Fable III Interview

Gamasutra had the opportunity to hammer Fable III lead designer Josh Atkins about “the nuts and bolts” behind the RPG/adventure sequel. On linearity and dumbing it down:

Particularly with games, you are always generating content, having to generate environments, and role-playing games also offer more non-linearity than other types of games. How do you orchestrate that in terms of the narrative?

JA: The interesting thing about Fable is that it’s non-linear, in a lot of what I personally think are very unique ways. The first thing we do is make sure we put in points in the story where the player feels comfortable wandering off, and feel like there’s a point where a character will tell you directly or insinuate, “Hey, now’s the time where you can do whatever you want” and give you that feeling of open space as part of the ebb and flow of the game and also the pacing of the story.

We make sure we leave those moments in for you to feel like there’s a purpose to exploring. But what we do differently at that point, in addition to having the standard optional quests, we have the sim.

You can lead this rather full life in the game so we need to make sure that we leave these brackets where you can play with the sim, get married, buy houses, try trading, do all the layers of activities that are in fable, along with all these great optional quests and side quests that build into the main story.

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Also, when you are talking out loud about your approach to a game like this, particularly with RPGs, you have that really broad audience spectrum, and the second you start saying things like that, the vocal minority will be like, “Oh, you’re dumbing it down, and taking things away.”

JA: Whenever you try to do something that’s outside the norm, you definitely will run into people who will be critical of it. One of the things we started out with was taking some steps away from the RPG-ness of the game.

That’s not to say we don’t have a leveling system, and all the RPG fun that players like, but we definitely tried to take a couple strides more toward the action experience because we felt like first off, that’s accessible and something that would be good for players and give them something unique to Fable as well.

Fable has always been kind of an action RPG, not a hardcore RPG, so for us to take strides away from the RPG side for the GUI really fit with what wanted to do with the franchise.