Fable III's lead designer Peter Molyneux has told GamerZines that "rubbish design" in Fable II "****es me off", revealing that only 20% of players ever changed their weapon in the game unless forced to.
"We had a bit of research that said that only 20% of all the people that played Fable ever changed their weapon," said Molyneux talking to GamerZines at Gamescom last week.
"Even though we had made 150 weapons in Fable II, only 20% changed weapons unless we forced them to do it. That really ****es me off. It's just rubbish design."
That stat and the desire to "get a good review score" prompted Molyneux to opt for a "new and fresh" weapons system for the third Fable.
"We were thinking about, quite frankly, how to get a good review score (for Fable III), and we came into a meeting which was to do with weapons. I had asked everyone to go away and think of ten different weapons, and with this time on Fable III, we wanted to do 200 new weapons so I could say in a press interview 'we have 200 new weapons!'
"And when we came in the room everyone had, you know, Death Slayer 5, Doombringer 100, and the Katakana of Very Sharpness, and we kind of realised these were all very boring weapons. In Fable 1 we had created the Sword of Aeons, the ultimate sword of the whole of the universe which could destroy time and space. It's hard to top weapons like that, and that's when we realised really we need something new and something fresh.
"And so that in conjunction with the fact that we were bored of making new weapons we came up with a simple idea. We'll let you, the player, design the weapon; let you craft your own weapon."
Fable III's new weapon system lets players create their own weapon via extensive customisation options and via the combat, with the weapon shaping depending on the player's actions and it looks very cool.
Fable III launches on Xbox 360 this October. A PC release is due to follow later in the year.
