Interview with Peter Molyneux

We sit down with a video game legend.

We recently got to sit down with Peter Molyneux – he of Fable, Populous, and Black & White fame – to talk about Fable II, game development, narratives, and James Bond. We caught up with him the day after he gave a keynote speech at the GCA 08 convention in Singapore.

At your keynote, you mentioned all these features that were in Fable II, and many of them were things you said were going to be in the first Fable – was that a conscious thing, to finally tick things off the list?

That’s exactly right – I think I stood back from Fable, and thought ‘hang on a second’. I sent out a letter to people saying, ‘I’ve learnt my lesson! I’m not going to talk about anything unless it’s in the game’. I’m not going to talk about the story – it made the PR in Fable disastrous; I told everyone about everything in the game, which left nothing as a surprise.

But this time I’ve been careful, I’ve talked about the dog, the combat, the co-op – but I really haven’t talked at all about the world, the economy. It’s only now that I’m starting to show off some of the little details.

How closely have you looked at the whole Hero’s Journey narrative structure while making Fable II? Most games have it, but don’t actually think about it, resulting in something that’s pastiche or derivative. In fact, how are you making the Fable II story stand out and be something special?

We certainly broke down the Hero’s Journey – mainly we realized early on that we didn’t have the skill to write a great story on our own, and that truly great ones are very rare. What really frightened me was that out of the hundreds of films made and thousands of books written every year, there was maybe a handful at most where you could say, ‘that’s a great story’. So it must be an impossible thing to do!

And to do that when you’ve got this large interactive world, where you don’t know who the hero is going to be, it meant we really had to think on our feet. In the end, the way we approached it was to cheat. We realized we can’t compete some of the greatest stories the world has ever seen – but what we can do is give you things to care about. So giving you the dog and a family – and I haven’t talked at all about companions – gives you a way of drawing people in.

Fable II is not hundreds of hours if you just follow the main trail, but that’s missing the whole point. I think after 50+ hours, you’d start getting bored.

That’s a good point – people have wondered if Fable II is going to be the ‘typical’ length of an RPG.

Well we’ve been very sneaky there – the length of Fable II is up to you. But if you go through quickly, you’re going to be poor, you’re going to be unpopular, so it’s just another reflection of who you are! If you want to be rich, and famous, and have a good dog and family, it’s a lot longer than that 12 or so hours.

I think in games, there are a lot of instances where people just don’t question the way things are done. Earlier you mentioned staging the entire script with live actors – what else have you done to ensure the story isn’t derivative and overly ‘game-like’?

There are a lot of very little things that we’ve done, and a lot of big things as well. One big thing is the quality of the voice actors we’ve got in. Across the board, it’s a very high standard – we’ve got some big names in there, but everyone is extremely professional.

So what this meant is that they don’t have the time to muck around with some developer coming in with a scribbled script on the back of a cigarette packet. And some of them simply said, ‘I’m not saying that – that’s not the sort of character I’m going to play’. So we needed to be really ready.

The staging was really revolutionary for us. We even had a film director there – his role wasn’t to direct, but to teach us to direct. So we started the staging of the story before any real work had been done on the game. And on the first day, the first scene we did was so tiny and simple – and we took literally 14 hours to get five seconds, because the director made us step back and really look at things.

There was a huge amount of learning in that. And then we mentioned that the character had a dog – and the director said, ‘I didn’t know he had a dog’. And we had a ridiculous dog puppet – and the director couldn’t handle that, the idea of a highly interactive dog roaming around.

We were at such a simple soundstage, with no props, no scenery – and next door, they were shooting the new James Bond! [Laughs]

And did they ask you what you were up to?

No, they didn’t care at all what we were up to – we kept trying to sneak in and see how they were going!

So that obviously took up quite some time – how long has Fable II been in development now?

It’s been three years – which sounds like a long time, but when you’re inventing and creating all this stuff, it’s not so long. We’ve been in crunch time for around nine months or so. In this industry now, three years for a new title is about the norm.

How was the development process? I’m just remembering all the features you’ve shown in the game, and it just seems like it must have been a huge effort to get everything in there.

It does sound amazing! But it’s no good being creative these days unless you’re professional. The first thing you’ve got to remember is that people are trusting you with tens of millions of dollars – you’re literally spending thousands of dollars an hour.

The old way I used to work – and I became famous for this – was to say, ‘the game will be ready when it’s ready’. And I used to come in to the office and say, ‘hey, I’ve had a good idea, let’s try it. And that’s partly why I got in trouble with Fable. So what we did here was block out one period of time for experiments and ideas. There were whole systems we tried and scrapped. But once we finished with that, we didn’t let ourselves add anything else.

So essentially design stopped for about nine months, while the tech guys caught up to what we were trying to do. And then we shifted things around, and then made ourselves stop.

How did the co-op mode come about? Because coincidentally, both my flat mate and my partner are playing through Final Fantasy XII right now, so the rest of us get to sit there and watch a single person play something, and I actually wanted an RPG involving more than one player.

Well firstly, I just guessed that the era of the single player game is coming to an end. Consoles are no longer in peoples’ bedrooms. They’re in the main room now – and it’s exactly the problem you just said, but what’s worse is when you’re married! And when you have kids too, the time you have left over – and the time you have to spend with your partner – they get very precious. And it gets complicated when you still want to play computer games!

So that’s part of it – I think people will want to play together, even with an RPG like Fable II. The most wonderful thing for me, then, was to have a gamer play with a casual. Why is it just boys who end up sitting on a couch together and play? That was all bubbling in my mind.

And so the thought of having co-op lead to the one-button combat. And then the problem was, how are these people going to link up together? That’s where the idea came to make the online lobby simply the world. So the concept of inviting people into your world, and seeing them pass you by as ghosts in your own world, came about.

Going back to the story – where did you draw inspiration from?

There was an iconic film for the look, and almost the feel, of the game. For the first Fable, it was probably Sleepy Hollow by Tim Burton, and for Fable II it was Brotherhood of the Wolf, where there were guns but also swords. And there were remote-feeling countrysides, but also cities.

For the story, it was those simple, pure stories that were more inspirational. But for the ending of the story, we didn’t look anywhere – we wanted it to be pretty unique.

How do you keep motivated? Is that even a problem? Three years can be a long time.

No, this is me - I have an incredible job, and it’s a more amazing experience for me today than it’s ever been. I literally get to have an idea, and then I can play that idea, and I can tell everyone about that idea. How can you possibility get bored with that? [Laughs]. I could have an idea in this room now, and that idea would be started!

Has this game achieved everything you want to do in games? From Fable II, where do you want to go from here? You mentioned you want to get casual gamers and more hardcore ones side by side – have you got further ideas on that?

Well, I would say don’t expect too much. We tried to make a great experience for you, but it’s not the second coming! You’ll find things wrong with Fable II, but hopefully still enjoy it. One of the things I wanted to do with this sequel was try hard to surprise you. I mean, we didn’t have to do many of the features, like the dog, or the world, and it would still have sold respectfully.

But I just want, when you experience anything from my head, I want you to be surprised. That’s what I want to be known for. I can see online going a lot further, and also story going further, and hopefully gameplay that is simple without sacrificing the depth. But the details I don’t know about!

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