Why have you implemented this now in Fable II’s life?
There are two reasons, really. The first is that I had a look at how many active Live users there are – I don’t know the exact number but it’s 10 million or something like that – and compared to the number of people that have bought Fable II, about three million, and saw there’s a big divide. As a greedy game designer I ask why. I can sit back and moan about it and wish the game had more presence at retail or whatever, or I could do something about it.
Now, I hate demos. I think demos are the death knell of experiences. Over the years I’ve done demos and they’ve either completely ruined the game, given too much to the player, or they’ve confused people, so I said that we should give away the very first 45 minutes of the game, completely free, and just before you get to Bowerstone up comes this message saying, ‘If you want to continue playing press this button, but if you want to buy the rest of the game, press this’. So people that are interested but don’t want to commit to the full purchase can play more, and people that are into it can buy all of it, and they don’t lose experience or gold they’ve collected.
How are you dealing with download requirements for later episodes which require all of Albion to be available? Will players be faced with a 4gb download before they can play?
No – we’ve been fairly smart. To be honest, I don’t completely understand the technicalities, but there are trickle downloads and all sorts of things. The experience I wanted to lay out is that it shouldn’t be that you have to wait for hours until you can get into a game. If you make a decision to do something, you press that button and away you go. If I’m in an arcade playing Zombie Panic Revenge and it asks me for another credit and I have to wait an hour I’ll walk away. You’re in the middle of your experience, usually at a cliffhanger, and you don’t want that moment broken.
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.
It must be a challenge to traditional storytelling techniques, because players of episode four may not have played episode two, and also to design, because players of later episodes may not have learned skills they’d have been taught earlier in the game. How do you ensure players get an even experience?
That’s an interesting point – some of the episodes we allow you to skip. In others it’s very hard dramatically to ensure later episodes make sense. There are all sorts of frustrations. Sometimes we might lock an episode in future games – not Fable II. Or, this isn’t an example of an actual game but as an example, there could be an episode that’s basically a ticket that you buy with 100 Microsoft Points and takes you on a ferry to another area in Albion. On that island there may be all sorts items and backstory and so on that you’re not required to experience but make the game richer.
As creative director of the European Microsoft Game Studios, are you seeing other developers thinking in the same way?
Yeah – any project at a stage in development that this can fit into I’m trying to wave my arms manically and say, ‘Hey, think like this!’ For quite a few projects it’s too late but it’s really fantastic to be able to go to teams and give them an idea – maybe they take it up or maybe not.
