Peter Molyneux Interview

Gamasutra offers an interview with Peter Molyneux, talking about the industry and design process in general, as well as – and I know this will come as a surprise – the shortcomings and flaws in Fable III.

At GDC 2010, you gave a speech about all of the things you were going to bring to Fable III to increase its reach, and you talked about your goal of hitting 5 million units. But it seems that Fable III didn’t quite reach the goals that you’d hoped for, at least perhaps creatively.

PM: Yeah. I think last year we were just on the cusp of possibly getting everything we wanted in the game, or possibly having to come down and edit very heavily to finish the game in what was two years. You have to remember that, you know, Lionhead — especially me — has never created projects in less than two years. This was the first time we ever did that.

Just after that point, we then sat down, and, partly because of the way that we worked — the process, the way that we designed, and the way that we crafted — meant that the game came together very late. That is one of the things that we’re changing; that is just such an old school way of working.

You have these ideas called pillars, and then you rush away and develop these pillars. About nine months before the game is due to be finished, you’ve got to bring that whole thing together and then — “Oh, wow! The game’s this long!”

Every game, unbelievably, you sit down: “Good grief! It’s twice as long as I thought it was going to be!” You just can’t afford that in terms of development when you’re developing by the second.

So when we came down to it, the edit — I think the ruling section in Fable was the one that really suffered a lot here. The edit was very harsh and hard to actually make the game fit.

That being said, I still think it was a good game! I just don’t think it was a great game that took us to 5 million units. I know I probably should say it’s a great game just respective of whatever it was, but the Metacritic score was sort of low-’80s. I think I’m pretty ashamed of that, to be honest, and I take that on my own shoulders, not the team’s shoulders. I think that, when you have something like that, which you can feel as a kick in the teeth, you have to pick yourself up and fight even harder.

That being said, it still sold millions and millions of units, and it’s probably going to net out, with the PC version, closer to the 5 million than perhaps you would think; but it’s not the dream. It didn’t end up being the game that I dreamed it would be, because I thought the mechanic of the ruling section were really good ideas. I thought they were good ideas, but we just didn’t have time to exploit those ideas fully.

I’ve been here before, and it just means that you’ve got to make whatever you do next twice as good. You’re going to make the process and the planning process much, much better because, in the end, that’s where you really suffer.