Fable III PC Interview

PC gaming blog Rock, Paper, Shotgun offers a pretty good interview with Fable III lead designer Josh Atkins, who gives some nice-sounding answers to some tough question.

RPS: So you’re confident there is enough business there? Other publishers have claimed otherwise of late.

Josh Atkins: Sure. I think so. I mean, I know tons of people who play on the PC. So I don’t think it’s a business thing it’s understanding how that business has changed. And that’s something that, whenever something pivotal happens, like for example if the model moves from retail to completely digital, like X large % digital, I can’t tell you how many people buy games on PC digitally but it’s a big number. You have to think slightly differently, and you have to think about the whole business case differently. But for us it was mostly the fact that we knew there were fans there, just by the sheer volume of people coming to Lionhead on the forums going (we want to the PC version.

It’s also actually been really fun working on it. I kind of alluded to that when we started, but I was involved in Fable: The Lost Chapters and it was fun doing that, working out how to move that control system over. And then kind of getting back to the roots: most of us here grew up playing PC games, most of us still do play games on PC, so getting back to designing for the PC was fun. It was a very homey, nice challenge. Our hope is that people who pick up on PC think (okay, this plays how I would expect it to play, it doesn’t play like just a half-done port), which I think is the danger for PC games. Not to knock anyone else, but people tend to just rush games out onto the PC, they do the very quickest port they can and they try to do it as a financial model rather than let’s try to make something that at least plays like it was designed for this platform, and respects what the platform does.

RPS: Yeah, we see a lot of stuff where there’s no cursor in the menus and a ton references to A buttons.

Josh Atkins: Yeah, that’s kind of unfair. Certainly when it comes to the number of PCs that are in the world, there’s a lot more than there are consoles, and there’s definitely a lot of people who like playing on it. One of the things I was saying for a while and this was something that came about from talking to you guys [journalists] actually we tried really hard to respect the PC as a platform and to treat it in the same way, to draw a bit of a strange comparison, the coin golf app on phones in that it respects the mobile platform. It’s not like we tried to port a Fable-esque game to mobile, we designed a game for mobile. With Fable III on PC, we wanted it to feel like it was respectful of the platform, that it had been built for it.

(…)

RPS: What about the use of Games For Windows Live? I guess you must be aware that it’s not exactly popular with a lot of people. How much has being part of Microsoft enabled you to tailor it to your game?

Josh Atkins: The way we treat GFWL, and I think this is both a pro and I’ll be honest a con too, is that we treated it a lot like we think about Xbox Live, because the parity between the two platforms is something that is important to Microsoft, right. And they so feel like one integrated system. As kind of a specific example, but I think it will make sense, going back to Coin Golf, it was important that it not just work with Xbox, but that it work with Xbox or a PC. That whole Live universe didn’t feel like Games For Windows Live and Xbox Live and Live on the phone that it felt like one thing. That was kind of our approach for it, to make sure that it felt like it should feel if you’re playing on the console, that you get the same general vibe for it.

There are things about Games For Windows Live that I think even people from Microsoft have said there’s work to do, and I think that work’s ongoing.