If there's one thing veteran British game designer Peter Molyneux is famous for, it's over-promising when it comes to his projects – from the first Fable to Godus, it seems most games he's involved in don't quite live up to the vision he originally sold the public.
This has more to do with Molyneux getting carried away and being too excited about his work than anything malicious, but even so, it's interesting to see him advising his former company Microsoft not to over-promise and under-deliver with their virtual reality HoloLens technology which was announced at a Windows 10 event earlier this week.
Molyneux, who says he saw early prototypes of the HoloLens while he worked at Microsoft prior to departing and setting up indie studio 22 Cans, said that part of the problem is that many VR concepts which seem great in theory end up being very difficult or tiring in practice.
"For me, some of the stage demos they had were magical as they were building drones on stage and you start to think back to your Kinect days and how exhausting that would be to move your arm around and tap with your fingers," Molyneux said. "And this is the problem with VR – the applications that we think are going to be great on it quite often are exhausting or very challenging. My hope is that their concept video doesn't over promise what the technology can deliver. Because the actual experience of seeing a 3D object projected into the world is a magical one."
Microsoft famously bundled the Kinect sensor with the Xbox One, saying it was an integral part of the system before offering a Kinect-free version at a cheaper price. "It did remind me of [Kinect]," Molyneux continued. "You kind of want to scream 'don't over promise these things.' The thing about the concept videos is they feel so seamless and it just looks like everything's working and actually, as we found with Kinect, it works all fine if you've got the perfect environment and the perfect distance away and you're the right shape human being. But it's very challenging if any of those things don't come together perfectly."
While it might be easy to roll your eyes at Molyneux cautioning anyone in such a way given his track record, he makes some very valid points during his full interview with GamesIndustry.
