Molyneux admits tinkering with games to match quotes
"Sometimes in the past".
Lionhead's Peter Molyneux has admitted that he sometimes changes things in his games to match the things he's been quoted as saying by the press.
"I've come to realise that the way I speak, the things I talk about are going to be interpreted. And that sometimes leads to misquotes," the affable developer told Gamasutra. "I'll be absolutely honest with you, sometimes in the past I've actually changed little bits of the game to match the misquote, however insane that sounds."
"It goes out there, and you can't withdraw the magazine and take down the websites... I always think misquotes are partly my fault as well for not being clear about things," he adds.
Oh well, you live and learn - and something Molyneux's learned more recently is how much of a positive impact middleware can have on next-gen development.
"[The] next generation is going to be all about that technology. It's going to be all about the technology behind faces, and behind animation, and blending," he says. "And that's blending everything - blending the graphics, blending the music, blending the gameplay."
In other words, allowing the designers to get on with things rather than faffing. "You would think that moving a health bar from the left hand side of the screen to the right hand should be a ten-minute piece of work. And it normally takes about a week to do," he jokes.
Fable 2, for example, is already benefiting from this, and Molyneux sounds like he's enjoying "designing properly again" for the game. "I want you to feel real emotions with Fable 2 that you haven't felt before. I want you to experience things like unconditional love - that's what I'm trying to get to," he explains. He also says Lionhead is "experimenting with something else" which "may lead to another game", but isn't going to elaborate yet for obvious reasons.
For more of Molyneux, including his confession that a lot of his drive to develop games comes from "when I was always a failure" and an "idiot" at school, check out the Gamasutra interview in full.