More Fable III Details, In Molyneux’s Own Words

Peter Molyneux is nothing if not entertaining. He’s outspoken and prone to making impressive boasts about his projects, but he’s also one of his own harshest critics. After hearing him savage on Fable II for its myriad faults, I joked to him that I didn’t realize how much I hated it while I was actually playing the game. He replied that Fable II was a lot like playing with a big box of dirty toys—it’s fun, but it’s messy fun. He added that the good parts needed to be cleaned up a bit, and I get the sense that Fable III is a highly scrubbed version of what he was trying for with Fable II.

During a presentation, Molyneux highlighted some of the new additions to Fable III, which include some significant changes to weapons, interface design, and more. Here’s some of that info, straight from the man himself.

On Story:
“You know, with Fable 1 the honest truth is that the story was made up in about 20 minutes in a meeting room. And we thought, “Oh, we’ll have a story, there will be this guy called Jack of Blades, and that’s it.” We did always have this long dream of what Fable would be about. The actual details of the story weren’t taken into account.

“Fable III’s story we’re trying to make compulsive and interesting. We’re trying to make from the very first moment to be clear about the story and what your objective is. In the very first 10 minutes of the game, we introduce this baddie called Logan. He is the king of Albion, this beautiful, lovely, enchanted place, which is exactly like Britain. You are a revolutionary. You start the game and nobody believes in you. We are saying you’re going to take out the king, and then in act two, you’re going to be king. And the way you do this is by going on quests and getting people to believe in you and follow you. When you have enough followers, you will take out the king. To get them to follow you, you have to make promises to them.

“I like this. I love that the idea is in two halves, I like the idea that when you rule Albion you can be as evil a king as this Logan guy or you can be a wonderfully good king. I love the fact that there is a massive plot twist here, and I love the idea that we’re clear about that. So that’s a bit different from Fable 1 and Fable II. It’s all about making it clear to the player what the objectives are.

An unlikely innovation:
“The first innovation in Fable III is centered around [the start button]. A strange button to innovate around, I know you are saying. Now, this is one of our industry standards. When you press this button on almost any game I can think of, the same thing happens. If it’s an EA game, you press the button and suddenly disco music comes on, the 2D interface scrolls down, and things start flying all over the place. It’s in no way linked to the story or the world. It usually involves lists. We wondered about this, especially with the truly atrocious schoolboy implementation of the 2D interface we had in Fable II.

“Now when we press the start button, instead you get teleported to your sanctuary. It’s a location. You find this at the bottom of a cave that you find in the first hour of gameplay. This sanctuary was built by your father, the hero from Fable II, and it’s got a lot of interesting functionality. First, it’s staffed by your personal butler, played by John Cleese. Then there are a number of rooms, which are like the menus in a 2D interface. You’ve got an armory—your weapons tab. You’ve got your dressing room—the customization tab. You’ve got your treasure room. Each of these rooms holds the things that you find in the world.”

An old friend returns:
“The dog is back. There are no new abilities to the dog. There’s no new super bark. He can’t do a super jump. He has no super growl. He’s just still a dog. We’re still using him emotionally.”

Weapons: More isn't always better:
“This is an interesting thing, and it gives you some insight into the way that we think. Weapons. Now, they’re kind of always the same. We had about 50 weapons in Fable 1, we had about 100 weapons in Fable II. And when we came to Fable III, our first reaction was we wanted to get a high review score so we would put in 200 weapons so we could talk about weapons a lot. Then we thought, ‘What are these weapons going to be?’ Well, we could make the Longsword of Ultimate Doom V and the Deathmaster 5,000 weapon, but we were quite frankly running out of ideas for new weapons. And we were bored in making new weapons. And then we discovered this simple fact. Even though in Fable II we had made 100 weapons, the fact was only 20 percent of people ever chose to change their weapon. And that’s a terrible design. When you design 100 things but only 20 percent of you use them, nobody cares. So, we decided on this idea: Why don’t we allow you to create a weapon? Why don’t we allow you to craft a weapon?”

“We loved that idea, and crafting is a hot topic in the games industry, so that’s good. And we thought, we could have a minigame where you could be a blacksmith and you could hammer the sword and the longer your hammered it the longer the sword. And then you could find gems and put them in there. It was kind of turning into one of those Fable features, which was a little bit gimmicky. Then we thought, hang on a second, we’ve already got the ideal, perfect crafting system. It’s called combat. So we chose to do this. If we look at the way you use the buttons, whether you tap or mash—which 50 percent of you will do—if you hold, if you block, if you roll. If we look at that and slowly evolve the weapon to reflect how you use the weapon, then slowly over time the weapon can change depending on how you fight. Those weapons can be unique to you, and interestingly, in multiplayer co-op you’ll be able to gift a weapon to someone else and they can continue to use it.”

A new way to level up:
“The trouble with leveling up is that it’s always based around this stuff called experience. And you get the experience normally in Fable through fighting, and you normally see it on a bar. Sometimes on this bar is a number. And it normally makes you a bit more powerful. But the tragedy is with that sort of leveling up system is that it’s all about fighting, and when you go up a level to keep the pace of the game right the baddies have to go up a level. And it’s always kind of the same. It’s always totally outside of the story and outside of what’s happening in the game. It’s not dramatic. Yes, it’s lovely to go from level two to level three to level four to level five, but we wondered if there was a more compulsive way to think about leveling up. So we invented this. We don’t call it experience anymore, we call it followers. Because you need people to follow you and believe in you to take on the revolution.”

I’ll have to take control away from Molyneux here. Basically, a special screen shows a long path toward the castle. The way is blocked by a series of locked gates. As players gain more followers, they can “spend” them to open those gates as well as to open chests that contain new spells, combat abilities, or even gameplay options such as being able to own and rent out land. The ultimate goal is to work your way through to the end of the castle in this area over time, but players who want to get their grind on can attract enough followers to open up every chest along the way.