Famed designer talks to Develop about the lessons learnt in running Lionhead
If there's one thing in life that's difficult, it's admitting when you've made a mistake. But when you're in charge of 200 people, and those mistakes are costing you millions of dollars a time, those mistakes are that much worse.
For the latest issue of Develop, we sat down with Peter Molyneux to talk about the mistakes he's made as studio head of Lionhead - and, most importantly, how he's learnt some important lessons and turned the studio around. We're pretty confident, in fact, that it's his most revealing interview ever - and we've just posted part one of it online.
Although classically known as taking its time to develop games, recent years have seen new measures and project management techniques employed at Lionhead to make the company a more professional operation.
"If you asked me what I was most proud of in Fable 2, it’s not actually any of [the innovations we introduced]: I’m most proud of the process," he says. "If I’m honest, on Fable we just burnt people’s lives; we destroyed the team. Week after week, month after month, they worked 50, 60, 70, 80 hour weeks. It destroyed their lives and destroyed their marriages. You just can’t do that anymore."
"So looking back at Fable 2, yeah, we crunched at the end, but it was only at the very, very end that we used up people’s whole weekends. There’s a few exceptions, but a lot of Sundays this studio was empty, which I thought was great."
Advertisement
For more on how Molyneux has relaxed the reign on creativity, plus how the company is now a much better place to work, check out part one of our interview here. Part two, in which Molyneux lays bare about his self-imposed PR blitz and where the company goes from here, will be published tomorrow.
"It destroyed their lives and destroyed their marriages. You just can’t do that anymore".
If this was a decade back I can understand, but this was a recent development cycle. It's entirely unforgivable that it even got to this stage. I appreciate that this is a previous era we're talking about but most people worked this out a while back. Once again it shows Molyneux is the games industry equivalent of Oasis, you either love him and swallow his lessons or dislike him and point out the numerous faults he continues to show.
Isn't he talking about Fable which was released over a decade ago? Forgive my confusion if I'm wrong
Fable was 2004.
While that doesn't sound that long ago, it was a generation ago and QoL is something that has only just started improving over the past few years.
I work for an developer who just released a big AAA title in November. I can say that this is still extremely common in the industry. However, It's not like the publishers /leads MAKE us work all this extra time like slave drivers, in fact they are frequently telling us to go home! It's moreso that we really try to push ourselves to do the best work we can ( while still maintaining a balance with our home lives ).
You really have to have a passion for what you do, or you will end up really hating the "process" . This is true for any job, really. If you don't LOVE your job, going to work is lame for even 1 hour a week.
A generation ago? Hardly. And.. Studios are still doing it today.
"It's not like the publishers /leads MAKE us work all this extra time like slave drivers, in fact they are frequently telling us to go home"
The sooner people stop doing this the sooner managers will be able to schedule work better to fit into 9-5 and have lives and families ... rather than having an inflated understanding of what you can get done in a month meaning overtime and cutting features late on.
The grunts that do this make things worse for everyone else. We all want to make the best game possible but we don't want to be working late all night because some guy is making us look bad by taking too much on. Half the time these people find extra stuff to do or waste more of their day because they can't keep time and aim to get their work done by the end of the work day.
It's as much of a work culture problem as a management one. Any improvement in QoL over the last few years has more to do with workers growing up than management decisions.
