Fable III Interviews

Two more interviews with Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux have come out of last week’s Game Developers Conference, starting with a video Q&A at VentureBeat that includes a handful of transcribed quotes and a short preview to boot:

Molyneux is also revamping the user interface of the game to make it less intimidating. Research showed that 60 percent of Fable II players finished less than half the game. Instead of a traditional inventory for items carried, the player can now visit a guild chamber room where a butler (played by actor John Cleese) waits on the king. You can walk up to a mirror and change your clothes with a single click.

(The idea is to make you feel part of the world,) Molyneux said. (What I want, like a greedy little fat child wanting more sweets, is a few seconds of your mind after you put the controller down. To think and feel emotionally affected by the experience you just had. We want that emotional connection.)

And then we have a very short article-style interview on Kotaku (thanks, RPGCodex), where Peter offers up an argument against non-linearity:

“What we found is that if you over-branch the storylines [is that] if there was one route you went down and got one reaction and a completely different route got another reaction we found that people would get really disappointed. They always felt they were on the wrong path. They always felt, ah, I wanted to see the dragon!”

…

We had been discussing the propensity for gamers to abandon the games they are playing, a potential problem for Molyneux, whose Fable III is supposed to reveal its true scope only in its second half. The first half of the game is a hero’s journey, the player-character’s fight to stop a villain in the fantasy world of Albion and Aurora. The latter half of the game sees the player as king, now required to rule the people he saved and either enjoy or suffer the reactions of the people to whom he promised favors on his rise to power. That concept of playing through kingly responsibility was inspired, Molyneux had told Kotaku, by a curiosity he had about super-hero comics that never showed the aftermath of big super-hero fights. How did the people react to the damage caused by the heroic battle? How did they live in the aftermath? That is the back half of Fable III.