Somewhat annoyed with not being able to look up exactly what was said at X06, I sat down and transcribed the entire video, so it’s all written down almost exactly word for word. It’s quite a lot that can be said in 23 minutes - 4000 words, actually.

You can watch the video here, uploaded by Khione to Gametrailers, and read the transcription below. Good for quoting, that.

[skip] has to stand for, is doing things that other people don’t dare to do. We have to make original games, and we failed to do that recently. Fable 2 allows us to do that again. So if we’re going to make Fable, as a sequel, then what it should be is the most amazing sequel ever. Every feature we have to say, is this good enough? Is this gonna be what Lionhead really stands for? So if we’re making the world, how can we make a world that surprises you?

Now, the first thing is, when we sat down and thought about Fable 2, we knew there were lots of games that were highly like what we did in Fable. You know, these free-roaming worlds are very very popular now. You know, just here, Mass Effect is looking fantastic, I thought Assasin’s Creed looks brilliant, and, there’s a lot of these sort of games there. If I’m doing Fable 2, there’s one thing I gotta do. I’ve gotta totally surprise you. I’ve gotta do things that is gonna [skip] help me make it different towards everything before. For a start, we’ve got one huge advantage with Fable. You play through a lifetime, not a weekend. A lot of the other games that are being made, you kinda play through 10 minutes of someone’s life, we play through a lifetime. And that means we can introduce something called, dynamic levels. Now, in Fable 1, I got into a huge amount of trouble, maybe some of you remember this, or not, about oak- acorns growing into oak trees. I said, at one point, you could plant - I don’t know why I said this, we just experimented with this, it wasn’t in the game fully - you could plant an acorn it would grow into an oak tree. That feature was cut from Fable 1 for very good reasons it was cut from Fable 1. After the game’s release, I recei-, honestly, I received two death threats because that feature wasn’t in that game. So, dynamically changing worlds, we’ve gotta nail in Fable 2 so I don’t receive more death threats. So what that means is, forget acorns and oak trees, let’s talk about changing a whole level.

Because it’s over a lifetime, this region will change

Let’s talk about this here. This is called Brightwood, it’s one of the regions in Fable, Fable 2. Because it’s over a lifetime, this region will change. How this region changes is dependent on how you play the game. This is the first of what I think is an exciting feature. There’s about ten of them, and this is one of them. So, let’s take two scenarios. [skip] and another ten year’s time, there’s a village, in another ten year’s time, there’s a time. What this means is, these regions, you the player decides what they’re like by the way you play, they’re dynamic regions. It’s not a tree anymore, growing from an acorn, it’s a whole region. That’s a next-generation step of roleplaying.

But that’s not enough, that’s not enough for the world, there’s one more important feature. Which is one of my - this is one of my ten favourite features [Molyneux leans forward, changes screen to showing a large house]. And it is such a simple concept, such an easy thing. We’ve all played role-playing games for countless years, we’ve played them in castles, we’ve played them in towns, we’ve played them in villages, we’ve played them in dungeons. Well it’s about time I owned those places. So everything you see in Fable - every building, every castle, every dungeon, you can own. You can buy, you can run it, you can own it. That means that at the start of the game - you see that castle? One day you can own that castle. It will unlock content for you; everyone in that castle will call you Lord, you’ll be the Lord of the castle. You can, if you want to, if you play long enough, everything can be yours. That’s a roleplaying game. I play through it, I play through a story, and I end up owning it. That’s a role-playing game; it’s my choice and that’s what I wanted.

the player can own everything

So having done all this world, fully simulated, dynamic regions, owning everything, owning a place means getting money from it, owning a place means unlocking content, if I own the castle and I own the, the cathedral, that’s fine. If I just own the castle, there’s conflict between the castle and the cathedral. It’s a simulation, means that the player can own everything. That is a next-generation world. Obviously we’ve got some simulated characters.

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