Fable III PC Interviews

Mike West, the senior designer behind Lionhead’s forthcoming PC port of Fable III, took some time out of his day to chat with NowGamer and IncGamers about a number of topics related to the action RPG sequel and the new PC-exclusive “hardcore” mode.

A little something from NowGamer’s interview:

An action-RPG should be right at home on the PC why do you think you sell more on console?

The PC has a very different audience. I think PC gamers are more tech-savvy, they have a different market for games. You still have driving games for instance, but there are a lot more tactical games, a lot more strategy games, and there’s a lot less of that on the Xbox. Obviously Fable at it’s core is an action game with RPG elements, that’s how we try and sell it. So it is an RPG game, but it’s an action-based one. So I think it’s the action why we seem to do better on the Xbox.

With Fable 1 for example we just did better on the Xbox, and that was the first Xbox, when the market for the console was a lot smaller than it is for the 360 nowadays. Although the market on the PC is bigger than the Xbox in total with your PopCap games and your Facebook and things like that, as soon as you go down the 3D route and have a quality release, the market drops in size you really need to spend a lot of money on [your PC], like I have and like my friends have.

And a sampling from IncGamers’ interview:

IG: Is there any more of a punishment for dying in Hardcore mode?

MW: There’s not. We haven’t implemented any more punishment. We’ve always found that death in itself is a punishment and that players want to avoid death as much as possible because you don’t want to feel as though you’ve actually ‘˜died’.

For us, and this is what Peter [Molyneux] has said in the past, if you die and you’re punished for it what you tend to do reboot. Personally, I do that all the time. What you’re essentially saying to the player in that instance is that, ‘˜you’ve died, so now you have to play that bit over again’. That’s not a particularly fun thing to do.

You’ve got the other side too, in that if you keep trying something and eventually get through you’ll feel good because you’ve finally beat it but, we’re trying to avoid any areas where the player could get frustrated because we’re trying to bring [Fable III] to a larger market.