Peter Molyneux Interview, Part One

[GameBanshee News]

Develop has published the first portion of an interview they did with Lionhead Studios CEO Peter Molyneux about the company's development process and how it changed from Fable to Fable II.

Is it something you’ve always practiced, or is it a new initiative?

The truth is, I think I’m famously awful at developing games. Before, I’d walk into the office, wave my arms and say ‘I’ve just had a cool thought’ – usually after severe alcohol abuse – and that lead us to spending a lot of money very foolishly on things that weren’t going to get anywhere.

Quite a while ago now, we sat down and thought, well, this is ridiculous – we can’t keep this notion that game development is a purely creative process, and that you have to build it to be able to see it. There’s got to be another way.

The first thing that we did is say, right, we need to do more work upfront it design and concepting, and that means less iteration further on. Because when you’ve got a team like Fable, which was around 100 people, you can’t experiment with that many; you’d be spending mad amounts of money. You just can’t do it.

So now, a lot of our design decisions are made when the team is small so that we can change our minds, because the thing about design is that you need to change your mind. You can’t come up with one idea and then just expect that idea to be perfect – it’s never going to work.

I’m a great believer of getting the ‘wrapper’ right up front – how you describe the game to people, how people describe the game to each other, and getting the mechanics and look and feel of it right – and that’s a lot to do with experimentation. We do that a lot. In fact, we do it so much that people get a bit panicky and ask when we’re actually going to go into production because we’ll keep on going around in that loop until we’re happy with it.

Was this process applied to Fable 2?

Yeah: the big things – the breadcrumb trails, the dog, the one-button combat – are all the result of real iteration, experimentation and concepting that we did. If it wasn’t for that, it just wouldn’t exist. So, we had a one-button combat demo three months after we started thinking about the game.

I’m not saying it’s the perfect way to work, but one of the things that Lionhead really wants to do is innovate, and challenge the fundamental foundation stones that we think of as a given in the industry – things like death mechanics and pause screens and minimaps – and if we’re going to do that, we can’t do it in a purely creative way.

If you asked me what I was most proud of in Fable 2, it’s not actually any of those: I’m most proud of the process. If I’m honest, on Fable we just burnt people’s lives; we destroyed the team. Week after week, month after month, they worked 50, 60, 70, 80 hour weeks. It destroyed their lives and destroyed their marriages. You just can’t do that anymore. You can’t do it.