From that community visit last week we have another interview! This time with Dene Carter, Creative Director on Fable 2, discussing a lot of things in Fable 2: the style it’s going for, what’s going on with towns and simulation and how they’ll be dealing with different player’s skills. Video here, transcript is not below, no.

I’m Dene Carter, Creative Director on Fable 2.

Hi. So, Mr Molyneux said that it’s going to be a lot darker and more mature - do you agree with that?

I think that one of the nice things we did in Fable 1 was there was always kinda a bit of a flip-flop in the story between things that are actually very very dark - things that happened to your family in Fable 1 were quite horrific - and there was a lot of quite silly content as well. I think this time because the graphical fidelity is going to be quite a lot higher, and our characters much more emotional, they’re going to be much more believable, we just don’t, if you look at the graphics themselves, can’t quite get away with things being quite so silly and campy all the time. So I think it’s not so much that we’re actively going for something which is deliberately a lot darker, necessarily events will be no more or less tragic than they were in Fable 1, but our delivery of it is certainly going to seem a lot darker because that sense of, well, that extra level of detail which will make things seem not more realistic, specifically, a lot more - compelling.

So does that mean nudity? Sorry? Nudity? Oooh, ah, that’s a very good question. Well if you remove all your clothes your hero will, again, be dressed in underwear. Even the female heroes. Even the female hero. Okay. And no streakers running around? Err, streakers running around? Again, probably in underwear as opposed to fully nude. Oh. Okay. I’m sensing a certain specific tack here. Not at all. Is this something you felt was lacking desperately from Fable 1? Noooo!

Anything you’ve got to say, in addition, about the dog, to what’s already been said? Well our model, in terms of our graphical look this time, is sort of Brotherhood of the Wolf really. Beforehand we were looking at things like Labyrinth and a lot of things that were very Jim Henson-based things, in terms of palettes and whatever we were looking at things which were if not children’s films from early on, certainly quite light and fluffy. This time just as before because we’re going for a little bit more detail, if you look at the Brotherhood of the Wolf the tones and palettes, the material is handled in a very much darker way.

We’re all silly

So is there anything else you use as inspiration? Well, obviously Fable 1 to a great deal, and awful lot of British humour as far as I’m concerned anyway, ’cause we’re all silly and we like to enjoy making games, so you know, we try to have a good time and hopefully that comes across there as well. Little bits of Hollywood creep in here and there all over the place, ’cause we happen to like seeing what goes on in Hollywood as well, we like to use techniques used in film making, new effects and new ideas and things.

So you brought in specialists for the dog, specialists from Hollywood, you have a lot of outside help?

We’re only just learning about this really, again the games industry in the past has been quite insular, it’s only recently that it’s only really looked into itself, most people making games tend to look at other games. We’re really just starting to learn to look outside and now we are bringing in experts doing things like editing and in composition and staging, scriptwriting etcetera, so we are kind of just starting to spread out our feet and try to make sure we’re handling everything now as professionally as we possibly can. It’s very different from the past.

What’s been done on the dog, after GDC?

It’s mostly been integrating it into the systems we already have, what tends to happen is that you get a group works on a very specific feature over here, and another group works on a very specific feature over here, and a lot of the remaining time is spent to make sure they all really kind of mesh from one thing to another. So the next time you see the dog I would like to think that it doesn’t necessarily look very different or act very differently to what you’ve seen so far, but you’ll see it much more cohesive and intertwined with the world and interactions.

About towns, what sort of size are we looking at? And are they going to be independent of the hero?

busy bustle in the streets and crowds

Yeah. That’s an interesting one as well. This time, we are, the movie you saw at the GDC demo, was Bowerstone. Bowerstone is considerably larger than before. We’re hoping really, I think it’s less about specific size in metres and that kind of thing, and more about how many people people on the screen at one time, so we’re hoping to get a much more kind of busy bustle in the streets and crowds and they’ll think, wow, crickey, this is a really really busy place, there’s so much opportunity here. But at the same time, I don’t think I’m going for the GTA style completely throw-away people, I very much hope that as people are wandering round, the fact that they’ve all got names, that they’ve all got places to live, some work in shops, some don’t, some wander around buying goods etcetera. You’ll hopefully get to know a lot more people this time and sort of introduce yourselves to them, and have them introduce themselves to you, have a little relationship with them.

