At the Develop Conference in Brighton later this month, Lionhead have:

Fable 2 Art Showcase — Ian Lovett and John McCormack (14.30 - 15.30, Thursday, July 31st)

and a as-yet undated “New Gameplay Dimensions in Role-playing Games” talk by Molyneux. From the latest Develop Magazine.

Lionhead has updated their website to a subtle yellow-on-black, gradient heavy design on a gorgeous background art piece.

It also includes a Tales of Albion section, which requires Microsoft’s flash-competitor Silverlight to run; however you can read content right here without Silverlight (I guess someone forgot to remove those This is Sparta!s before publishing).

The old content still appears to be there in its entirety, including the never-updated © 2006 Microsoft Corporation (you guys, I think <%=Year(Date)%> echoes the current year).

GameSpot, in a press release (since when do they do press releases? About something so mundane?), confirm that Fable 2 will once again be at E3, July 11th - 13th.

In the super-short superficial entirely worthless “Players Only” series, this week dealing with the console race, Peter Molyneux is featured for a whole thirty seconds saying he likes the Xbox because of Live. (The only actually interesting comment is from Michael Pachter.)

Peter Molyneux has said something again about the games industry today. The Guardian’s Kieron Gillen asks him about the (non)visibility of games designers.

“This produces twice as many column inches in a magazine or online… and suddenly they can literally quantify the benefit from getting stars out there,” he says.

Clearly having a celebrity touch gets newspaper articles twice as many column inches too.

The Develop Conference & Expo – Come and be inspired by these speakers and others from studios such as Media Molecule, Lionhead Studios,

Again from Develop Magazine’s most recent release, it seems that someone from Lionhead will be representin’ at the Brighton conference later this year, from the 29th to the 31st of July. Also see last time Lionhead went to Brighton.

In this month’s Develop Magazine there is an “IP Profile” of Black & White, although it reads more like an essay about Lionhead pre-2006. (We have some alleged “images” which may or may not come from the alleged “article”.) The interesting numbers are:

• Black & White and Creature Isle sold 2 million copies put together
• B&W2 sold “a fraction” of that, so perhaps a few hundred thousand
• Fable sold 1.5 million in its first month and 3 million overall

Gamasutra have a 5-page interview with the Molynator. Here is a brief selection of tantalising phrases which may or may not be related to the interview or, for that matter, Fable 2: henchmen that can do everything you can, Peter playing with and designing for his wife, finding the middle ground between arcade and hardcore and the audience to go with it, something about “women” having “insight”, the industry, the past of Bullfrog yet again. Also he likes Phantom Hourglass.

Yarr.

Former High Karma members were invited to Lionhead Studios a couple of days ago. During which time, they were let in on some hidden secrets and the likes that regular members dream about at night.

Most of which they discovered was fairly old, MJLover mentioned that there were some fancy details that were recently put in, but sadly he wasn’t allowed to say much about it.

So what was revealed?

Well, as Derobrash mentioned, LH are experimenting with a Tamagotchi device of sorts that will allow you to train your dog even away from your xBox. You’ll then be able to upload the dog you have on your Tamagotchi up to your xbox, and if you’ve done much training, you’ll have a more trained dog on your game.

Much as we at Loinhead feel obliged to hate MTV, their multiplayer blog has a writeup of one of the endless GDC press sessions Molyneux gave. What he says about aging reinforces that the game takes place in episodic sections of the character’s life. There’s nothing groundbreakingly new, but rather everything again from a different starting point.