Those arduous times were necessary though, argues Molyneux, to help ”make the game not boring.” It’s all a part of the ”democratic world of development that we’re in now.”
22Cans has released the Beta 2.0 version of Godus which dramatically altered the god sim and includes new features like Voyages, which are puzzled-based challenges.
”It was boring because we only gave you the two things in the game - we gave you sculpting, and we gave you a little bit of expansion. We hadn’t turned on the voyages, and we hadn’t turned on the big motivators that motivated you to do these things. We couldn’t do that because we had to refine that sculpting mechanic, we had to refine the AI of the world and we sort of gave that out,” Peter Molyneux told Eurogamer in an interview.
”We said, initially, our first release was 25 per cent. What we were trying to say by naming that is, yeah, 75 per cent of the game is missing - it’s like giving you Call of Duty without guns. It is fundamentally going to be on the boring side.”
He knows there’s an inherent risk that these early tastes of Godus could taint people’s perceptions by the time it fully releases. This is the gamble he’s willing to take with this new ‘democratised development’ era.
”When you develop a game, whether it be a role-playing game or an RTS or a God game, there’s a terrible thing that often publishers and the team itself say, well the game’s not fun. You have to discover the core of what the game is, and you have to amplify that. Maybe people won’t stick with it, but this is the democratic world of development that we’re in now.”
”We could have shut our doors and gone into our ivory tower and not released anything,” he said. ”We could have actually gone and got a publishing contract and kept a secret and come to GDC and release the game in a shock and awe campaign, but we chose to do this slightly crazy approach, which was to involve the community in the development side.”
”The risks are people do say it’s boring, or it’s tedious or it’s buggy or my wrist hurts from clicking too much. We can choose to say that’s tough, do more wrist exercises, but instead we chose to go back to the drawing board, re-define it and look at how people approach the game and what they did.”
The new beta release has reduced the amount of clicking significantly, simply by letting us perform more actions just by holding down the mouse instead. A simple yet profound change to Godus.
”That’s why I said it’s learn, fail and learn,” Molyneux continued. ”One of the most useful things we found is that people found it boring. That’s incredibly useful, because you can do something about that. That’s why we introduced this concept of voyages, that you can send your little people on voyages. We always knew that the biggest motivator of Godus was the thing that we couldn’t introduce until everything was set, which was this hub-world connecting people together.”
”Is it a risk that people like yourself say I know what Godus is, it’s just a boring game? Yes it is a risk, but it’s a risk worth taking, because the rewards from taking that risk is refining a game that you truly think will be great. It’s great not because you think it’s great, but because you’ve learnt from what’s gone wrong.”
Check out the full interview between Peter Molyneux and Eurogamer. Godus is available through Steam Early Access.