Lionhead Studios and EA just released Peter Molyneux's latest game: The Movies.
The game is part movie-studio tycoon game and part movie-making game. When I first heard about this concept at E3 in 2004, I was skeptical. How could a game let you create your own movies within the game world without the movies being a literal recording of the game-play itself (ala Starcraft or Counterstrike matches)?
Well according to Gamespot:
"If you want to get really involved in the fake filmmaking process, The Movies includes an incredible set of in-game moviemaking tools that let you create your own little masterpieces. At its most basic, you're given a timeline and the frame for a story arc. Anyone familiar with digital video editing will find this to be like a Playskool version of something like FinalCut or Premiere. You fill in your story by dragging and dropping prebuilt shots, of which there are literally dozens to choose from for any one portion of the story arc. Like the rest of the game, the moviemaker can be tuned to give you just the amount of control you're comfortable with. If you're happy with just dragging and dropping a few scenes into a timeline and letting that be that, you can operate that way...though the real fun here is getting really crazy with the details, such as lighting, the mood of the performances, the backdrop designs, the types of camera angles used, and so on. You can even add subtitles, sound effects, your own custom musical score, and, if you've got a microphone, your own dialog. Given the dozens of different sets you'll eventually have at your disposal, in addition to the five different genres you can work within and the insane amount of control you can take over virtually every single detail of your movie, there is a great amount of potential here for budding virtual filmmakers."
Now do your movies affect gameplay? Well, Gamespot also covers that:
"Unfortunately, you can pour hours into creating your own perfect piece of machinima, and it will have minimal impact inside the game itself, as the game judges the quality of the films rather mechanically, without much capacity to discern between what's garbage and what's art. In a way, this is acceptable, since the end product of the movie you've made is really the best reward. Plus, the game makes it quite easy to export the movies you've made into a common video format that you can share with others. There's even an integrated tool that makes it easy to upload your movies to the Internet for all to see. Really, with the inclusion of a sandbox mode that lets you skip the "game" part of The Movies almost entirely, it's pretty apparent that the whole package was designed with two separate, largely unrelated goals in mind. It's not a deal breaker, but it does mar the illusion that you're running your movie studio in a living, breathing world. "
So, ultimately no. The AI of the game won't be able to judge your film and thus won't affect gameplay. This is sad because your work doesn't change the game world. But then again, it would be a bit freaky if the game's AI knew if you were making slop or quality.
The most interesting thing to me here, is the potential for making machinima movies with an obviously intuitive in-game movie-making UI. Final project for CTPR-507 anyone?
Regardless of the disconnect between the two game elements: tycoon and user created content this game seems fun.
