[INTERVIEW] Gamesradar Finish their Interview with PM

[hobbes_pwn]

[INTERVIEW] Gamesradar Finish their Interview with PM

http://www.gamesradar.com/f/the-ups-and-downs-in-the-history-of-fable/a-201004281522275008​

Peter Molyneux is one of gaming’s most famous designers, the boss of Lionhead studios, and Microsoft’s European Creative Director. Last month we presented a snippet of our chat with him at Microsoft’s February showcase. Now, finally, here’s the rest of the meeting of minds, almost entirely unabridged. Only almost, mind you – because Pete sure can talk.

How has your take on Fable – how it works, what its aims are – changed over the years?

Let’s just talk about me as a director and the ideas that I’ve pushed and bullied through in this thing because the team is an amazing team. They’ve done a brilliant job.
I think the first mistake with Fable 1 was that I really mistook the idea of game features as goodness. I just stuffed it full of game features and didn’t think about the mechanics of those features or how to explain them to people or how to exploit them in the story. I can remember going into meetings three months before the game was on the shelves and saying, “I’ve just had this brilliant idea, why don’t we do this?” That was just insane, man.It was insane. You know, if you go into a shop and pick up a box and it’s covered in small writing in six-point font with all the features and its gadgets, you know it’s not going to be a pleasant experience. But if you go into a shop and there are other products… I mean, Apple do this ‘it’s a phone and it’s beautiful’ thing with their packaging, which is exactly it! Suddenly you’re, like, “oh right, so that’s what I want.”
Fable II was the dawn of the realisation that it’s not about the number of features you’ve got, it’s how we exploit them and what they actually mean to the player.

Fable has become more accessible with each entry. Would you say it’s a brave move to simplify traditionally beardy RPGs?

No, I think what it just comes down to is that you can design a game around ten percent of your audience if you want to but you’re probably being a bit lazy. Because you know what? The world moves on, man. For example, Coronation Street has continually reinvented itself over and over again. That’s the genius of what makes that programme so unbelievably successful. It’s a format that’s got a life of its own. Why shouldn’t Fable be the same?I love the idea of surprising people and getting people to do everything the game is capable of, and that’s all down to what they understand and the accessibility of what’s there. You know, I like Expressions and I like the ability to be able to emote but there’s just no real reason for me to do that in the game – but then you introduce the Touch system and the Follower system and suddenly you’re, like, “of course!” Now it fits in, now it’s part of the game, now there’s a reason for me to do that. There’s a consequence to me doing that and it all adds up.

Did simplifying things in Fable II take the RPG out of the game?

I’m not sure I personally call Fable an RPG. I mean it’s certainly not a nineties RPG. In a way you could look at it as an action-adventure. There’s a lot of drama, there’s a lot of story, there’s a lot of emotion in there, but we’re still levelling up. And you know, I love that levelling up mechanic; I’m not the kind of person who likes being given a pre-canned character and saying “this is you, no matter what”. But that’s just me, and that’s not to say it’s not okay to make games with Master Chiefs and all that – they’re brilliant, brilliant games.

So why dump the usual experience system?

The absolute main reason is that most people didn’t understand it. You know, that’s just wrong. I really thought about why you just get experience for combat; it seemed wrong too. This game is about expressions and getting married, and doing things in the world should be as important as fighting. Everything you do in the game, including what you wear, including the way you fight, including the touch and expressions, can gain and lose you Followers. So for example, if I marry someone in the game, and that was the daughter of someone significant, say, the Mayor of the town, I get more Followers.
Same with the health bar. Here’s the thing about removing the health bar – we haven’t removed anything; we’ve just copied other games. In first-person shooters the health bar’s in the world. When your health gets low the corners of the screen go red, sometimes it gets black and white, sometimes it gets fuzzy – that’s a health bar, man. In Fable II we were making that bar smaller and smaller and last year when we were working on Fable III that bar was one pixel high. Why not just do what everybody else is doing and just put it in the world?

