Fable Interview
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Q: One intriguing factor about Fable is that it's been a relatively long time at four years in development. Is that a good thing for a game?
A: Political answer on this one. It's been an interesting thing. I don't think we realised it would take quite as long as this, for a number of reasons. One of which is that we set up the game's central two premises. Which are, everything you do in the game changes your character and everything you do in the game changes the world. From that point, what would it be like to play and what would we like to do?
It's a 'what if' game, what would be fun? That generated 500 game features and being the people we were, we said, we'll do all of them, every single last bloody one. We were over ambitious, we sat there and worked through them and what we didn't realise is that our original two questions should have been the guiding light through the whole of the project.
And if something didn't enhance those two main features, then we probably shouldn't put too much effort into it. Basically we tried absolutely everything and we've done so many things with this game and some things didn't work, which we expected.
In some way it was really good in that it gave us a lot of chance to experiment, to try out a whole bunch of new things. There's a load of technology which has never been used, just because they didn't enhance those two main features, which we'll use later on and you'll see in forthcoming games.
Secondly, we didn't realise how much more polish you had to put into a console game compared to a PC game. It's not so true anymore, but it's something that dawned on us and it was changing while we were finishing Fable. We'd finish everything to what we thought was about 80 percent, but what we didn't realise there was still about 80 percent to go.
Getting that animation spot on, getting that feel for combat absolutely there... That was a completely different way of thinking for us, because an action game is that much more tactile and that's what makes the whole experience. Going forwards, we're much more aware of how much extra effort modern games demand.
