GDC 10: Molyneux on Fable III

1:30 PM on 03.11.2010   |   Anthony Burch

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It's easy to be snarky about Peter Molyneux, but the man can (on occasion) give a pretty entertaining presentation. Thursday morning, Molyneux gave a talk entitled "Complex Challenges of Intuitive Design," and we were there to cover it.

"I had to call it that complex thing to get the talk accepted," Molyneux admitted. The actual talk had more to do with how Lionhead is "radically changing" the design of Fable II in the production of Fable III, and why. Beyond going over the same "touch" system revealed earlier in the year, Molyneux revealed some never-before-seen aspects of Fable III.

Hit the jump for my summary of the talk.

The Fable games were born out of Molyneux and Simon Carter's passion for roleplaying games like Ultima, or even more recent fare like Fallout 3. With Fable, Molyneux wanted to broaden the definition of RPGs, as RPGs traditionally don't sell as well as action games.

"We asked ourselves a question," Molyneux said. "Are we truly a roleplaying game, or are we actually starting to become more of an action-adventure game?" What if Lionhead moved completely toward an action-adventure format? What would be lost and gained?

Molyneux feels that game sequels "just get better and better. Look at Modern Warfare 2, look at Mass Effect." If the Fable series didn't expand and grow like those games, Molyneux felt, it'd die.

Fable sold about three million copies, and Fable 2 sold about 3.5 million. As Molyneux wanted to break the five million mark – to become "one of the big boys" – the guys at Lionhead also had to think about how to expand their audience.

"The RPG market is limited by core gamers," Molyneux said. It's hard to market RPGs, and people have a harder time wrapping their heads around RPGs than they do with, say, action games.

What's more, through Microsoft's user research, Molyneux found that "more than sixty percent of the Fable audience understood less than fifty percent of the features" – many of the RPG aspects were being ignored or underutilized by most players. Molyneux also claimed that the industry has moved from huge tutorials and manuals to simpler, more intuitive design. How does the complex number-crunching of RPGs function under this design philosophy? To what extent does Fable III need to be an RPG? The team needed to first discern what was core to the Fable series.

Avatar morphing has always been a part of Fable, but Molyneux admitted that the second game didn't handle it very well. Nearly all female characters ended up looking like looking like "1970's russian shot-putters." Choices are a big part of Fable. People like making choices, but they can't be making the same choices in III that they were in II. Drama is also important to Fable, and in this respect, Molyneux thought Fable II was more successful than the first. When it comes to eliciting emotion, "the dog was a great success," Molyneux said. Fable games are also meant to be accessible.

With a grasp on the core features of the Fable series, Lionhead sat down and made a list of big changes they wanted to make for Fable III.

Firstly, the team wanted to simplify the interface. According to Molyneux, "the interface we had in Fable 2 and Fable 1 meant that people who played the game, if they wanted to, say, customize their hero, had to work through up to 300 items in the list." Very few people ended up customizing their clothes, because the 2D interface was such a hassle. For Fable III, then, Lionhead decided to put all of the 2D interface's functionality into the 3D world. Molyneux also wanted to remove the health bar, a decision which "epitomizes this drive for simplicity." Why not do the "industry standard" of using the entire screen to show health, a la Gears of War? Lionhead also wanted to redesign the title screen to make it clearer, like popping in a DVD and just being able to start your adventure.

Fable III's morphing system is more obvious and simple than those from previous games, Molyneux says: if you use a lot of swords, your muscles develop. If you use a gun, you get taller and more agile. If you use magic, your complexion will change. If you eat food, you'll gain weight, and if you get a bunch of followers, you'll gain more "power," whatever that means. As in Fable II, the combat system breaks up each of your different attacks down to one button which can each be tapped for a regular attack, or held for a flourish.

Molyneux loved the dog from Fable II, but this time around he wanted to make it more meaningful by giving it more abilities, allowing the player to play with him more, and making him a more surprising character in general. For example, the dog in Fable III hates rabbits, and all of your training and connection with the dog goes out of the window when he sees a rabbit and starts chasing it. Lionhead initially wanted to make the dog hate chickens, but given stuff like the chicken-kicker Achievement in Fable II, the team eventually decided they were being too cruel to chickens.

The new "touch" mechanic is meant to be an extension of the player's emotional involvement. This mechanic was actually inspired by Ico, and the hand-holding mechanic between the protagonist and Yorda. The touching is used for all ingame interactions like opening doors, using chests, and making expressions.

Fable III wanted to amplify the intensity of its choices through a new mechanic called Judgments, which Molyneux wasn't going to show. Somehow, though, Molyneux promised it'd make the moral choices more impactful.

Molyneux wanted to make Fable III's story is much clearer, and more different, than the narratives from the first two games.The team could have retread the same narrative ground and made another Hero's Journey where you start weak, then get really strong, and then kill a baddie at the end, but Molyneux asked: "what if we made that hero's journey the halfway point in our game? What if we constructed this story where you started as a hero without any power at all, and what if there was this evil terrible tyrant king, and what if you went out as a rebel, took forces and took on and overthrew that tyrant king, and then you became that king yourself? Would that be a unique and original story if that was a halfway point? The answer was yes."

