Fable III Interviews

G4 and VideoGamer have both published new interviews with Fable III senior design director Josh Atkins, covering everything from the sequel’s co-op implementation to its shorter development cycle.

A snip from G4’s interview:

Was there much fan feedback from Fable 2 that you hadn’t considered that made it into Fable III?

There’s always stuff that people say — whether it’s someone from our forums or a member of the media — that we hadn’t thought of. Because people are very smart. I’m trying to think of a really good example of this. We did a poll on Lionhead.com when we started the project, asking “What was everybody’s favourite quest?” and “What was everybody’s favourite creature?” The creature poll was interesting. What it proved to us was that we had created a mythology. It was an interesting result, actually, I think one of the choices was “I don’t know what this one is”. Even though we got a couple of thousand responses, we got pretty good answers and people had good knowledge of the creatures and strong feelings about their favourites and it was nice to know that there are fans out there that understand what we’re building and how it works and why we do what we do.

The marriage and relationship stuff in the co-op mode came about because of fans who told us they would play with their spouse of their boyfriends or girlfriends. But also, when you work in a team at Lionhead you get asked a question a lot by Peter [Molyneux]. It’s a question I think that, as developers — and across the industry in general, is a really great question, which is: What are we trying to make the player feel right now?

It’s really easy to design a feature that’s cold and sterile and has no emotion to it. Sometimes we trade away emotion for game rules. So we’ll say “oh, we can’t do this cool funny thing that will make the player laugh because it will wreck the balance” or “it won’t do anything but make the player laugh.” Which is sort of silly. Giving the player something to do that they enjoy doing because it’s fun and it makes them feel something or laugh or feel something for the person sitting next to them, so that’s why we’ve added co-op marriages and that’s why we’ve done all the touch expressions and stuff like that. It’s because it makes you feel something not only about the game, but about the person you’re playing with.

And a snip from VideoGamer’s interview:

Q: I had read that a lot of people who had played Fable 2 weren’t actually aware of the amount of things you could really do in-game. How did you go about to make it more obvious for the players?

JA: There are two things we’ve done in that respect. The first thing is that we’ve tried to integrate a lot of the features into the actual core experience of the game. [Many of the features have] been tangential, but now we’re giving you a better reward and a bigger reason to do it and we’re pointing you toward it a bit more. Then we’re trying to advertise them better. So for things like Road to Rule the reason that some of the expressions and relationship systems are built into that is so that as a player you see and go “Oh, I didn’t know I could do that!” Like house buying and house editing. We’ve made them relatively inexpensive unlocks but you still have to make the conscious decision to unlock them and therefore it’s in your mind as something you can do.