Fable II Interview

Lionhead Studios’ Peter Molyneux continues to discuss Fable II, this time chatting at length about the game with the editors at Joystiq.

Back to Fable 2, we haven’t really experienced co-op yet. How much engineering has gone into your co-op experience, and how important do you feel cooperative play is in general?

It would have been a lot simpler for us to have made a “normal” co-op experience. That’s why, as most games do, they force you to leave the single-player experience and kind of start the game again.

What I said was, “Look, if we want more people playing Fable 2, the ‘couch co-op’ is super-important.” It’s like the classic arcade games. Like Gauntlet you walk up, put in a quarter, and you’re there. You don’t have to leave the game or go back to the start menu.

Then I thought, “Co-op is sort of unfair. If I go into your game, I don’t get anything. You get all the stuff, since you can continue on playing after I leave.” That’s why we’ve made it so that, using profiles, any experience that either player gets in co-op, they keep.

I want you not to plan to play co-op, but for it to be something opportunistic. It’s not until you leap into someone else’s world that you truly get an appreciation for just how unique yours is. How different your dog is, your town is, the way people treat you, and so on.

This isn’t any kind of a hint at anything, but it really gets you closer to that sort of massively multiplayer sort of feel. It’s when you’re down in a dungeon and you see someone else running along the gantry up above you, and you know it’s me, you do feel a part of this community. People do this back at Lionhead they’ll see me down below and they’ll wait at the top for me to get there and then we’ll just talk about it. They’ll say, “Hey, did you find that chest down there?” and I’ll say, “Oh, no I missed that!” I love that aspect of the game.