Being a king makes the player feel powerful, which was really important to Molyneux. That's what roleplaying games are all about, he said – that's why he ignored his girlfriend for Ultima.

Beyond simply making the player feel powerful, however, being king will also complicate the player's decisions. Molyneux was inspired by someone like Obama, who made endless promises that haven't come to fruition. What if, on your journey to overthrow the king, you're asked to make promises? Then, when you become king, those promises resurface and you find that you might not be able to follow through on those promises? At thsi point, Molyneux said, "you realize that being powerful is also being responsible. That becomes a really interesting story."

Moving onto a discussion of basic gameplay, Lionhead wanted to make the core mechanics more simple. The team initially wanted to hang onto the idea of experience points, but experience is just about combat – you don't get experience for getting married, or doing expressions ("which, in Fable II, meant farting in peoples' faces a lot"). This is where the "followers" system came into play. What if everything you did caused you to gain or lose followers? If you marry a high-class woman, you get a lot of followers; if you marry a skullery maid, you get fewer followers. Followers act as support both as AI companions and through co-op. Molyneux cryptically mentioned that he likes the idea of Twitter followers, and that Fable III might include some sort of similar system.

Finally, level-ups now take place within the 3D world, rather than the 2D interface, because it's more visually rewarding.

At this point, Molyneux handed the talk over to design director Josh Atkins, who talked about the combat system.

In designing Fable III, Atkins said the team had to examine what was unique about Fable's combat. Where other games incentivize fighting through scores or visual rewards, the Fable games want the player to feel like they have a "cause," and a reason for fighting beyond pure, visceral fun. Additionally, Fable's combat has always been focused on fluidity, but combat needed to be even more fluid and intuitive the third time around. Many other combat games have your character zipping around all the time and it looks cool, but you don't feel like you have total control over them. Finally, Fable's enemies also need to have a personality and a behavior beyond their attack patterns – the player needs to remember more about the enemies he fought beyond which strategy he or she used to defeat them. In the Fable games, all of these different aspects of the combat design are meant to come together to make the player feel incredibly powerful.

Atkins briefly talked about "a huge discussion topic" at Lionhead: difficulty balancing. Is Fable too easy? "That's a tough thing to figure out," he said. The balancing is all intentional – traditional game balance is built around what arcades used to do, where you'd have to keep dying just to keep putting in quarters. "We try to slowly move away from that," Atkins said,and build around this idea of balance to create an emotional experience...we want you to feel powerful, but we also want you to care...it's more important that you feel powerful and you feel like your character is the greatest hero in the world" rather than having the game push back and force you to drop in another metaphorical quarter.

Atkins then threw back to Molyneux, who started the Fable III demo.

First focusing on the "touch" mechanic, Molyneux explained that the right trigger activates your hand. According to the context and who you're touching, your action will change. Onscreen, the player character verbally punished with a press of th right trigger, before using that same touch button to comfort her. At first glance, I wasn't sure how the game differentiated between the "scold" and "hug" actions.

Fable III allows for more varied forms of player-on-NPC interaction, including what Molyneux called "the American man-hug." Digressing for a moment, Molyneux gave the Americans in the audience a bit of advice: if you're an American and you're gonna hug a British person, keep your groin away. Brits don't hug that way.

Back to the demo. The hero held his daughter's hand and walked through the streets. Molyneux illustrated that even when holding onto your hand, your kid still has a personality; as the hero and his child approached a bar, the hero's daughter lamented her father's propensity for drunkenness. "You said you wouldn't go back here again," she whined.

The hero took his daughter back home – kind of an unimpressive shack, given the hero isn't king yet -- and his fat wife came out. After shooing the hero's child into the house, the hero's wife (who, again, was kind of fat and funny-looking) expressed her desire to kiss the hero.

The hero ran away without another word, to a sudden burst of audience laughter.

Approaching a bum, the hero grabbed him by the hand and began running with him. As they approached a factory, however, the bum realized what Molyneux then told the audience – that the hero was going to sell the bum into slavery. The bum started struggling against the player's grips, appearing visually distressed at the prospect of being a factory slave. To Molyneux, this replaces the simple "A and B button" moral choices; it's more intimate and emotional to have to physically drag this dude to his death than simply picking an option in a menu.

Molyneux jumped to the next part of the demo, which concerned the GUI. Everytime you press the start button, you appear in a sort of otherworldy chamber full of different rooms. The chamber, according to Molyneux, replaces all of the functionality of Fable II's pause menu. Again pointing out the menu-based tedium of picking clothing in Fable II, the process of dressing your character is much more intuitive in Fable III: you simply move into a dressing room withint eh pause chamber, where your butler – described by Molyneux as "like Gordon [sic] from Batman" -- sets up different outfits for you.

Though he couldn't present any of the butler's actual dialogue, Molyneux revealed that John Cleese voices your butler. Applause ensues. "Having John Cleese big you up in a slightly sarcastic way," Molyneux said, "is absolutely wonderful."

