Peter Molyneux is described as a "legendary game maker" in a recent interview with Glixel, and to a point it's true. But in more recent years, he's acquired a reputation as a guy who promises too much and delivers too little, epitomized by Curiosity, a game which promised (and failed) to deliver a life-changing experience for the winner, and the Godus debacle that followed in its wake. As you can imagine, his fan base is not quite as wide as it was 15 years ago.
That may be why he is uncharacteristically reticent to talk about his new project, Legacy, a game which he said he's been coding himself as a sort of return-to-your-roots thing that's left him feeling "so much more empowered than I have for years." But what exactly is Legacy?
"I think it would be a mistake to talk about it," Molyneux said. "The only thing I think is wise to tell you is that it's very different. One of the things I am proud of is the number of different genres that I've attempted. At the moment, it's hard to peg what genre Legacy falls into."
He did say that at this point the project is "platform agnostic," rather than being designed specifically as a mobile or PC game, and that he's currently working on getting "the feeling of it right: You do have to worry about the interface. You have to worry about the input method. At the moment, I'm focusing on the mouse, purely because it's the easiest for me."
He revealed no more about it, but did touch on a range of other topics, including regrets—he has a few—the relative success of his mobile games, the failure to pay Curiosity winner Bryan Henderson, and his connection to (and understandable sympathy for) No Man's Sky, which he believes has been treated entirely unfairly.
"If you approach it without knowing anything about it, it's an incredible experience—flying from a planet, no loading, no nothing, into space and then realizing that all those little dots you're seeing, you can visit," he said. "Bloody hell, that's pretty incredible, isn't it? I'm not sure if this analogy works, but it's a little bit like how the Lord of the Rings films never worked for me. They were incredibly good, but that world was so defined in my mind by reading the book. In a way, No Man's Sky was the same. It was so defined by everything that people had heard and seen. It was ruined in the same way that the Lord of the Rings films, for me, were ruined by all the hype that came before."
