Molyneux Slips Additional Details on Fable II

Via Xbox 360 Fanboy, and in the grand tradition of Peter Molyneux's history of saying crazy-awesome things in interviews, comes some fascinating revelations about Fable 2 and past games. Mr. Molyneux's tradition of honesty continues, with up-front admissions of problems with Black and White 2 and a few hints about what we'll be seeing in his upcoming fantasy game. "One of the tiny decisions that we made in Black and White 2 was to use Black and White 1 as the foundation stone for all the code for Black and White 2, and what we found was you had this massive amount of code and you were putting an even more massive amount of code on top, and underneath it was this quite shaky foundation stone, and that meant we had to rewrite quite a lot of stuff. And then it came down that the original plan for Black and White 2 - we thought we had it on time, but we didn't, we ran out of money to produce really - was that it was gonna be twenty-five lands, I think, fifteen to twenty-five lands, the creatures' intelligence could have been much more, we had a real plan to stretch the features out so that you didn't get them all by land, you know, third land I think it was, stretch those features out, there was an awful lot more about the RTSy side of the game, an awful more about the army side."

Comments

Seems like a sincere guy, but..

[ScotchForBreakfast]

Peter's enthusiasm is always nice, but does anyone put a lot of weight into what he says before a game is released?

His games are usually good, but never nearly as revolutionary as he talks about before they're released. The innovations he tries end up being around the edges of the game and the core game often is very... typical.

Re:Seems like a sincere guy, but..

[Control Group]

No. And if they do, they shouldn't.

I mean, come on - what did he actually say in that interview? It's obvious he's excited, and that's neat and all, but he didn't tell us anything.

Except that death is going to be involved some how, some way. Maybe. But he can't tell you anything about how, or why it might be cool. But it'll be better. Or maybe just different. Or maybe not, but it's something he's thought about a lot.

And there'll be one-button fighting. If it works out well when people test it. If they have people test it. But that's risky.

Also there's this other thing that's super-duper awesome, but he can't tell you anything about it. Well, OK, he can. It's one word. But he can't tell you what that word is. But it's awesome.

I mean, I can respect the fact that you don't want to let the cat out of the bag prematurely when you're making a game and trying to innovate. And given his history, it's not surprising if Molyneux is trying to be far more careful than he's inclined to be about letting information out. But if that's your goal, then just say there isn't anything you can say except you're working on things that you hope will be innovative and fun.

It's a much shorter interview, I admit. But, brevity and wit and all that.

Something extraneous, here...

[Control Group]

Molyneux's history of saying crazy-awesome things in interviews

You know, removing one word from that phrase would transform it into an accurate representation of reality.

All right, technically one hyphen followed by one word.

Re:The Dog Companion

[DrSkwid]

So you'll be a vegan then, or does your capacity to empathise finish at your plate ?