Anyway, your butler lays out some clothes appropriate to what you're going to do. If you're a king about to go to a celebration, you'll have more regal looking stuff. If you're still a rebel, you'll have more aggressive stuff to wear. You can mix and match between the different outfits your butler presents; take the trousers from the soldier type, and wear a kingly shirt.

Molyneux then moved onto "the other big failing of Fable II," the map. Unlike the circular, two-dimensional map from Fable II, the third game's map is a three dimensional "sort of godly view" of the world, where the player uses a magnifying glass to check out almost RTS-like simulations of each region. Zooming in on a town, the hero watched a few of the townsfolk walking back and forth. Zooming in on his house, the hero could check out the status of his family. According to Molyneux, you can see everything and check on everything purely from the map screen.

Jumping forward again, Molyneux elaborated on the weapon morphing system. Though all weapons start out pretty simply, "depending on what you kill when you're fighting, it changes the texture of the weapon. Depending on how many kills you've got," the size and shape of the weapon will change. Killing innocents or evil people will morph the weapon, as will your gamerscore.

At this point, the hero fought a big group of baddies. During his particularly brutal flourish attacks, wings shot out of the hero's back. Molyneuxd promised that the size and shape of your wings can be modified by the number of followers you have.

At this point, the Q&A section began.

The first audience member asked if the game would ever come out for the PC. Molyneux, wary of the PR people in the back, gave a noncommittal non-answer.

The next question concerned the breadcrumb trail from Fable II, and whether or not Molyneux felt it made the game too easy. Molyneux responded that, actually, he thought the breadcrumb trail was a "huge success" – he liked the idea of allowing the player to move through a linear path and not get lost, without mandating that the player follow that linear path. To Molyneux's mind, the only significant prolbem with the breadcrumb trail was that the game didn't tempt the player off the trail frequently enough, which is another thing Fable III will attempt to improve upon.

At this point, I asked Molyneux about the ethically ambiguous choices in Fable II, where the player would often be punished for doing the right thing. How did effective did Molyneux feel those choices were and how would Fable III build upon that system? Molyneux responded that he liked the idea of creating ambiguous choices, and found it more interesting than simply allowing "good" or "evil" options. Fable II's moral greyness is still around in Fable III, but on a larger scale: it'll be physically impossible to follow through on all of your kingly promises, so you'll have to decide exactly what sort of king you want to be, and that can involve compromise.

The next question concerned the expression system, and whether or not the expression interface would also be transferred entirely into the 3D world. "You just wanna fart all the time," Molyneux said to the audience member who asked the question. Molyneux couldn't elaborate, but he said players could do something "amazing" with expressions, "...and something else," Molyneux sheepishly concluded.

The next audience member asked how Fable III will specifically address character morphing. As Molyneux said before "the big design flaw" of Fable II's morphing system was to link morphing with the experience system. In order to get combat flourishes, you HAD to spend XP on strength, which always made you look bulky. In Fable III, however, you don't have to spend points like that, because you level up weapons and skills simply by using them a lot: if you want your character to look feminine and agile, just use guns and magic. You can get through the entire game without using a sword, if you like.

The next audience member asked how the basic gameplay will change after your hero becomes king. Will the game still involve your hero going on quests, or does it turn into more of a management sim? You're still a hero, Molyneux responded, and you still need to go on quests when you're king. Once you become king, though, you get two new gameplay mechanics. The first are judgments: these are big events, where you can say, in Molyneux's words, "I am king, and law will be THIS...and you almost write your own constitution. Tear down those factories, replace them with trees. That's a judgment. But unfortunately, that's going to result in a huge amount of starvation because you aren't making food anymore." The second mechanic has to do with the 3D worldview. "Don't think of this as an RTS game," Molyneux warned. "It's more to do with choices you can make. " Molyneux likened it to being in a war room, where you decide where troops go and such.

The next audience member asked if Pub Games would be making a return, and how your gamerscore changes your weapon. Molyneux avoided specifics about the return of Pub Games, though he admitted there will be some outside way of affecting your Fable experience. Regarding gamerscores, Molyneux liked the idea of your gamerscore changing the appearance of your weapon because, ultimately, your gamerscore says something about you.

Molyneux was then asked for clarification on the touching mechanic. In the demo, how did the hero determine whether he chastized or comforted his daughter? While the right trigger activates the touch, Molyneux said, the d-pad gives you the choice of how you touch them. The d-pad HUD wasn't shown onscreen because the demo looked better without it.

The next question concerned Natal, and how it helped or hindered Molyneux's design process. "Natal is wonderfully additive to this experience. It really does add to the Fable world. I can't give you specifics about that," Molyneux admitted.

The final question regarded co-op play, and player identity. If you invite someone else into your game after the halfway point, does that mean you have two kings running around? In co-op play, Molyneux responded, your co-op partner (whom you can now marry) will have the same power in the world as you do. Your partner can even make their own Judgments, which means that you have to be careful about who your partner is.