Hard Drive and 2GB of branded RAM, $450. Battlefield 2 at 1600x1200 with graphics on full, priceless. Chuck in a case, cooling, sound card, DVD drive and peripherals (keyboard, mouse and 2.1 speaker system) and you're looking at a budget of $6,000 for a well equipped Quad SLI system. That's around $2,000 less than the Renegade PC (sans the $2,199 30" widescreen monitor that Dell includes with their system) so you're not quite saving the $4,000 that the destructoid guys claim you will.The obvious downsides to building your own Quad SLI rig include: the hassle of constructing the system and installing Windows yourself (although we're sure most people could do a better job than Dell) and the lack of a warranty, but before you think about these problems ask yourself the question: is that red flame color scheme worth two grand?[Thanks, Franco]
