We have an exclusive interview with Peter Molyneux on our hands here, from the community visit on Friday. There’s one going to follow with Dene Carter, Creative Director of Fable 2, in just a couple of days - keep checking back! Peter talks about loads of stuff, including what went wrong with B&W2, reveals what’s going to be the next big thing in combat, prototypes for Fable 2 they worked on, what’s going on with NPCs and expressions vs. dialogue, plus a final bit about the secret game. Video here, transcript below.

So - can we talk about Black and White 2? Yeah. You’ve said why you felt it went bad, but what was actually bad about the game itself?

Right. That’s a list, and it’s a list of kinda my failures - which I have to take responsibility for, obviously - but also just the position and situation that we were in and you know, forced to finish the game. And that’s the biggest flaw, not having the time to finish the game. Even though it was in development for a long time. It was rushed at the end, we didn’t have time to balance it and play it.

Is it true that you had to start again from scratch after a certain time in development?

One tiny little decision that can end up totally ruining the entire thing

That, that - it sounds like a really bad thing, doesn’t it. Starting again - we didn’t actually start again - that implies that you walk into the office one day and you haven’t got anything, but there were certain features that had to be thrown away and redone, and the reason for that was that, this is what’s so stupid about games development, it can be one tiny little decision that you make that can end up totally ruining the entire thing. And one of the tiny decisions that we made in Black and White 2 was to use Black and White 1 as the foundation stone for all the code for Black and White 2, and what we found was you had this massive amount of code and you were putting an even more massive amount of code on top, and underneath it was this quite shaky foundation stone, and that meant we had to rewrite quite a lot of stuff. And then it came down that the original plan for Black and White 2 - we thought we had it on time, but we didn’t, we ran out of money to produce really - was that it was gonna be twenty-five lands, I think, fifteen to twenty-five lands, the creatures’ intelligence could have been much more, we had a real plan to stretch the features out so that you didn’t get them all by land, you know, third land I think it was, stretch those features out, there was an awful lot more about the RTSy side of the game, an awful more about the army side. So you know, if you were going to turn round to me now and say, what are your biggest regrets? I think one of my biggest regrets is that whole time of Black and White 2, you know, I wish I could go back to the start of the development of Black and White 2, start from a blank sheet of paper and plan to make it better.

How do you feel, now, about the creature sliders to control the mind?

Well, it was a really good idea, if it had been implemented fully. What that turned out to be, that idea wasn’t balanced enough I don’t think. That was a leading question, wasn’t it? Yeah. What did you feel about the sliders? I don’t think they worked. They ruined the creature as a person. Agreed.

So - Fable 2. Yes. One-button proximity-based combat. Can you tell us about it?

it’s an experiment that has really, really worked

God, there’s so much I can tell you about it. I’d love, I’m gonna talk publicly about this for longer almost than I talked about any other game feature. It was - the only thing I can say about it - it was an experiment, that we tried, it was an experiment that we didn’t need to try, because the combat in Fable 1 wasn’t bad, at all, no-one said it was bad, quite a lot of people said it was good, and it’s an experiment that has really, really worked. Really worked. Not nearly worked.

You’re talking about this later, does that mean it’s one of the BIG 3 features?

I wouldn’t say it was one of the big three features, what I’m saying is that it’s worthy of, you know - if I could sit down with you now, which I’d love to do, I’d love to show you - in fact, we might do this in the communities, is to, well, considering the idea of publishing to the communities the prototype engines that we used to try and prove it, and those are all in what we call whitebox, so they don’t look particularly nice but they play well, and see what the communities think of all that stuff. But you know, as I said it was a risky thing, there’s more bits of that combat that come together than I am talking about. I’ve talked about proximity-based context-based combat, confined combat, I think I’ve talked about one-button combat and one-blow kills, I haven’t in any way talked about … and this is something that no-one has ever heard, this word, there’s one thing about combat I haven’t spoken about which is a very interesting area - and, one word? - One word. And it’s death. Death. Think about it. Think about death. Think about what computer games do with death. What have they done with death? What does every game do, what does just about every game do with death?

Think about death

Try to ignore it, simplify it? Well, it’s even worse than that, you die, and you go back in time twenty minutes to do the same thing over again. That’s fine if I’m playing a platformer, not so fine if you’re doing an RPG game. So I haven’t talked about death, there’s another thing which I haven’t talked at all about which is another word that you’re gonna hear me use - which I’m not gonna talk about - it’s another big thing.

So a lot of the combat came from the Core Technology Group. Has anything else come from that?

A lot of prototypes came from it, and there’s a lot of things which those people experiment with, like for example the core technology group [knocking] did the fur on the — dog.

