Love him, hate him, try to compromise somewhere between the two for the sake of the villagers, there’s no denying Peter Molyneux usually has interesting things to say on the topic of game design.

“What I try and do – and now I try and do it more as a sensible designer – is I try and say to myself ‘is this idea that I’ve got a gimmick or a real mechanic?’” the ‘Neux told Develop in a recent interview. “I have to consider if it is something that would sound good on paper but actually wouldn’t be that good to engage with, or is it something that is compulsive and fresh and new?

“That’s always the challenge from with inside yourself, because you can get very attracted to the gimmicks. If you don’t think that all the way through then bad things will happen.”

He explains Lionhead’s current development strategy, which pretty much means going through the game in a straight line.

“The devil is in the detail, so now the design approach at Lionhead is all about laying the experience out in this golden thread,” he says.

“We’ve got this tool that allows us to lay out every minute of the gameplay so that we can talk about every minute from the start to the end. Every minute is storyboarded and if there are branches in there we have branches in the tool. Before we start work we talk through the whole of the experience, designing each minute of the experience”.

Awesome. Now shut up and make Black & White 3.