Loinhead

Videogamer.com has the third part of its huuuge interview with Molyneux online now; the main bits are that Molyneux thinks he’d be dumb not to plan DLC (and that it’s more that just new weapons and armour), co-op sex is maybe out, and Molyneux might revisit BC.

From Kotaku comes an interview with Molyneux about what he tried to do with his letter to reviewers and what he intended with the game.

I think there are two reviews you could do and you could be very objective for. You could review this as a gamer’s game and I think it will do well as a gamer’s game. But really it has been designed to be a casual game as well, to be accessible and that would be interesting for me.

This is what I was trying to say in the letter: Why don’t you, after you’ve done the review give a copy of the game to someone who doesn’t play games and see how they get on. Because you may find that is a completely different experience they are getting that of course us as gamers couldn’t hope to ever get because we’ve been polluted by years and years of games. That’s what I was kind of saying, I wasn’t trying to steer you in to review it this way.

I think increasingly now we are making games which are trying to appeal to not just us but a wider audience. That’s certainly what Fable is trying to do. It’s interesting when I watch (a non-gamer) play, they just obsess about completely different things than what I as a gamer would. They are far less interesting in leveling up their character and far more interested in making sure the dog’s OK. And that is quite a bizarre experience to see.

I’m not being critical of Fable but I do think that Fable is quite a distance away from what people in Japan are used to (in terms of role-playing games.). There isn’t a million things you can configure for every battle, there are just those three simple buttons. What we are trying to do is make the experience of having your own hero, we’re trying to open that up to a broader audience as well as keeping our core audience happy.

It all comes down to he experience at the end of the day. How it makes you feel. I’ve come to learn more and more as a designer that it’s all about how it makes you feel and less about the mechanics of whether you have growing trees or all of those things.

I have been guilty in the past, I think, of shoving in more and more of these mechanics in the thought I would be making a better experience but actually… I’ve forgotten to ask does that mechanic make you feel any better or more involved, or more into the game.

Russell Shaw has written a brief article on the Sound recording of Fable 2 for Music4Games.net in which he also reveals the four catergories music in Fable, the 8 styles of music used, The Crescendo system reacting to combat level (difficulty), number of opponents and Hero health and finally, The Tiffins Boys Choir

From Sam on Lionhead’s blogs:

Remember a couple of days ago (or was it a week) where on a blog it was mentioned that Fable II would be shipping ‘without’ Online Co-op? And remember we said we were busting our balls to get it ready in time for a ‘Day One’ release? Well - news folks! It looks like we’ve done it…for all of you who are connected to Xbox Live, when starting up your copy of Fable II (on 21st October in USA, 24th October in Europe and 18th December in Japan). So all of you getting upset and all, you wouldn’t even have noticed… Sort of. Well done to the team.

Yahoo! carries the Fable II TV ad!

Molyneux told Videogaming247.com that all Fable II singe-player saves will be horded on one server:

All the single-player games are accumulated up to this one server and then filtered back down to you.

There are a number of filters that filter down what orbs are seen in your world, and you can have up to 64 simultaneous orbs in your world at any one time.

And they can be filtered down by region, so you can see the people that live locally and close to you, they can be your friends from your Friends List, they can be people with a similar game ranking as you, or I think there’s one - this is purely from memory, so I may be wrong here - for people in a similar state or progress in Fable II.

If we could patch the code we could add any filter we liked.

So we could, if we wanted to - not that you can - say everyone that likes the colour yellow, or everyone who dresses the same as your hero, or everyone who’s a woman: we could filter it down in a whole host of different ways.

A couple weeks ago, MTV chatted to Molyneux again about the “Han Solo” problem: not playing as morally great or awful but still getting rewarded.

After childhood, it then becomes a lot more subtle and it’s less about the good/evil choice and more about your choice, whatever that is. The way that I present it to you is not ‘oh, please save me or please hurt me,’ it’s more about giving you sort of an insight into what this is and you do what you need to do.

Don’t think that being good or evil will unlock different parts of the game that will allow you to be more powerful. Don’t think that you’re going down these paths that lead you to completely different content in either one. You’re not. You’re just doing it to be who you want to be. You’re going to have the same choices at the end of the game, whether you play good or evil.

I’m going to say that I don’t want you to play through this game twice. I kind of thought ‘God, there must be a huge amount of this game they find insanely boring the second time you go through.

According to Variety.com, Molyneux has written a letter to go out with the review copies of Fable II that are sent to publications. Effectively asking for special consideration, it reads:

I have a favour to ask you — we build this game not only to appeal to gamers like yourself, but to appeal to anybody. So please, please, please, please, pleae find somebody who doesn’t play games, watch them play it and see how their world turns out, because I think it’s only when you see those differences that the unique experiences comes through.

Molyneux also “devotes two paragraphs to explaining how great online co-op is going to be, but how we won’t be able to review that until after the game comes out, perhaps in the first week, via the promised Xbox Live update.”

After the famous 9/10 rating and quality concerns around the edges, now there’s a letter to reviewers. Getting weirder and weirder.

From Woody on Lionhead’s blogs:

Just to give you all a quick reminder of one of our LCE make-up-offers. Today, and only for a limited time, you can get a few tracks from Fable 1 and 2 for FREE (link below). 
To further show our commitment to the faithful fans, we have created a special Fable album for free download for a limited time!  This includes a wonderful selection of Fable 1 music and 3 brand new tracks from the upcoming Fable II soundtrack. Go to http://www.sumthingdigital.com, and enter “FableCollection” promotion code.  This will be available beginning October 6, 2008 @ 9am PST!
I’ve managed to download them without the promotion code, just click on the image on the right hand side and you’ll get the .zip with six tracks. The music is absolutely wonderful!

P.s.: the track meta info in the mp3s you download is a bit wrong, for proper credits see the details page: https://www.sumthingdigital.com/AlbumDetails.aspx?albumid=3822.