Molyneux Interview '08: Fable II & Beyond

Our frank interview about Peter's future as a designer, how he misses PC development, Fable II, and fresh chat on the top-secret Project X - formerly known as Project Dimitri.

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Kikizo: For you personally - I suppose this is kind of a life question - you had amazing success with Bullfrog which EA bought, and then you left and started again with Lionhead, and now obviously that has been bought by Microsoft. Do you think history might repeat itself? Does it make sense for you to stay at Lionhead for the foreseeable future, or do you have further ambitions to have independence from scratch again?

Molyneux: Yeah, well I'm pretty happy with where I am at the moment. I do think that... I am aware of the mistakes I made under EA, and I think... whilst I'm very professional, and whilst Lionhead is very professional, I think Microsoft is very happy with the way that it's run - and it's run very independently from Microsoft. I mean there's nobody actually from Microsoft that works at Lionhead! And there hasn't been for two years. So, I'm pretty happy with that.

I do think though that I'm somebody who just requires challenge. Now, I'm pretty challenged with Fable II, and this other project, you know that's pretty... I'm pretty engaged at the moment. But if I ever even smell boredom or just, you know, being on the same road, that's when I get really recept. And that's why I said to Microsoft, "don't let me get bored!" - just give me more stuff to do, and give me more challenges. And hopefully there'll be something that will come out of that.

Kikizo: And finally then - because this is a "hurry up, standing" position [nodding towards his publicist, who had now found the location I'd dev-napped Peter to!] - you've been noticeably confident throughout the last few months of hitting your release date on time. Was this helped by Microsoft cracking the whip or something?

Molyneux: Well I think the reason I was 100% sure is that there were a finite number of bugs that we had, and we were fixing more bugs than we were finding. And the second thing is that the team was ready to release this game, and everyone wants to release it. And I know that sounds weird, but so quite often you can be in development and you know it's not the right time to release it, because people want to put more stuff into it. But we've got all our stuff there, and it's ready to be 'born' - it really is. And it's one of the shortest games we've had in development of all, even though it seems like forever because I've been speaking about it forever, it's literally only two and a half or three years. I'm really happy with where we stand.

Kikizo: By the way, is it still "one-button combat", because it looks like it's developed?

Molyneux: Well, no it's still one button, that's the whole point, it's one button. One button is for guns, one's for swords, and one's for magic, and then it's up to you, how much you put on that one button. So it's all still there, and this was always the plan - I was just being a bit enigmatic about it so I could stretch the story [about the control system] out. So it's all still there, and all the timing and music stuff I talked about is all still there - you know, you can choose to play this game and only use one button, or you can use all three. It's totally configurable by you, we have this dynamic experience system, so the cooler you are with your combat, the more experience you get. No gamer will reach the limits of our combat - it's truly a different way of thinking about it.

[The publicist also points out at this point that, in fairness, Peter always said that range would be on yellow and magic would be on red].

Kikizo: Well thanks for your time, Peter.

Fable II is released in the US October 21, and October 24 in the UK. Watch out for our detailed verdict. Also stay tuned for an interview with someone who has an answer for Peter relating to questions we asked him in an interview a long time ago, to do with certain Bullfrog created IP.

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