And it doesn’t take the hero being there or doing things to have things happen on their own? I mean - the towns will change even if you don’t interfere?

Not so much - the towns will - because the game’s over a, not quite sure I can mention the period of time, hero’s lifetime? the game is over a long period of time, so the hero ages and whatever as you’d expect, so, it’s quite a long period of time, if you wander off to a quest and come back, you’re not going to see anything changing too much to be honest, most of it will be in terms of how they react to you, Mrs Miggins who works in a pie shop will still going to work in a pie shop when you come back. There will be other, more dramatic things which happen later on which I’m not really at liberty to reveal I’m afraid.

And is that sort of change going to be in sudden bursts or is it going to be very gradual?

I’m hoping you’ll hear something much more interesting about it later on. Nothing too much for now I’m afraid.

How far are you going, simulating the economy and things like that?

We’re going quite a lot further than we did last time, again, it’s a really interesting thing, you can go a little bit too far with this sort of thing, and end up with a system which is so reactive to what you’re doing that it makes the game no fun at all. So what we are trying to do is for example that the geography of the world, the things that are going on in the geography of the world, whether places are overrun or not, whether pathes between two places are cleared, we’re hoping that kind of stuff stimulates the economy between any two regions as well, but again, that would always always - because it’s a Lionhead game - will always be tailored to make sure the game’s more fun to play rather than just more realistic.

So on the balance realism to simple fun you’d go for the latter?

It goes burgh

What we normally like to do is end up with a relatively kind of chaotic system, so lots of variables to play with, lots and lots of detail, but not so complex that if you pull this thing here it burgh and explodes and ruins the game completely, “there’s no food anywhere you’re just going to starve” because that’s no fun for anybody really. It’s much like the “the-entire-world-is-overrun-by-monsters-that’s-it-you’re-dead.” Game over. It’s possibly the most - the least compelling game over I’ve ever seen, well, I can’t be bothered doing that again then. So we’ll always try to make sure that everything moves back to an equilibrium if possible, where the game is still fun to play but we never try to go as far outside the bounds as we possibly can.

So, in combat - would you say that - Hahaha! Apparently you wouldn’t say anything! Okay, so, quests - have you, has it changed, the system?

The system’s a lot clearer this time, again, I can’t really tell you the mechanisms involved, but one of the things we found last time was there was actually an awful lot of content in Fable 1 and Fable The Lost Chapters as well which people just never saw. If you look through the FAQs and the guidebooks you get quite a lot of fat manuals full of information, but not everybody who played Fable saw that all this was on offer, a lot of people kind of raced through the game, “where was that gone?” This time we’re going to make sure that it’s much more, much more obvious and they know how the simulation affects quests and quests affect simulation and all these kinds of things. But not in the form of boring tutorial or anything like that, just trying to make sure that things are highlighted when they’re actually very important rather than letting them slip by.

We hear from Mike West that the main story won’t be the - aimed at hardcore players? Right. So, it might be possibly go through the game very quickly and again miss out on a lot of things?

