British developers don’t come more legendary than
Peter Molyneux: the man who co-invented the God game, built up his company Bullfrog into the biggest developer in the world before flogging it to EA and has continuously created innovative blockbusters since the 1980s. I managed to catch a brief 15-minute chat with him in London, as he publicised
Fable II, one of the Xbox 360’s biggest guns this Christmas.
As ever, Molyneux was in a garrulous mood, talking up his latest game – although uncharacteristically admitting that the first
Fable copped some flak, partly because of his inflated claims for it. This time around, his hard-sell sounds more realistic, despite some descriptions of it in the forums as: “
Fable with a dog,” and what I've seen of
Fable II so far suggests it is vastly improved upon its predecessor and should both satisfy the RPG-heads and bring a new generation of more casual gamers to RPGs. This is Peter’s own take on
Fable II – along with RPGs in general, future projects and the state of UK development.
SPOnG: So what’s new in
Fable II
Peter Molyneux: At the end of
Fable – which did really well, selling three million copies – there were a lot of people who enjoyed it, but it didn’t review particularly well. And a lot of the communities were just rabid: they got very, very upset, especially with me. Because they said, “Peter had promised too much, and he’d said it would be the greatest role-playing game of all time.” There was a whole list of people saying they were never going to listen to me ever again, and so on.
SPOnG: But that’s what you do, Peter.
Peter Molyneux: It is what I do. But if you come from a position where obviously a lot of people enjoy something like
Fable and you’re a company like
Lionhead, when you come to make a sequel, there are some important things to consider.
One of those important things was that we would continue to innovate and change, and make a difference. So, when we came to
Fable II, first we wrote a long list of features we wanted to put in, such as more weapons, more creatures, bigger levels – you’ve seen this a thousand times in a thousand sequels. And at the end of that list, we put an equals sign, but then thought, “No, that shouldn’t equal
Fable II.” So, we came up with three big things. The first was the drama of what someone would be playing. We said that the simple thing - and this is a typical hype line – is that we want you to remember playing
Fable II for the rest of your life.
We want to make a game that you never, ever forget. This, actually, is far, far more ambitious than aiming to be the greatest role-playing game. Because what we’re kind of saying is that this is as important to you as
Lord of the Rings or something.
So, when came to make that drama, we first thought about the story. Which we set 500 years on from
Fable. We had a refresh of what the world was, and what it stood for. We hired scriptwriters and film directors from Hollywood, and did something called staging for the first time. We got actors into a film and sound-stage, and got them to act out the entirety of the story, filming the whole and allowing them to improvise. That was just for our reference to check the story. None of this had been done in
Fable I – in
Fable I it was Dean
(Design Director, Dean Carter) and a little bit of myself talking in a room, and that was the extent of the crafting.
That was the first thing, and even though we had a great script and a great story, that still doesn’t equal something that you would remember for the rest of your life. So, then we started to think about some game-play mechanics that would allow you to remember the game. And we stumbled – although we were also influenced by games we had made before – on this stupid little thing. I remember walking into the room back at Lionhead and saying, “I know how we’re going to make that story: it’s great. And it’s a dog”.
In
Fable II, very early on, you get a dog. This dog is the state of the art of artificial intelligence, he’s with you the whole time, he doesn’t aggravate you and he absolutely loves you.
