Interview: Peter Molyneux talks fable

Posted on 12 Aug 2004 at 10:23

Gaming guru Peter Molyneux talks about Fable's wife-sacrificing options, burly men in dresses and importing heroes. Fable - straight from the designer's mouth...

You've mentioned that Fable has been four years in the making and involved the consumption of hundreds of pizzas and curries. How do you look back on the process now?

Molyneux: Yeah it is four years since that conversation with Simon and Dene [Carter] and we've had about four years, maybe a little bit longer. At that time there was just us and the Fable team. And going from nothing, not even having an Xbox, not even knowing about the Xbox, to a team of 70 people, with a lot of the team over in America on the Microsoft side, which means almost a 100 people making the game. The last four years has been a pretty remarkable experience.

I mean, there's been a lot of very, very hard work and long hours. You know what we wanted to do was be really ambitious and I think we're pretty happy with the result.

Here's how it started: I wanted to do a console game. I'd never done a true console game, but you can't go onto the consoles and do a game like everyone else, so I wanted to do something different. I've always had an incredible passion for role-playing games and I was thinking, "Right, how can we do something different and ambitious, something that's never been seen before and yet is familiar?"

And that's really where Fable was born from, a passion for RPG games. It started by saying, "Right we're going to make people feel like a hero, make people feel like a hero in this amazing, simulated world where you can do anything you want, but still play through the story." And absolutely we've achieved that.

There's things that have been much tougher than I'd have predicted. I was really naive, I'd never done a game about a single person before, it had all been about god-like beings, though I suppose Syndicate was perhaps the closest...

But it has been a real experience: doing it for the Xbox controller, it's been a real experience doing the combat system. It's not good enough just to have button bashing, but you've also got to have something incredibly simple so that people can play, but there's got to be lots of variation in that.

There's been lots of challenges on the way. There's some things - because I started talking about Fable over three years ago, literally when Fable was no more than a couple of concept sketches - there are some things which we thought about in those early days, for the simulated world, which we dropped because they really didn't make sense.

We had this idea, which was a pretty mad idea really, about all the vegetation, all the trees would grow around you, because you play the game as a hero from a kid to middle age, and it'd be cool if they grow with you.

The trouble is on a console of course is that you've got a limited amount of power. If 15 percent of that power goes to growing trees, then your hero can do 15 percent less. So there have been things that have been dropped, but there's tons of things which have been added - this expressions system which is really unique and enables us to do things which have never really been done before in a console game.

So could you give us some examples of what other groundbreaking gameplay and technology that Fable employs?

Molyneux: Well, the most incredible thing about Fable is the fact that there are lots of examples where people play the game in a certain way and things happen that were never designed to happen.