Interviews// Lionhead Peter Molyneux

SPOnG: Like the latest incarnation of the creatures from Black & White?

Peter Molyneux: Exactly: imagine those creatures put into the form of a dog. You can teach the dog stuff and he’ll learn from you. You don’t have to if you don’t want a dog – you can leave him hurt, and struggling around, but that’s absolutely fine. But I think he’s pretty special.

The second thing is – and we had this in Fable I but we’re pushing it a lot more in Fable II – is the idea of having a family, and being able to choose your spouse. You can get married, you can have children, those children can grow up and they will love you. And if you do things right in the world, the world will love you – or if you don’t, it will hate you.

My guess is that when you play Fable II, because of those decisions that you have to make, you will simply have not experienced any video game like it. Because being loved and making this bond with the dog for example – after a while, it’s just infectious, and you can’t help yourself: you start caring about the dog. And as soon as, I guess, you’ve started caring about the dog, that’s when we weave you into the story, and that’s why you will remember playing Fable II.

So, that drama and everything to do with the game-play mechanics around it are the first big aspect of the game. The second big thing is – and this is equally important – that we had a kind of obsession about why it should be that just hardcore gamers play role-playing games? Why shouldn’t casual gamers play role-playing games? There’s a lot of talk in the industry about creating casual games and core games. But my point as a designer is that why do we build a box of games here for casual gamers and a box of games here for core gamers? Let’s bring them together.



SPOnG: And we all know Microsoft has launched a big push to try to attract casual gamers to the Xbox 360.

Peter Molyneux: Yes, but we made this decision three years ago, although I think that decision by Microsoft is super-smart. At the core of that, I said this simple thing: you should be able to pick up the controller at any point in the game, and you should be able to play it and feel good. That’s if you’re a casual gamer. If you’re a core gamer and you play Fable II for half an hour, there should be no limits to its depth.

So, the combat is super-simple: you press the blue button to swing your sword, the yellow button to shoot your ranged weapon and the red button to cast magic. But the subtleties of what you can do by holding the buttons, pressing them with rhythm and using them in counter-attacks are super-deep and you get rewarded for that. So, the second big point is accessibility.

If you look at the screen, we have questioned why it is that games have what they do. Why is it that games have mini-maps? If you talk to people who don’t play video games, they find it impossible to translate a 2D image into 3D movement. So, this is a role-playing game without a mini-map: we’ve got something called a breadcrumb trail.

The last point is about sharing: the idea of Fable II is co-op play. It’s two-player co-op but, at any point in the story, I can give you the controller and you can leap into my world. The second aspect of that is that, if you’re playing Fable II on my Xbox 360, you can import your character in as my henchman and continue playing through; any experience or gold you earn, you can take back into your world. And that’s completely dynamic over the whole of the game.