Fable III Interview

After chatting up Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux about Fable III during this year’s E3, UGO has posted the full results of their conversation. A snip:

UGO: I just played through the demo of Fable 3 here, and I saw a lot of improvements. What did you learn from Fable 2 that has benefited Fable 3? What improvements from Fable 2 did you have in mind when you began on Fable 3?

Molyneux: When we sat down with a design, the first thing we did was take lots of Valium, and we looked at the communities and started reading the community boards. You have to take Valium because we designers take this very personally, and when people say horrible things about your games, it’s like saying something horrible about your child. You almost have to go for counseling.

When we looked at that stuff, there were lots of frustrations that people had, and we kind of wanted to address those frustrations and fix those frustrations. So that was one side. The other thing we said is, “Why shouldn’t we continue to surprise people and give people stuff they haven’t seen before in any game in Fable 3?” We want to make sure everything is accessible and it kind of made sense, but we love the idea of innovation. Mixing those two things together is really where Fable 3 was built.

Very specifically, we can credit some of the features in the game (to user feedback). Everything from — very obviously — people saying, “We love co-op but why cant we have our own heroes in the game?” We took the idea of co-op so that you can invite anyone you like into the world and mixed it with some new stuff. So we said, “Why can’t you marry the person you bring in? Why can’t you start your own family and have your own children?” So you can do that with your co-op partner if you want to now. That’s just a cute little mechanic we added.