The answer, of course, is not very often, and he went on to cite a number of examples of locations that moviemakers often use to make fights more interesting, such as bars, rope bridges, and staircases.
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Referencing Hollywood again, and specifically the movie Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which features a memorable fight scene on a spiral staircase, Molyneux asked the audience how often combat in movies takes place in a perfectly flat arena. But Molyneux's assertion that it should be possible to kill an enemy with just one well-placed swing of a sword definitely appeared to get members of the audience thinking.Īnother feature of combat in games that Molyneux hopes will benefit from today's powerful game hardware is the role of environments. There are exceptions of course, Dead Rising's zombie-slicing katana being a recent example that springs to mind.
"Real-life combat is rubbish" exclaimed Molyneux at one point, before going on to explain that while the swords in Kill Bill were invariably sharp enough to dissect enemies, those in most games (including Fable, which the audience was shown a brief clip of) behave more like blunt or only quite sharp objects. He believes that Hollywood, rather than real life, is the place to look for inspiration when thinking about combat in games, a point that he illustrated by contrasting footage from Kill Bill with a movie made by role-players running around a forest with wooden weapons. Molyneux's goal is to make combat in games less repetitive, less dependent on the player memorizing button combinations, and more dramatic. Hit points, blunt weapons, and meaningless environments were the first to come under fire, as Molyneux discussed some of the experiments that he's been conducting with his Lionhead team, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with Fable 2, apparently. Titled "Combat: Time to Evolve?," Molyneux's address kicked off with a brief video clip of Street Fighter II' Hyper Fighting, after which the seasoned designer proceeded to question the need for many of that game's enduring gameplay mechanics in this day and age. What was surprising, though, was that the keynote-delivered to a capacity audience of around 400 developers-focused almost entirely on video game combat.
It came as little surprise to us, then, that this morning's keynote address got under way two hours late. We know this because we were on the same flight, and because we were talking with him at the baggage pickup point when he realized that the laptop with his GCDC 2006 keynote presentation on it was missing. Peter Molyneux's luggage didn't arrive at the Leipzig airport on the same flight as he did.