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More of the Fable III Interview from Gamasutra
As promised, more of the interview with Peter Molyneux from Gamasutra. In it, Molyneux argues that "games can be an art form and a product," that art pieces should be able to be as successful as anything else. Peter feels that not only is Fable III itself evolving as time rolls along, but so is the RPG genre altogether. Explaining to Gamasutra that "We feel like the whole industry's kind of evolving, itself. There's a huge amount of innovation now. Only a few years ago, everyone was saying, "Oh, there's no innovation." Now, there's a lot of stuff happening.
There's a lot of social stuff happening; there's a lot of casual games happening; all the motion controllers are changing; there's new titles coming out that kind of change people's thoughts like Heavy Rain; [with] Fable -- we keep on trying to reinvent ourselves a little bit. A lot of this stuff is happening, and it's really fascinating. You know, I think, to me, if you don't evolve, you die. This is true evolution in an industry that needs to push itself. Absolutely. I think that's going to be fascinating when we come out the other side in five years."
More of that here. Peter explained to Gamasutra about Lionhead's priority shift for a more streamlined design to make the game more accessible, taking inspiration from games like Mass Effect 2, BioShock, Uncharted 2, and Call of Duty. How BioWare has dropped "fiddly complexities" to make things more streamlined and have a better focus on the action of the game.
Peter Molyneux: Now, it's been a very interesting journey with Fable III: taking a lot away from Fable III actually adds a lot to it. We took away leveling up. Taking away the leveling up in the GUI and saying, "We'll make leveling up part of the game experience. We'll put it into the world." So taking away the complexity and abstraction of it and making it all part of the world actually made it better and more understood. People anticipated it more, and that really worked well.
Gamasutra questions Peter on the very simplistic yet complex nature of Final Fantasy XIII. Peter's response? He actually never played it, but is now intrigued on it's very streamlined design.
"See, that is such an interesting -- now, I've got this talk that I gave, which is all about steeds in World of Warcraft, because when I played World of Warcraft this was like a dawning moment of realization for me: that the steeds in World of Warcraft, brilliantly, didn't come until you were level 40. That anticipation that it built up in me as a player -- I didn't care what the gameplay was like; I didn't care how tedious it was. I just wanted to get a steed! The fact that I'd be trudging along as a Tauren and someone would speed past me on a horse would just **** me off! "
Following that up with Fable III: "Fable III is like this -- okay, you've got your time with magic; you've got your time with the guns; you've got your time with the swords; you've got your time with judgments; you've got your time with rule; you've got your time with touch; you've got your time with the dog.
If you measure them all out and get people to anticipate them, then they're so much more powerful. That just is another one of those things where you think, "Well, why didn't I just think like this five years ago? Why wasn't it like this before?" It's a real inspirational thing."
Tedium followed by rewards, constantly giving rewards to players for tedious gameplay to the point where gamers expect a reward for it, Gamasutra questions Peter on this. He responds that he enjoys the level grinding but that you've got to be careful with such gameplay. He later explains how the other designers at Lionhead thought the minigame jobs in Fable II were completely ridiculous, hated it, believing nobody would enjoy them.
"Oh, you know; hitting a hammer against an anvil for half an hour -- no one's going to do that. It's ridiculous. It's awful. Where's the fun? Show me the fun."
A lot of senior management people would say, "Why are you wasting your time on these jobs? No one's going to do them." But the point was that doing those grindy things can actually feel really nice, especially if you feel like, "I'm doing this grinding for a particular purpose. I want to get this much gold." That's fine! The trouble is if you overplay that hand or if the grind turns into tedium, then it ends up being an experience where you think, "Why am I doing this? This is just... I'm just wasting my life!"
It's kind of like watching bland television, and you go off and think, "Why am I grinding, watching this television?" You've got to mix it all together and all part of the whole experience, and so I do think, when I look at something like FarmVille -- which is a lot of grinding, but there's a social side as well; they just get away with it."
Gamasutra touches on the belief that some developers feel that "Well, this has got to be commercial. We can't innovate." and how now that things have evolved further, that that is not true.
"Yeah. This is where, I think, creative people really have to have a voice: when something starts to be successful, the overwhelming urge is to use things like focus groups and research saying, "Well, 90 percent of the people enjoyed this in your game, so you should do more of this and less of this. Oh, no, we don't want any new stuff because they might not enjoy it as much." I think that's where you need creative people to say, "Look; this is what we created. It was this successful, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't carry on innovating." said Peter.
"It's the creative texture and the belief in the creative process; the belief that the creative process should allow you the flexibility to do things against what research says and that bucks the trend of research. Sometimes, like in Fable, we use research a lot to actually say, "Okay, what bits didn't work, and what bits did work?" But I think if you feel like the creative direction of something is led by research, then that's a bit scary."
