Peter Molyneux Q&A, Part Two
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Shack: Were there any ideas you had to cut from Fable 2, for whatever reason?
Peter Molyneux: There were things every single day which we had to pull back on. There's loads and loads of things in Fable that we had to pull back on. A lot of the time it's due to the fact that, when you actually sit down and think about, "Okay, players are going to be doing this at this point in time and this at this point in time," when you actually lay that down there's so many things in Fable 2.
It's just incredible the number of things that you can do in this game. It's really incredible. A lot of times you think, "Gee, we haven't finished implementing this feature yet and god knows where this is going to fit. Where are we going to be telling the player how to do this?"
There's a very good example of that, where we thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool in Fable 2 if you could wear disguises? If you could disguise yourself so you could go into a town and you could commit a crime and then you could be chased out by all the guards, and then you could put this disguise on and come back in town and creep around and hear what people have to say. Wouldn't that be cool?"
We realized that if we were centering the game around disguises, that would be cool. But it being a hidden feature that people have to discover for themselves? Balancing that against the idea that to do disguises you would have to have three less costumes in the game, we chose to have three more costumes.
There were a lot of things like that within Fable, where we sat down and thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we did..?" and we didn't fit it in. There's a ton of things, a list of about fifty things that we thought of, which may have been experimented slightly with, or we partially implemented and then realized or saw that the experimentation didn't work, or they didn't fit in the game, or it was too complex, or it took up too much processor time.
The funny thing is, the way that we work this is kinda the way I've always worked, has been to be very ambitious at the start, and then pare back, which some people would think is a pretty fool-hearted way to work. The reason I like that way is that even if you get to half of the features that you thought of, it's a better place to be, to try and get innovation in the game, rather than saying, "Look, we'll be safe about doing this game."
