Fable III Interview and Editorial

GameInformer brings us a post-release interview with Fable III lead designer Josh Atkins, discussing some of the goals and design decisions the team had for the action RPG sequel. Everyone must finish!

If you had to narrow Fable III’s optimal audience down to a single hypothetical player, what would he or she be like? A veteran RPG player? Someone new to the genre? Someone new to video games in general?

Every Fable game has been made with the intention that anyone can pick up a controller and be successful, and Fable III was no different. Our goal was to create an accessible and easy to understand game that very casual players could experience and, most importantly, finish. We have heard many great stories about Fable III that led us to believe we were reasonably successful in that goal. My favorite story was the day I randomly discovered my wife’s hairdresser who generally watches her boyfriend play games actually played Fable III, enjoyed it, and finished it.

Now that the game is out, is the team satisfied with some of the streamlining decisions made in Fable III? In particular, the interactions were restructured in both how many NPCs could be engaged at once and the overall depth of such encounters. Are you happy with the end result?

We had a real dilemma with both the Fable II interaction method and magic systems. As Peter Molyneux has mentioned in the past, we had statistics that indicated many of our users were not using a substantial amount of the features we created in Fable II. Therefore, after many tricky discussions we came to the conclusion we should simplify a set of our features in an effort to ensure they would be clear and usable by players at every level. Clearly we were a bit surprised by some of the responses we got to these changes, and our goal was never to make our users feel something had been removed unfairly. One thing I like about Lionhead is that we look at each Fable as a standalone product, and while we are influenced by what we have done in the past, we do not let the past be a barrier toward trying to innovate.

Based on the answers provided by Josh, the folks at Nightmare Mode figure that the game is an example of “metric fetishism”:

I will not begrudge a company for wanting to expand its userbase. But when you take a game that works, and make it worse because numbers show that people ignored the feature, doesn’t mean you should get rid of it. You already spent time developing the feature, so it’s not as if it’s wasted development time going toward it. Getting rid of it means you are getting rid of what another established userbase finds enticing, meaning you are excluding people with your choice: and wouldn’t the bottom line dictate that this is a no-no? ‘˜Mainstream gamers’ (sorry to use the term) are already playing the Fable franchise, so it’s clear that previous systems did not push that audience away.

But really, the tragedy behind metrics fetishism is less risks are taken because there is concrete data to support ‘˜safe’ choices. Why take a risk when the numbers don’t lie? As the number of ways to examine player’s actions increases, the more numbers will become deified within the industry. Franchises like Fable, Dragon Age and Mass Effect may just be the tip of the iceberg.

If developers just keep chasing statistics, those of us who think games are already too easy and dumbed down certainly aren’t going to like what’s to come in the future.