For the Full Interview, Click Here.
As promised, more of the interview with Peter Molyneux from Gamasutra. In it, Molyneux argues that "games can be an art form and a product," that art pieces should be able to be as successful as anything else. Peter feels that not only is Fable III itself evolving as time rolls along, but so is the RPG genre altogether. Explaining to Gamasutra that "We feel like the whole industry's kind of evolving, itself. There's a huge amount of innovation now. Only a few years ago, everyone was saying, "Oh, there's no innovation." Now, there's a lot of stuff happening.
There's a lot of social stuff happening; there's a lot of casual games happening; all the motion controllers are changing; there's new titles coming out that kind of change people's thoughts like Heavy Rain; [with] Fable -- we keep on trying to reinvent ourselves a little bit. A lot of this stuff is happening, and it's really fascinating. You know, I think, to me, if you don't evolve, you die. This is true evolution in an industry that needs to push itself. Absolutely. I think that's going to be fascinating when we come out the other side in five years."
More of that here. Peter explained to Gamasutra about Lionhead's priority shift for a more streamlined design to make the game more accessible, taking inspiration from games like Mass Effect 2, BioShock, Uncharted 2, and Call of Duty. How BioWare has dropped "fiddly complexities" to make things more streamlined and have a better focus on the action of the game.
Peter Molyneux: Now, it's been a very interesting journey with Fable III: taking a lot away from Fable III actually adds a lot to it. We took away leveling up. Taking away the leveling up in the GUI and saying, "We'll make leveling up part of the game experience. We'll put it into the world." So taking away the complexity and abstraction of it and making it all part of the world actually made it better and more understood. People anticipated it more, and that really worked well.
Gamasutra questions Peter on the very simplistic yet complex nature of Final Fantasy XIII. Peter's response? He actually never played it, but is now intrigued on it's very streamlined design.
"See, that is such an interesting -- now, I've got this talk that I gave, which is all about steeds in World of Warcraft, because when I played World of Warcraft this was like a dawning moment of realization for me: that the steeds in World of Warcraft, brilliantly, didn't come until you were level 40. That anticipation that it built up in me as a player -- I didn't care what the gameplay was like; I didn't care how tedious it was. I just wanted to get a steed! The fact that I'd be trudging along as a Tauren and someone would speed past me on a horse would just **** me off! "
Following that up with Fable III: "Fable III is like this -- okay, you've got your time with magic; you've got your time with the guns; you've got your time with the swords; you've got your time with judgments; you've got your time with rule; you've got your time with touch; you've got your time with the dog.
If you measure them all out and get people to anticipate them, then they're so much more powerful. That just is another one of those things where you think, "Well, why didn't I just think like this five years ago? Why wasn't it like this before?" It's a real inspirational thing."
Tedium followed by rewards, constantly giving rewards to players for tedious gameplay to the point where gamers expect a reward for it, Gamasutra questions Peter on this. He responds that he enjoys the level grinding but that you've got to be careful with such gameplay. He later explains how the other designers at Lionhead thought the minigame jobs in Fable II were completely ridiculous, hated it, believing nobody would enjoy them.
"Oh, you know; hitting a hammer against an anvil for half an hour -- no one's going to do that. It's ridiculous. It's awful. Where's the fun? Show me the fun."
A lot of senior management people would say, "Why are you wasting your time on these jobs? No one's going to do them." But the point was that doing those grindy things can actually feel really nice, especially if you feel like, "I'm doing this grinding for a particular purpose. I want to get this much gold." That's fine! The trouble is if you overplay that hand or if the grind turns into tedium, then it ends up being an experience where you think, "Why am I doing this? This is just... I'm just wasting my life!"
It's kind of like watching bland television, and you go off and think, "Why am I grinding, watching this television?" You've got to mix it all together and all part of the whole experience, and so I do think, when I look at something like FarmVille -- which is a lot of grinding, but there's a social side as well; they just get away with it."
Gamasutra touches on the belief that some developers feel that "Well, this has got to be commercial. We can't innovate." and how now that things have evolved further, that that is not true.
"Yeah. This is where, I think, creative people really have to have a voice: when something starts to be successful, the overwhelming urge is to use things like focus groups and research saying, "Well, 90 percent of the people enjoyed this in your game, so you should do more of this and less of this. Oh, no, we don't want any new stuff because they might not enjoy it as much." I think that's where you need creative people to say, "Look; this is what we created. It was this successful, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't carry on innovating." said Peter.
"It's the creative texture and the belief in the creative process; the belief that the creative process should allow you the flexibility to do things against what research says and that bucks the trend of research. Sometimes, like in Fable, we use research a lot to actually say, "Okay, what bits didn't work, and what bits did work?" But I think if you feel like the creative direction of something is led by research, then that's a bit scary."
For the Full Interview, Click Here.
