Fable II Interview
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Shack: That decision to slowly ramp up the complexity--the approach is slightly reminiscent of a game like Spore. Do you find it challenging to entice the casual gamers without turning off the core players who already know how to swing a sword?
Peter Molyneux: Firstly, what I've learned as a designer--and I think I've learned more on Fable II probably than any other game I've worked on--it's so tempting just to give you everything and say look, "This is what the combat is like, this is what the story is like, I'll give you big drama and a lot of big guns right from the onset." I've done games like that before, and I think Fable 1 actually suffered a little from this.
But when I sit down I say to myself, look, you're going to playing this for a while. I don't need you to give you everything. It's far better to give you something new--every fifteen minutes there should be something new. Maybe that new thing's on the horizon and you're reaching for it. Maybe it's a new combat style, maybe it's a new thing that your dog does, maybe it's a new region to go to, but just that feeling. I hate the feeling in a game where you think, "Oh god, I'm doing this all over again." I loathe that.
A lot of what it is--imagine if the features are a rubber band, and we're just stretching that rubber band out. We still have the same amount of features, we're just stretching them out, so that when you get these things you're ready for them. So it's a very interesting thing that hopefully you'll find psychologically, and even now that I've just told you I think it works, just at that point where you're just thinking, "Oh, I want something meaty to fight. I'm fighting beetles." That's when we hit you with the first bandit battle. And just when you're saying, "I've been talking to these people and nothing's happening," that's when you get to a city and realize that you've got money and realize how big the world is. We try to just pull those features out.
