Fable 2: The Molyneux Interview Feature

Location: London's Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane and Microsoft's European preview event for Fable II. I was led into a regal room that made a dozen Xbox 360 pods look decidedly out of place, but quickly tuned out of the surroundings and zeroed in on some Fable II exploration. After what seemed like 30 minutes but was apparently 2 hours, I was drawn out of my transcendental state by a Microsoft PR person saying that Mr. Molyneux was ready to see me now.

So I sat down with the legendary developer and went through the motions. After the Q&A I left the interview room and had one of those Homer Simpson style, 'Hey, wait a minute' moments. Had I interviewed him or vice-versa?

Peter Molynuex: What've you been doing [during the hands-on]?

TVG: A bit of socialising. I had a couple of people following me around and got married, I think.

What do you mean, "you think"?

TVG: I got up to the ring on the relationship meter.

Did you buy a ring?

TVG: I didn't buy a ring. Presumably that's what you do to get married...

You see, this is the whole ethos of the game. It will have started giving you a mini tutorial, but you're not incentivised to get married until you get to Oakfield. We wanted to give you a new feature every 15 minutes, but all of those features are enabled so if you want to (if you play it again) you can go and get married in the gypsy camp right at the very start of the game. In fact, it's really easy to get married there because there's this one girl that you've been chatting up, supposedly. So you didn't manage to get a ring then?

TVG: No, but there was a jeweller at Bowerstone.

It's pretty expensive though.

TVG: Yeah, I'd just started the blacksmith's job so...

What did you get to?

TVG: I got promoted once.

You know that you can earn up to about 800? In fact there's no cap. You know the chains that you get? We don't cap that at all, so it goes infinitely up and I have seen people earn 800 a sword.

TVG: Does that mini-game get any harder?

Oh, it gets insanely hard. It gets harder when you go up levels and as you go up chains to the point where [the sweet-spot] is about a nano-pixel wide.

TVG: When I started the hands on as Little Sparrow, the introductory quest was finding five arrest permits for the police sergeant. During this section you're given a couple of opportunities to do favours for Nicky the Nickname. I sided with Nicky the first time and promptly got an evil deed notification and my moral standing in the town went down. On the second opportunity I went with the police sergeant rather than Nicky and this opened up a discount on services in Bowerstone when I met the sergeant later in the game.

If you do the evil one there's a whole assassin's society that you can join. With the good one you get discounts and with the evil one you get jobs; you can become an assassin and get up to a level 5 assassin.

TVG: Good vs. evil decisions were obviously a big part of the first game. How have you been expanding on that this time around?

Well, don't think of it as good and evil. In fact, we very rarely talk of it as good and evil - it's not. There's good and evil; cruelty and kindness; a lot about greed and generosity; about sacrifice; about purity and corruption. All of these are measured and we allow you to sort of branch things and change things in the world about yourself and the people you know, and all of these change people's reactions.

What you'll find fascinating is that if you went out into somebody else's Bowerstone, it would feel very different. The music will change; there's 120,000 AI driven lines of dialogue just for that, so you'll hear people gossiping about you getting married, for example. It's really nice that there are lots of people hanging around here, it's a really social place, but it's only when you visit someone else's world that you really appreciate that and that's why the co-op stuff is so important.

What I hope is that you'll go out and, taking your dog as an example, you don't realise that you're bonding with your dog all the time, whether or not you're doing things with it. You'll only really appreciate how different your dog is (just like real life) to other dogs when you go to someone else's world and see someone else's dog.

TVG: Yeah, I had a couple of groupies following me about at one point but I wasn't really bothered about them, I was bothered about the dog. It started limping and I was right in there with the dog elixir...

Yeah, it sounds like you're being a good guy then.

TVG: The Ambient Orbs for multiplayer co-op is certainly a very original concept...

Some very interesting things have come out of the orbs. For a start, we're storing everybody in the whole world when they're playing single-player co-op. Where they are in the world, their story, and details about their hero is being stored centrally in a server, and then up to 64 of those is being filtered down into your machine. We filter them by your friends, Gamerscores, by where people are in the story, and where they are geographically around you.

