Loinhead

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.

From Gamesindustry.biz via Kotaku:

Q: Peter Molyneux recently dropped one or two hints to GamesIndustry.biz about the sorts of things we might expect from Lionhead’s next game - will that definitely be published under the MGS banner?
Phil Spencer: Yeah, absolutely.

Q: No Bungie- or Ensemble-style plans there then?
Phil Spencer: Well I’m going to drill in on that a little, but no - no plan for Lionhead. But even the Bungie games that come out as Bungie - the entity they are today - are still MGS games. We look at those as first party games.

So, Lionhead are are currently safe from an Ensemble style closure, but will they part ways with Microsoft, Bungie style, where MS retain a 10% share?

From Kotaku come the news that Fable 2 is going to go Gold within “days, if not hours.”

“We have one or two bugs that are keeping us from going gold,” Van Tilburgh said.

When that happens, Lionhead have traditionally put an image up of Sam holding a Gold CD to their webcams (as for Fable, pictured left).

Sam also revealed in the same conversation that you’ll be able to earn special items and a little cash through mini-games on Fable 2’s official website, when it launches.

Following the news that Fable 2 is confirmed to come out in October (from Kotaku’s liveblogging), there is one question on the lips of every older Lionhead watcher:

October which year?

Kotaku got to chat with Molyneux about death and fighting. Death doesn’t happen, fighting is one-button contextual rhythm-thing. Similar to the other interviews but this one talks about James Bond.

When last we saw Peter Molyneux and his promise-filled Fable 2 at GDC, he just would not stop talking about his dog. I should know, I was there. And you know what? He made a believer out of me. But this time, in a hotel room at E3, he showed off two things teenage boys are probably much more interested in: fighting and death.

He teased us about death back in May, but this time he actually elaborates. There is no death. Instead, your character gets beaten until he collapses. Then he (or she) gets beaten some more. And more. Continuously beaten until you get up. How do you get up? By paying for it in either experience or gold. How fast you get up, and presumably continue fighting and killing your enemies, depends on how much money you pay. Pay a lot, get up fast. Pay a little, lie on the ground for, say, sixty seconds.

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