Peter Molyneux Talks Fable II Episodes

With today’s release of the episodic version of Fable II, it comes as no surprise that a couple of new interviews with Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux have popped up on the web.

First in line is IGN:

“I’m just a very greedy person,” said Molyneux. “I want as many people as possible to play Fable II…If I could persuade or cajole or chain people to a chair and get them to play it for a while everyone would enjoy it. That’s where the idea started, is how could you get more people to sample Fable? Then the next thing, I’ve always absolutely loathed demos. They should be shoved in a big coffin and thrown in a deep hole and never pulled out again because normally demos are requested by the publishing team very late in the day, me as a designer has got this impossible problem to solve where you have to teach someone to play a game and not entertain them too much and entertain them just enough. And if someone gets to the end of the demo and then chooses to buy the whole game then they’ve probably got to go through the same content again then they get bored and that just sounds like rubbish.”

He feels by giving away the first part of the game for free, it works a lot better, since it’s the actual game that’s been played instead of some manufactured sample. Once the end of the demo is reached, the game will ask you if you want to continue playing and at that point, a decision will have to be made by the player about whether or not the rest of the experience is worth paying for. If you do choose to continue, you’d keep your gold and experience and continue on exploring the world of Albion.

While the other Q&A is at Edge Online:

What have you learned about designing episodic games so far?

One of the really big inspirations for Fable III you’ll think that this is so contrived is Charles Dickens’ books. The fascinating thing is that he wrote them as episodes in such a way that there would be cliffhangers so people would go out to buy the next, but if you’ve got the whole book it doesn’t feel episodic.

This really changes the way you think about making games. I’ll try to be vague here because none of this has been announced, but one of the questions we’re asking is about why is it that you should go to a shop, buy a game and finish it over a weekend and wait for, in Fable II‘s case, 16 weeks to get new content, and you play that over a day and wait 20 weeks for the next, and so on? If I said to you, go and watch six episodes of Lost and then there’s a massive break, it just fractures the whole experience. How can we create a much better way of having a relationship with the player so they feel that there are more things they can add to the world, even on the first day they play in it? I think that’s vague enough.

If you have any free time left after reading those, here’s a video of the Fable III development team bowling. Yeah.