Anything failed - Oh yeah - like what?

Ermm — there was a lot of experiments with fluids, which didn’t pan out, there was a load of experiments with greater than one thousand animating objects, which didn’t pan out, there was, yeah, there were quite a few experiments that we played around with.

How did working out what the player’s interested in from the camera movements work out?

The camera movement stuff, the camera in Fable 2 has had its own little team at the moment. The camera in Fable 1 was fixed, but the camera in Fable 2 is a lot more dynamic.

And, err, anything interesting to say about the NPCs?

Well, I mean, yeah, of course I’ve always got interesting things to say. I can tell you about the ambition for NPCs? The ambition is that they say a lot more, they do a lot more, they remember a lot more, they comment a lot more, they’re sort of woven through the game and the gameplay an awful lot more than they were, and you can think of Fable 2 - where Fable 1 I think one of the criticisms which I heard from Fable 1 which we saw ourselves, you had the hero bit, and the fighting bit, and then you had the simulation bit. And they kind of almost felt like two seperate games. And you’ll find much more that it feels like they’re pulled together. I still quite like the idea that I can take, you know, if I don’t want to go adventuring today I’m not forced to go, there’s not just gameplay in adventuring, there must be gameplay in the simulation. So I quite like the idea that I can control when I’m a hero and when I’m not. But equally we - you’ll find that locations and NPCs and what they remember and how they react to you and what they give you, they have things now which are important to you, is going to be much more in the gameplay.

And talking to NPCs, you use expressions, still? What makes that such a good system, instead of dialogue?

Well, yeah, it’s a very good question, why not just have, like quite a few games do, have a - do you want to say this, or do you want to say that - now for me, the more I have to read, and the more I have to sit down and wait for something, the less impactful it actually is. You know, I think a lot of people mistake a lot of dialogue for good story. A lot of people mistake, you know, you’ve seen it in lots of games: “Do you want the main character to say: Hello-my-name-is-blah-and-I-am-a-very-nice-person-will-you-come-with-me-to-go-to-Beechwood-and-we-will-have-a-good-time.” When actually what you want to say is, come with me. Yeah. So the more you put words into the hero’s mouth, the less he feels like my hero. So if we restrict his vocabulary through these expressions, he actually feels more like me, and less like someone that’s been given to me. That’s my theory.

What about games like GTA 4? Like CJ. I mean, that worked very well. You felt a lot of empathy for the person you were playing.

Yes. I mean, I agree. There’s good examples on both sides. I would say, our ambition is to firstly make you believe more - it’s very important to me that this is you, of course you won’t really believe it, but I want you to say, when you talk to the screen, talking in your own mind, I don’t want you to say “What should he say here?” I want you to say in your own mind, “What should I say here?” That - and I know it’s a very little distinction - but it’s very important to me. I think we can give you that. What’s very powerful - what’s disastrous about those statement things - is imagine you could do this: Imagine someone, this is an example, it’s not going to be in the game. Someone’s turning round to you and says,

And your finger is just hovering over the laugh button.

“Ahh, I really need your help. My daughter’s been lost for a week and she’s gone to the woods and I haven’t seen her, you know, she’s the apple of eye.” And your finger is just hovering over the laugh button. And you think, haha, I’ll just laugh. And you laugh, and the character goes, “you laugh?? This is my daughter!” And you laugh again, and the main character says “This is terrible, you’re such an evil man!” You laugh again and he goes running off, and I mean that’s my decision to do that, you may never do it, you may not have the mind to do it, that, to me, makes me believe that this is a story about me, and not a story about someone else.

Okay. And one final question, you can’t tell us anything about Project X? No. But if you could, hypothetically, what would you tell us?

Well - well all I can - no, I can tell you something. I can tell you that there’s two things about it. Firstly, what’s Lionhead stand for? Innovation. Innovation. Innovation, and we more than ever before have said, we must make landmark games, we must make landmark, things that are landmark in the history of gaming, so you know that it’s gonna have innovation in it, and we’re going to strive further than ever. But! I’m gonna say to you, already, there’s more innovation in Fable 2 than there was in Fable 1. Maybe as a gamer, you’re not gonna think, like the interactive cutscenes, well that’s not very exciting, where actually, combat, well, combat, it’s not really innovation there, but actually, there’s a huge amount of innovation hidden in things you may not think about. And I can promise you one thing about the Second Floor title, there’s gonna be some stuff you’ve never seen before. I’ve always said that. Always said that. But that’s what I’ve always believed.

The September 23rd source. Can you narrow it down a little bit? You said that’s where you got your inspiration from? No. Okay. Too bad. The clue’s there. Thank you.