Peter Molyneux Sees Videogame Industry Creating New Genres

Innovation will be the name of the game for the videogame industry in the coming years, according to Peter Molyneux, the legendary designer who is in charge of Lionhead studios and currently working on Fable III. He believes the avalanche of new concepts and technologies that are coming to the fore at the same time will enable those who are putting games together to explore fresh possibilities and create experiences entirely new to the player.

Talking to Gamasutra as part of a longer interview, Peter Molyneux said, “There's a lot of forces all coming together at once. The hardware manufacturers have really realized, 'Look, if we really want to revolutionize things, it's not about faster processors and more memory. It is actually about things that are being held in the player's hands.”

The man who leads Lionhead thinks that while hardware will be forever changed by the introduction of the Project Natal motion tracking from Microsoft and the PlayStation Move from Sony, developers are also beginning to see how the online space and the social features it brings with it can be integrated.

Mr. Molyneux is also excited about the possibilities offered by more emotional elements creeping into gaming experiences, pointing to what Heavy Rain, from Sony and Quantic Dream, has done and saying that his own upcoming Fable III will aim for something similar. The third game in the Lionhead series is expected to offer support for Natal when it is launched exclusively for the Xbox 360.

The convergence of these three trends, which will be clearly visible this year, especially at the E3 trade show, will then lead to new genres being developed. It's highly unlikely the old labels of real time strategy, first person shooter and role playing game will be ripped out and replaced but it's possible that more experiences mixing and matching elements from all of them will come out.