Peter Molyneux Q&A, Part One
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Shack: You mentioned that you're play-testing Fable 2 right now. How's that going?
Peter Molyneux: It's pretty good. The way we work at the moment is that the whole game is completely playable, from start to finish. There's a group of people, and I'm in that group, that just keep on playing through it and making minor adjustments.
We're just playing through the opening scenes of the game, which is childhood. When you first play the game, you start off as this eight-year-old kid who's either a boy or a girl. We're just playing through the first thirty minutes of childhood at the moment.
Today, for the first time, we've got snow [worked in], because it's snowy at the start of the game. Now there's so much bloody snow you can't see anybody anywhere, it's so thick. All the balance that we'd done before, the subtleties about you seeing things out of the corner of your eye--there's a moment in the very, very start of the game where your sister, because you play with your sister, says, "Look at that beautiful castle. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we lived there?"
At this moment, you can't see the beautiful castle. It's playing through, coming up with perhaps a hundred things that are very slightly wrong with that scene, them going out to the team, them making those changes, coming back in again, and then giving more feedback. We just do that over and over and over again, pretty much, all day, every day.
We'll do childhood, probably from now until about 10 o'clock tonight, just playing it over and over again.
Shack: So you're in the polishing stages of the game?
Peter Molyneux: We're just driving. There are a number of these hurdles that we've got to get through. One is called a hurdle of code complete, which is coming at the end of this month, where effectively all of the programming code on the game is completed.
We're just coming up to that hurdle. We're just in the closing stages of Fable at the moment, going through these hurdles. There's content complete, then there's all sorts of different hurdles to get through.
If you were to be here now, and you'd see it and look at the screen, I think you would say, "Wow, childhood looks finished. When are you going to put it in a box?"
But there's a lot of subtleties there yet to go in, and what we've got left to do, is to play through as if we were not people who wanted to get through the game. A lot of the time, the way you play through is to say, "Okay, we think people are going to do this at this point, not try to break it."
We have to do a play-through that says, "Okay, supposing I want to jump off this wall at this point or suppose I want to go in a house at this point." There's a lot of steps to go through to get the game finished.