The core quest is completable by everybody

No no no, I think quickly is potentially wrong, the thing is again we want to make sure that everybody enjoys playing Fable, people who don’t necessarily play games very much, to still be able to finish it. They may just finish it by the skin of their teeth; they might come through horribly injured and and very very depressed and horrible things have happened to them because they haven’t been particularly heroic. But we still want people to finish it, in the same way as for example if I buy a DVD I don’t expect it to stop at the 2-hour mark just before the ending comes. “What’s going to happen next?!” “I’m very sorry, you’re not good enough to watch the rest of that DVD.” That seems a bit of a shame, really. So the idea is that the core quest is pretty much completable by everybody, there’s going to be a whole bunch of different rewards and various bits and pieces that will open up depending on how skilful you are, so there’s lots of rewards to stretch it further, but also there’s going to be huge sections of the game there that will stall things for a while and tell the player, “Okay, go away and have some fun. Do some stuff. We don’t care what that is. Just do some stuff.” If you’re not particularly keen on combat, go and do something with the economy. If you don’t care about the economy stuff that’s great, if you’d rather be doing the fighting stuff and going somewhere else and doing something purely heroic, go and do that! They will both allow you to progress to the end, but we’re trying to make sure there are at least these kind of time-out periods where people are told, “You don’t have to race through any more. It’s fine. Things aren’t happening.”

You’re hoping that players will chose the quests that they’ll like. Yes. Is that by quest differentiation you’ll cater for different skill levels?

Yes. Absolutely. It’s not just different skill levels, it’s different interests as well. One of the things that we were very gratified by in Fable 1 was the fact that we had some people that literally did nothing but sit in the pub and gamble. The entire time. You know, they went du-du-du-du, okay, and they thumbed their way through card games for hours and hours and hours and made stupid amounts of money. And we thought that was fantastic. The idea when you buy something like Fable is not that we tell you how you’re going to enjoy the game. The idea is that ideally we hand you something and say, “We’ve made a world of stuff here, and are really hoping you enjoy of it as you can. And everything we put in there we hope is going to be compelling in some way. We don’t care what you enjoy, specifically, as long as you enjoy as much of it as possible, if you pick a bit that you like, fine, we’ll try and make sure that that’s enough of a game as well.” Rather than deciding, “no, I’m afraid you need to be an expert in magic to get through level 46.” Of course, if you don’t like magic, why bother? Suddenly the game’s no longer for you. So we’re going to try not to alienate anybody if we can possibly do that.

What plans do you have for interacting with props and things like that? I mean, there are a lot of actions you can do with a pint of beer - how do you choose ‘em? How do you decide, control what to do?

All I can really say is context.

Again, this is potentially territory, all I can really say is context. All I can really say is context. There’s going be a lot of very different uses for things and it’ll very much depend on what’s going on at the time. So no context menus … just context? No no no, we’re trying to make sure in general that again the game’s as simple as possible to play. Fable 1 - obviously loved it - there was possibly a little bit too much fiddlelyness in some of the menu systems and whatever so we’re looking at trying to simplify those, and make sure that there’s a lot less of that to wade through, trying to cut as much tutorial as we possibly can, try and make sure when players are trying to do something, or it looks like they’re trying to do something, that’s what we can interpret it and encourage them, well okay, we can see what you’re trying to do, what you might wanna try is something like this. Try to ease them along and help them along rather than, say, now press blah. And the dog is a mechanism that does that as well? The dog is going to be a very interesting mechanism. The next time when you see him doing something, errr - yeah, I think you’ll be quite interested.

What do you think the most interesting thing about Fable 2 is that you’ve worked on, that’s going to be there?

I think it’s the way we’re trying to tell the story this time, as I said before, the fact that our characters are going to be an awful lot more detailed than in Fable 1, show a lot more emotion, means that we have to handle the drama in a very different way. The drama in Fable 1 was quite simple in many respects, literally had a guy saying, you know, basically tell you something dreadful was happening to his people, “oh no, this is a dreadful situation!” This time I think the fact that we’re going to be trying to make sure that everybody you deal with is obviously emotionally involved and its worked, you know. If somebody told me that their wife’s been kidnapped or something, they’ll be visibly upset. And that’s leading some very very interesting, dramatic learning curves for us really. We’ve not done this before. So this is going to be very interesting indeed. A lot of challenges.

You think it’s going to work out?

Yeah. It’ll work out very well indeed. We’ve got really good people here, and we’ve got absolutely the right intentions, so err, I think you’ll see something special.

Finally, can you complete the sentence? Fable 2 will come out on …? Hahaha! No! Okay, well, I think that just about sums it up. Thanks!