Peter Molyneux

Project Survivors (Lionhead Studios) [Cancelled Concept – Xbox 360]

Survivors was a misterious project that was in development at Lionhead Studios for the Xbox 360: not many information are available, apart from a series of concept arts, from wich we can only wonder about how the game could have been played. From what we can see, it seems that Survivors was going to be a “survival” action adventure, in the same vein as Raw Danger or Disaster Report (aka SOS: The Final Escape in Europe), in which the player would have had to find a way to survive in a collapsing city / world.

It’s currenlty unknow if this project will ever be finished or if it could be somehow connected to the Dimitri Project (another misterious Lionhead game).

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FABLE 2 Sex Minigame gets cut

A week ago a group of journalist saw the latest FABLE 2 beta at Lionhead in Guildford and had some talk with Peter Molyneux. In the chat, Peter said that he “wanted a sex minigame in there, but they had to drop it, due to the nature of the content. Now the screen just goes black, and your hear some moaning.” No more fap for us! Another interesting note is that “the female character also came close to being cut. But the female designers on the game wanted her in, so they made it happen”. [source: NeoGAF] The first FABLE has got lot of removed parts, and it’s nice to know that the sequel go on with the tradition.

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Project EGO (Fable) [XBOX – Beta]

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Fable is an Action RPG developed by Big Blue Box, a satellite developer of Lionhead Studios, originally published by Microsoft for the Xbox in 2004. Originally developed under the name Project Ego, Fable’s development involved more than seventy people. The game’s release was widely anticipated, due in part to Lionhead creator Peter Molyneux’s enthusiastic hype of the game. [Info from Wikipedia]

Many of the features promised for Project Ego were never implemented: the original concept was to give the player total freedom on the game’s world, but the final game was instead very limited. A cooperative multiplayer mode was planned too, but it was later removed. Most of the places seen in the early screenshots were removed from the final game or heavily changed.

Big Blue Box wanted to create a time system in which seasons and years  would pass according to the game’s time, making our character to age and the world to change according. This hyped time-system was completely removed. The main character does age in the game, but after a cutscene and not following the game-time. As we can read from an IGN preview:

Not enough to convince you of how intelligent this game may be? Well, let’s say you are a mean cuss and one day you cut a kid. That cut will become a scar and if you return to that town twenty years later, that kid will have that same scar and a serious hate-on for you. Or maybe you’re more into plant mutilation. Carve your name in a tree and it will stay there through the years.

As you can imagine, this is not possible in Fable.

Even if one of the beta screenshots shows that we could have been able to kill even kids, that was not possible in the final version. As noted by ResidentDante from the NeoGAF Forum:

I remember Peter Molyneux telling about this on a documentary on tv. They let you kill children in the beta version, which they tested with a group of people. When they noticed a guy playing the game killing all the children around in the village, they decided to remove this “feature”.

Thanks to FullMetalMC for some of these images!

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B.C. (Lionhead Studios) [XBOX – Cancelled]

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BC was going to be an action-adventure video game in development for Microsoft’s Xbox video game system by Intrepid Computer Entertainment, a satellite of Lionhead Studios. It was cancelled in 2004, having been in development for some time; why is not known though it has been alleged that it was “overly ambitious“. Set in a Harryhausen-esque prehistoric time period, BC featured the player having to advance their tribe in a world inhabited by dinosaurs and other anachronistic creatures. From what is known, the player would assume the role of a tribal chief who is responsible for the welfare of his people. It is up to the player/chief to spur his people’s technological development and lead his tribe of cavemen to a Valley free of predatory dinosaurs and savage ape-man where they can evolve in peace. Part of that means that the player/chief would assign various duties to his tribesmen. However, it would also have been possible to play as any member of the tribe.

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Early images at E3 showed extreme clarity and self shading but early reviews called the artificial intelligence the most impressive thing. According Gamespot.com’s information on the game, the game would have had a foodchain, like Peter Jackson’s King Kong (video game), in which each thing would have been subject to being eaten by something higher on the foodchain. In addition the dinosaurs and other creatures would have been intelligent, interacting with each other acting independently of player. It would have been possible to affect the videogame world as a whole, leading some people to comment on the driving certain species to extinction.

Other things would have included capturing and training certain animals to use against tribal enemies. Animals known to exist in the world would have been Tyrannosaurs, Velociraptors, Pachycephelosaurs, Sabre-Tooth Tigers, Apatosaurs (or Brontosaurs as the game would have focused on anachronisms) dodos, ape-men, and others. As part of the exaggeration, the game, in addition to anachronims in dinosaur ages, would have featured dinosaurs as larger than they really were. In one preview, Molyneux was quoted as saying that the Rex seen in screenshots was a child, a third the size of its parent. the game was also planned to be very bloody. Gamespot quoted Molyneux as saying that the dinosaurs will spill “swimming pools full of blood” when killed.

At the moment, the game has been cancelled, fans believing that it was too ambitious to be made; indeed, even while the game was still in production, Molyneux said that he was unsure when he could release it due to “the ambitious nature of the gameplay and the high standards the people developing it are pushing for.” According to one article, as of May, 2002, “[the demo build] was roughly 50 percent complete“. Its cancellation was announced in late 2004 with Molyneux saying “The decision to suspend work on any games project is always a very difficult one, particularly when it is a title with the potential of BC.” However, fans hope that Molyneux will live up to his suggestion that the game might be revived at a later date. [info from Wikipedia]

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