14 DAY TRIAL // A recent interview with Peter Molyneux revealed that the Lionhead boss did not regard Project Milo as future release, but rather he thought it as a very big tech demo that could become a full game at some point. The development process for such a game, however, would be very non-traditional, as even the subject of a possible Milo title was quite contentious in Molyneux's opinion.
Speaking to USA Today, Peter Molyneux said that, “We think about [Milo] being an ongoing experience. This is a completely different way of authoring than we have ever done before. The way that we developed Fable, all the features are developed in parallel. The way we develop something like Milo is much more sequential. We spent a lot of time getting the stages and the environments right. We spent a long time on the procedures. You can now experience to release-level quality the first three to four hours of the experience.”
He continued to comment that, “I don’t think of it as a released product at the moment. I still think this is a very, very big tech demo. I don’t think of it as something that would be a boxed product on the shelf. But is it something consumers will eventually get some aspect of? I think so, eventually. I do. There’s a lot of huge mountains to climb before that happens. The reason for that is it is enormously contentious for us to do a game, a story, an experience, about a boy. You are immediately appealing to all the dark thoughts of humanity.”
Part of Molyneux's inspiration for the non-classical approach he and his team took with Milo were Pixar's Up and Toy Story 3. He sees the two movies based around characters that are unlikely to be interesting, but the emotion and storyline built around them brings new and unique experiences to the audience. This kind of exploration of human emotions of remembrance and self-discovery has a lot of potential, both artistically and commercially.