Fable III Interview

Eurogamer brings us a lengthy three-page interview with Peter Molyneux about the new features being implemented in Fable III, why the game is leaning toward the action/adventure genre more than before, how Natal factors into the game, and more. A hefty excerpt:

Eurogamer: Can you talk us through the new Fable III information you revealed in your GDC speech today?

Peter Molyneux: The big things are the GUI and the combat stuff. We talked about making it more like Street Fighter and Soul Calibur than the previous Fables, and how the old GUI was a real barrier towards people getting into some of the things that worked in Fable – but that people didn’t realise worked.

In the old GUI, everything was list based. Ever since I’ve been doing game it’s been all about 2D GUIs. We’re replacing that and saying, ‘Right, we cannot have a single list in the game – everything you’ve got must be in the world.’

That caused us to invent these things called the Guild Chambers, which you discover after playing for about 10 minutes. Slowly, you unlock different rooms in the chambers which give you different functionality.

Eurogamer: Like the dressing room?

Peter Molyneux: Yes. It’s more than a dressing room, it’s where all your clothes collections are. You’ve got literally everything from a sock drawer to a jacket drawer.

Then there’s your armoury, where you collect different swords, guns and magic objects. There’s also a little bit of extra crafting we’re going to allow you to do within the armoury so you can enhance the weapons you’ve got.

We’ve got the treasure room, which is the place where we show off all your Achievements and we show how much gold you’ve got. It’s really interesting because normally gold is expressed as a single number on the screen. In Fable I and II, that number just went up. Now you can physically see these piles of gold growing within your chamber. You can use Touch to pick up gold and rub it on yourself, if you so desire, which some people will really like.

…

Eurogamer: How concerned are you about the move away from RPG to action-adventure? Don’t you risk alienating some of the series’ fans?

Peter Molyneux: Yeah. I mean, I said this line about how people are going to get pissed off, and I think this is really what I was talking about. I’m a little bit worried about it but I think Fable had already made that transition already. We had tweaked the experience, we had a tenth of the numbers other role-playing games like Fallout and Dragon Age have. They’ve just got numbers everywhere.

Rather than saying, OK, we’re an RPG but we’re trying to broaden the RPG, what we’re saying is we love the idea of RPGs in terms of levelling up and feeling powerful and collecting things. Those are great mechanics which you don’t often see in the action-adventure category. So why not take all that stuff and then say hey, we’re more like action-adventure than we are RPG?

I’m not saying we’re not going to have all that cool stuff from RPGs. I’m saying that if you were to describe this as the first Fable to the press, you probably wouldn’t say it’s an RPG – you would probably say it’s an action-adventure.