Loinhead

So here’s the usual transcript of the developer’s diary and some nice screenshots. Note that there are still edges to polish - the very ugly mountains behind the beautiful cottage, for example.

[Lionhead Logo, dramatic shots of Lionhead HQ]

Peter Molyneux, in voice-over: This is the first episode of the Lionhead diary. My name is Peter Molyneux. Let me just explain a little bit about what you’ll be seeing. We, at the game developers conference, recently unveiled one of the three big features that we’re gonna feature in Fable 2, and that big feature is the emotions that you will be feeling as you play the game. So, you feeling loved, is really important to us. And that’s what the whole of this episode is about.

Dene Carter, Creative Director: Love is that warm fuzzy feeling you get when you realise somebody cares about you so much they’ll forgive you being a complete arse.

Jonathan Shaw, Senior Programmer: Love is very important to me, sort of in my life, I kind of very much consider myself a romantic.

Kieran Nee, Gameplay Engineer: Love means many things to me, it’s - family love, erotic love …

family love, erotic love, love for pizza, love for coffee. God, I love coffee.

Peter Molyneux, Creative Director:What people often do is confuse lust with love [he says, while sitting in red-lit porn set]

Kieran Nee: … love for pizza, love for coffee. God, I love coffee.

Jonathan Shaw: Because we deal with love every day, in our lives, it’s something we recognise and we’re sort of intimate with, if it’s faked on screen it can be very jarring, obviously it’s wrong. So it’s very difficult to get that right. As we get more processing power, the AI will indeed get more sophisticated, and you’ll be able to track a lot more variables, to do a lot more with it. So all of the ambitions that we had for Fable 1, which we couldn’t quite fit in, we are bringing back into Fable 2.

Dene Carter: Most RPGs are about going off on random adventures. Fable’s exactly the same in that respect, it’s all very very big, it’s supernatural, exciting, action-orientated storyline, but what we’re trying to do with Fable games is we try to make sure the player realises that all the things he does out in the world, while he’s out adventuring, have a really really big impact, on the rest of the world, not that the rest of the world sees them. So for us, the love and the respect and the fear - all these factors here - are altered each time you go out and do missions. That makes for a much much deeper experience than simply going out, bashing a dragon over the head and going, “Right! I’ve got thirty something-or-other points.” We’d like to bring the emotion back into the storyline, love’s going to be very important with that.

Jonathan Shaw: In Fable 1, we had the, you do the sexy expressions and so they like you a bit more, you give them gifts and they like you a bit more, we kind of tried to build on that, so there’s that aspect of it in Fable 2, but there’s a lot more to it as well, to try and get someone to fall in love with you. And hopefully we’ll find the balance right so you’ll find one person, the way they talk kind of builds, you can tell you’re getting there slowly, and they’ll sort of want you to take them out as well, rather than just giving them gifts they’ll want to walk with you. That’s the sort of thing we’re experimenting with, to try and get the process of them falling in love with you to be, more, real.

That is a dog

Peter Molyneux: What I said at GDC was, I was toying about emotions again, I was focusing on love, and I was definitely fotesing on being loved. Now I focused on the dog, because I wanted to show the quality, that we were putting into the development of the game. Gamers, casual gamers, everybody who sees that dog, they all say - that is a dog. I understand him. I understand when he’s excited, I understand when he’s sad, I understand when he’s, when he’s happy, I understand when he’s hurt. He looks like a real dog. You know - what we could have done, is given you this dog and made him controllable by you. Allow you to send him to places, get him to wait, have him so that you could send a button and he could attack. That would have been the easy thing to do, but no, we’ve been brave about it. We give you no control over the dog. I don’t press a button when I go out with my dog for a walk. I just go out with a dog and the dog does his thing. And he knows that if I don’t like something, he damn well doesn’t do it. That’s how you control the dog in the game.

>Dene Carter: If you look at the history of other visual media - cinema, for example - the addition of love and emotive content has been a really big deal. If you look at Charlie Chaplin, he introduced emotion into a film called The Kid, and suddenly cinema was elevated to a new form of art. I’m not quite saying we’re there yet, but I’d very much like to think that we’re kind of in the vanguard of groups who are interested in this side of games, rather than sheer thumbcandy.

Just think about that

Peter Molyneux: We give you no control over the dog. Just think about that a second. No control over the dog. You haven’t got a dog button. A lot of people would say, that’s just mad, man! Eaeaaeah how can I be engaged with something? And what we’ve said is, you control the dog by playing the game. You control the dog by worrying about you as a hero. I think the very fact you don’t control him makes him feel real. Makes him feel like something that has a mind and that has an agenda. And that agenda, first and foremost in that agenda, is his love for you. His willingness to sacrifice himself for you. His need to please you in everything that he does.

[More swishy music, Bowerstone flythrough clips]