And one of the biggest problems with Fable and Fable II was the whole morphing system. It just didn’t work because it was based on experience spending; all those thousands of hours we put into the morphing system was all dependent on people spending experience – which they didn’t understand in the first place! Our fatal schoolboy… well, my fatal schoolboy error, was to have essential gameplay features locked in that experience screen. Everybody wanted Block so everybody had to spend experience on Strength, so that means there was one whole morph no-one ever saw. It was stupid. Me being stupid.

Does the shift in the experience system put the emphasis on emotion over action?

I definitely wouldn’t say one excludes the other. I think with Fable III, we’ve been thinking about the visceral action more than ever before and have tried to take down the barriers to that action. But if I can make you care about what’s happening in the story, then the whole experience gets better.In today’s world, we sit in our seats and watch our television and – I don’t know about you – but many times I think “What am I doing? I don’t really care what’s going on here; I don’t really give a damn about these characters!” I don’t want to make a game like that. I don’t want to make a game which is just meaningless.
All I want is just one thing: I want five seconds of your mind as your head hits your pillow. I want you to think “I wonder if I’ve done the right thing.” That’s all I want. If I get that, then I’ve made a connection. You know, it means something to your life. In today’s world of ultimate, unbelievable, infinite choice, what that means to me is infinite blandness. And it is, it’s all just so bland. And I turn that television off and I think ‘what have I just done for the last three hours?” Gone into a coma. And what I’m trying to do is make a connection.

You mentioned in January that you might be liable to **** a lot of gamers off with your announcements at Microsoft’s X10 event, but we have to say they all seem pretty reasonable to us…

I guess it must come across as a brilliant PR line: “Peter Molyneux says he’s going to **** everyone off then he comes to America and reveals all and doesn’t **** anyone off.” That was a conversation I had standing in the snow in Copenhagen, minus fifteen, waiting for a cab; we were talking about game design and Fable III and I said “you know what? I’m really worried; I’ve changed so much in Fable III I’m worried about ****ing people off.”

Suddenly, with the power of Twitter that became a PR line; it wasn’t that at all. I think what I was really getting at is just because you as a designer feel that “God, if I remove experience and health bars and put levelling up from a 2D interface to a 3D interface some people are gonna get really upset” that isn’t a reason not to do it. It’s actually a reason to do it. That’s what I was really talking about. I know some people are gonna miss health bars and gonna miss experience but that’s not a reason not to do it, especially when the total number of those people is getting smaller and smaller.

What inspired the idea to strip out some of the old systems and replace them with ‘Touch’?

Ever since I played Ico, it was lodged in my mind. It was such an important game for me; an emotional game. I think part of that was because I led her (Yorda) by the hand. I’ve always thought about that. And it was only when we began talking about Fable III, and how broken the expression system was in Fable II – after you used it three or four times you didn’t use it any more – Touch is a wonderful mechanic.
You’ve still got expressions on the D-pad. I’m guessing people won’t use that too often, but we left that in there for people who want to do the fart joke all the time, and why not?! But Touch is very, very context sensitive. It’s inspired by real life; if you meet someone for the first time you’re going to shake their hand – you’re not going to go for the full tongue kiss. If I do something nice, then that person might be attracted to me. The next few times I meet them that shake of the hand may turn into a hug. If it’s two male characters then it will be more of a manhug.

The Americans are very good at manhugging. There’s a whole sequence to manhugging, I don’t know if you’ve noticed. I’m employed by an American company now, so I have to do a lot of manhugging. I’m now at the stage of the manhug with the slap. That’s stage three of the levelling up of the manhug. Worryingly there seems to be a stage four but it seems to be something about groins coming closer together, which I want nothing to do with. But this is very much what happens in Fable. So you can do all that stuff and you formulate this relationship. If you keep on going with it then that can turn into a kiss, and that can turn into a snog which can turn into a date and that could turn, finally, into marriage.

