Fable III Interview

Develop caught up with Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux for one of those inspiring Fable III interviews we’ve been seeing over the past several months. I really wish the guy would just be happy with selling a few million copies of an RPG rather than chasing the action-loving crowd:

With the new additions to Fable III, such as scrapping the HUD and axing a lot of text, it appears as if you’re attempting to widen your target audience. You’re trying to make the game less frightening.

Part of that plan is less clutter, less aggravating little inventions that Peter Molyneux once thought was a good idea.

Less of that rubbish, more clarity, better story, better cast, better balance. Of course, we have to do all this still with fresh ideas and a new feel to the game.

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At your Develop Conference speaker session you were keen to have a wider discussion about infusing drama and comedy into Fable. Why?

Part of it was this big question I’ve got on my mind at the moment; why are we [at Lionhead] so RPG oriented, and why aren’t we more action-adventure orientated? Why aren’t we making games in the action genre? a genre, by the way, that has a large slice of the game market pie chart.

And as part of our new push into the action adventure genre, we realised the story has to be clear, it has to be dramatic, but the cool thing is we can add in our Fable-ness, we can throw in our humour.

I still think there are very few games that make me laugh, and I’m missing that at the moment. I think less games are making me laugh as well because we haven’t seen the Ratchet and Clanks for a while. Call Of Duty is great but I’m hardly going to roll around floor laughing when it’s on.