Fable II Interview
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Eurogamer: So you have all these ideas, is it always a struggle to bring them together coherently?
Peter Molyneux: Yes, and I think I've been more guilty perhaps than anyone in the industry of making games with mechanics in them which don't mean anything. They're very nice, they sound good, but when you come to play them, there's a kind of feeling of what should have been. When I think back to Dungeon Keeper, and even the original Fable, they were incredibly guilty of having those mechanics in them where at the end of the day you think, "So what?"
In Fable 1, all of the world's economy changing, the prices changing, the villagers' reacting to you, that was a tiny proportion of what the game was about, and when you think about the number of times that I spoke about that, it would seem that it should have been a lot more important than it actually was.
In Black & White 1, famously, it was announced that the weather in-game when you were playing would be the same as the weather outside for real. And that actually worked. We had 300 weather stations sending updates to your machine. In fact what it meant was that people in Britain probably just played a grey Black & White, which is pretty depressing.
There was an enormous amount of effort to do that, and it was a feature than meant nothing. We never told anyone about it. We never said, "Hey, look at the sky here and look at the sky outside!" To be a good designer you've got to think about the experience, and that means right from the very first moment. Just because I think we've made an amazing eighth feature, does that make the game better or worse? I would argue now that your poor little mind has to think about eight different features rather than seven, and even seven is too many to start off with.
It's far better to cut it down and have a smaller number of things, polished. The dog is the perfect example in Fable 2. The dog is polished to make sure that the limited things that he can do, he does well.
