Fable III Interviews

A couple more interviews with members of the Fable III development team have surfaced this evening, starting with this Q&A with creature lead artist Jon Eckersley and character art manager Ian Faichnie on CVG:

What inspiration did you take for the clothing in new Albion – bearing in mind the game is set a number of decades after F2? Did any of this come from ‘fashion icons’?

JE: We’ve always felt the need to push on the time frame as Fable has iterated – it keeps thing fresh, but it’s still based in the Fable universe. Fable 3 has moved on 50 or so years, so stylistically we wanted to push the art towards the industrial revolution as well as dress from the Napoleonic era – a lot of the new towns and cities reflect this shift.

There are also some new additions – we have the new continent of Aurora which reflects a much different flavour; a taste of a foreign land, almost moor-ish in feel. There are also some great outfits scattered throughout to provide a little slapstick and humour that Fable thrives on.

And then we have this Q&A with lead designer Josh Atkins on WorthPlaying:

WP: In terms of combat, you’ve got melee, swords, gun and magic. This could just be the first few hours of the game, but it seems to encourage you to use each of them equally. As you progress, can you specialize in a particular combat discipline?

JA: One of the things that we looked at when it comes to combat in Fable III is you look at the convention of specialization, and specialization in games has its place where you can say, “OK, I just want to be a melee user.” For us, we will let you do that. There is no hesitation. You can be just a sword user or just a gun user, if you want to.

What’s more fun in the game is actually combining them together. What we’ve found through our gameplay and designing the game but also through our own intentions, we really want players to use all the buttons. We don’t want them to feel like they just have to use one for the whole game. We’re a lot more generous about wanting them to explore other types of combat, not just the one that they’re using at the start of the game.

One thing we’ve done to allow that to happen is to make experience a single commodity, or currency. Rather than having strength experience that you can only use to buy strength items, we have one form of currency that you can use to buy anything. As a player, if you feel much more comfortable with the different combat types, you’ll try to weave them together rather than being forced to pick one.