You can then see these people floating through the world and you know that's where they are in their world. What that means is you kind of want to show off and I've seen people do it. They'll walk up and say, 'Hey, can I do this bit of the game with you so I can see what it's like to do the evil or good bit?' And so it allows people to dip in and out of other people's worlds and only then do you really appreciate the differences. That ambient orb stuff is pretty cool, it really is. I've never seen anything like it before.

TVG: The police sergeant example I mentioned earlier was a pretty obvious example of different plot-arcs, but it's otherwise pretty hard to figure out where the story is branching out.

Ah, you see, that's what I want. In childhood I want it to be really obvious what you're doing, but after that it's a lot more subtle. It's a lot more subtle how you deal with those things, and I want you to be inventive as well. Later on you're encouraged to go and get famous, and one of the ways you can get famous is by getting married. You meet this ghost that says, 'I committed suicide because I was left on the altar. I want you to go out, find this girl, woo her, and then give her this note just before you get married.'

Now, is breaking her heart good or evil? Is putting him to rest good or evil? And I want you to experiment. I want you to say, 'Okay, I'll woo her, I'll take her out and then, in front of the ghost, I'll kill her and that'll make him really regret his actions.' I want players to experiment completely. So, sometimes they are going to be obvious, like with the police sergeant, but we're not going to be so kind on you after that. It's going to be a lot more up to you. I want people to talk about this and say, 'Have you tried doing this; have you tried doing that?'

TVG: The way your character's appearance changed with your actions in the game was a big part of Fable 1. How have you expanded on this for this sequel?

If you can get back to a machine, press the back button and on the debug menu it says 'Hero'. Press that and at the very top option it says 'Randomise Hero'. You'll be able to press that and it'll change the hero every five seconds and you can keep on doing that for the rest of the day.

It's not only about the hero's appearance, it's about their clothes; you can wear facial makeup now; you can wear beards; you can wear haircuts; you can dye all your clothes. We've got morphs to do with good and evil, purity and corruption, cruelty and kindness; to do with reputation and your renown; there are all the morphs to do with age - I just haven't talked about it, that's all, because it's one of the features I wanted you to discover on your own.

TVG: There are obviously hundreds of permutations for different routes through the games story. But in terms of actual end states of the game, you've talked about good, evil and corruption etc. Are there specific endings for all of those different groups?

Well, no. We could have done that; we did explore that, but then we found that people actually didn't like that. They think they'd like that, but what people then convince themselves is that they're on the wrong route. People go, 'I want to be on the route where you get this!' So, in the main core of the story but not in the side quests, everyone's going to experience the Lord Lucien character who is going to be there (I'm trying not to spoil the game here) and the same thing will happen, it's just who it happens to, what you're like, how the world reacts, how the world changes, and what your world is like when you get to that point is the difference. The ending is the same but the set that the ending takes place on and what happens as a consequence of the ending - that's the difference. Your world will be radically different to someone else's.

So, did your hands on disappoint you in any way?

TVG: No, not at all. Actually, we have it as a Pre-Order Now!! up on TVG, which is the highest anticipation rating you can give a game. One of the other TVG guys saw it at Microsoft's Spring Showcase earlier in the year, but I'm not at all disappointed by what I saw and there are obviously high expectancies going in with that sort of reputation.

I know. Well I've tried not to build it up too much because that was a mistake with the last one. I kept winding journalists up until they were in a frenzy and then when they got the copies, not even a cross between the Kama-Sutra and the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare could have met their expectations. But hopefully Fable II is going to exceed expectations.

You've only had a tiny, tiny glimpse. If you went back into Bower Lake I could show you 50 secrets that you missed.

TVG: Yeah, I'm sure.

And you'd kick yourself with some of them.

TVG: I'll look forward to getting around to that upon release...

TVG would like to thank Lionhead's Peter Molyneux for sitting down and talking with us about Fable II, the studio's upcoming Xbox 360 sequel to 2004's Fable, due out on October 24th.