How does phasing out Expressions in favour of Touch affect players’ connection to the game?

When you’re King and you don’t like someone, you can physically grab them by the scruff of the neck and throw them on the ground or into the dungeon and you can hear them squealing and screaming for mercy. When you’re dragging the beggar to sell him to the factory, as you drag him he starts to tell you what will happen to him if he gets sold. It will pull on your heart-strings. If that was an A/B choice outside the factory you would never get that opportunity.
If it was done as just a cutscene it would be meaningless. All of that is really big emotional stuff and it all comes from that emotional connection. I think it’s a combination of Ico and the dog in Fable II. For a lot of people the dog really worked. I think that the Touch system is a much bigger emotional engine than anything we’ve ever had in Fable before. It really does make you feel more powerful. You really feel like you’re punishing people or chastising people or kissing people.

How tough has it been to code the Touch system?

I said “let’s do Touch,” and then I had an army of technical people giving me reasons why it would be incredibly difficult. There are huge problems with the intersection of hands and it’s especially hard if you want to touch something taller than you or shorter than you – and worse when you’re a morphing hero. There’s a million and one reasons not to do it. That just means you should do it in my book, because it’s unique. What is so important about Touch is that it’s weaved into the gameplay; you get something for it. It’s more than an emotional engine and it has to have real meaning of depth to it.

The story of Fable III
Set just 50 years after Fable II, the world is a very different place. Industrial revolution has lit Albion with gaslight and seen the rise of trains, steamships, and heavy industry. Under King Logan children work in factories and men are sold into slave-driven workhouses. The hero this time is the son/daughter of Fable II’s hero, forced to lead an uprising which climaxes in glorious success somewhere around the game’s mid-point. From here Fable III will shift, with the hero as king or queen. You’ll have to answer to your people, deliver on your promises, make war or peace with the neighbouring continent of Aurora, and throw people in the dungeon. Fable III introduces the Touch system, relegates the old Expressions system to four options on the D-pad, and extends body morphing to your weapons, allowing you to craft a sword unique to your game and trade it online. It’ll let you change the entire world to meet your wishes – replacing factories with schools and feeding the poor, or putting men to work and fuelling an unstoppable war machine.

You mentioned to us that Touch is a ‘real feature’, not just a ‘gimmick’. What’s the difference between the two?

As it turns out I think Expressions in Fable II and Fable were more of a gimmick than a gameplay feature. You know, we didn’t really exploit them in the game; they were more about making people laugh because of the fart joke in many and various ways. There weren’t any real rewards. That’s a gimmick.

A game feature is something that is woven into the drama of the experience; we encourage you to do it, we give you the rewards to do it, and it’s something you can do over and over again. So for example, in Fable II what really worked as a gameplay feature which could have easily been a gimmick were the jobs. They were very, very simple but they really worked – you really felt like you were a blacksmith or whatever. That’s more of a game feature, woven into the game.
What’s so brilliant about Touch is that for me it really does change everything because in Fable and Fable II you were presented with choices – whether you’re going to save someone or not – but now you have to physically drag someone to their fate. That tramp you take into the factory says “if you take me in here I will die in two weeks. My friend was killed by one of these machines!” And you’re dragging him to it. I’m going to pull on your heart strings a little bit and that’s why it’s so different from pressing A and B because you’re physically doing that stuff.

Touch is currently an action for the Right Trigger, but it seems like something built for Natal, that could be a real…

I am absolutely forbidden to talk about Natal. Only that I’d say it’s a great device for a designer that makes you think in a very, very different way. And that there are unique things in Fable and it would be lovely to marry those two things together, would it not? But that is not a confession that we have Natal functionality or not. I can tell you that the primary way to play Fable will be with the controller. It’s something I would love to tell you about. I could spend many hours telling you about Natal and Fable. Many, many hours..

Good interview, a bit more on touch and the health bar and how he aims to fix issues with previous titles.

I can't tell though if some of the images are new or from Fable II (Especially Page 2)