March 11, 2010 - As he traditionally does, Peter Molyneux, the father of Fable and creative lead for
Microsoft Game Studios Europe, took the stage at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco to give a lecture. This year the title of the talk was The Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design, a discussion on how to make games more immediately accessible to all everyone without "dumbing them down." Joining Molyneux in the talk was Peter Atkins, lead designer on
Fable III.
Much of the talk felt like a repeat of the recent X10 demo, which you can read all about in our most recent
preview. Now, however, Molyneux gave some context as to why Lionhead is making such drastic changes to an established franchise. He began by talking about the RPG genre as a whole, essentially writing it off as being too limiting. "The RPG market is limited by core gamers," Molyneux said. While Fable 1 sold about 3 million and Fable 2 sold 3.5 million copies, the goal for Fable III is to move into the upper echelon of hit games with sales of over 5 million. For that to happen, the franchise would have to target the larger action-adventure genre.
Molyneux outlined the thought process as a series of questions. "What if we moved Fable towards an action-adventure? What would that mean? What would we lose and what would we gain?" Provided the core elements of Fable still exists – listed as Morphing, choices with consequence, drama, emotion, and accessibility – would it really change the game that much?
Fable III is doubling down on these core elements, while removing many of the more traditionally "hardcore" elements. The combat has been streamlined, taking inspiration from studios like Team Ninja (of Ninja Gaiden fame) and Santa Monica Studios (known for God of War). The drama is being improved with a new "touch" system for interacting with non-player characters, drawing inspiration from Ico. The health bar has been done away with, inspired by what has become the standard in first-person shooters. Even the idea of leveling up and gaining experience is being overhauled.
"Surely, we had to keep experience. Experience for role-playing games is a massive thing. I began to realize that experience is all about combat, but the Fable world is much bigger than that." You don't get experience for getting married, or farting on someone, Molyneux noted. The replacement is a system of followers. The goal of Fable III is to first recruit an army and then overthrow a tyrant king. That's only the halfway point, however. From there, you'll have to rule a kingdom. "Everything you do, however trivial or noble or wonderful, results in you gaining or losing followers." Get married to the right person, you get more followers. Make a promise to a certain town that you'll tear down a polluting factory, and you'll win their trust. Of course, making certain judgments, as the system is called in Fable III, might have consequences.
Molyneux then teased that your followers might even be affected by things outside of the game. He noted that he currently has a lot of followers on Twitter and finds that very intriguing. Will Twitter be integrated into Fable III? Or will the number of people on your friend's list affect your followers? It's an intriguing concept, but we'll have to wait and see what this tease means.
The most interesting part of the talk came when Molyneux spoke about how Lionhead planned to simplify the user interface for more accessibility. You'd be hard pressed to find anybody that enjoyed the item management system in Fable II, and Molyneux agrees that it needed fixing. During the talk we got our first look at how Fable III is taking the majority of the 2D interface and placing it in the 3D world.
For something like changing clothes, you'll go into a wardrobe closet to view each costume you have (and a butler voiced by John Clease will help you out). With the touch of a button you can swap to a new look. Or, you can angle the camera down to simply change pants. The same goes for dying your clothes, allowing for the same amount of customization as you got in Fable II without all of the clutter.
We also got a look at the new map interface. There's a war room of sorts where you can walk up to a map table and peer down on it. This allows you to scroll around the top of a map and look at all of the areas. Using a magnifying glass, you can peer down into each area and town. The kicker is that the simulation of the town is still going on, so you can see all of the people walking around going about their business in a simplified 3D world. I even saw Molyneux zoom further in to a single house where he could see his in-game wife and kids, and interact with them. Molyneux teased that, though it wouldn't be similar to an RTS, this map could be used for sending troops around the world once you are king or queen.
Peter Atkins primarily spoke about the combat mechanics of Fable III. While he didn't divulge any new details, he did defend the difficulty of Fable II when he let everybody know that, though some cried out that the game was too easy, that was the intention. The goal, he noted, was to make the player feel powerful and not to use old-school arcade balancing curves. "Is Fable too easy? That's a tough thing to figure out…It really is built around feeling powerful…[It's]balance to create an emotional experience. We want you to feel powerful but we also want you to care."
During the question and answer session at the end, Molyneux declined to close off hopes of Fable III coming to PC. "I would love to see the Fable franchise on the PC," he said. However, he noted that it would have to be "awesome." He also refused to confirm a new version of the popular Fable Pub Games, though he did say that Lionhead likes the idea of importing and exporting data from games and that we should, "expect some surprises there."
