Lionead's Xbox 360-exclusive action adventure title Fable
II has just debuted -- and to significant acclaim thus far, it seems.
And of
course, the charismatic and talented -- if divisive -- personality at the
center of this massive development effort is Populous and Black & White creator Peter Molyneux, whose Lionhead
Studios developed the game, its first since it was acquired by Microsoft in
2006.
The grand ideas and inspirations get talked
about a lot. But what about the actual processes used in creating the game?
Gamasutra had a chance to speak with Molyneux during this month's Tokyo Game
Show in Japan,
and asked about the development process of the game, from white boxing and
prototyping to high-level design; in a major reveal, Molyneux details the
intensive process by which Lionhead formulated the story sequences in the game.
Gamasutra also discussed the then-breaking
controversy over the possible exclusion of co-op play, a promised feature, from
the shipped game -- and how stories like this can become massive, for a brief
period, in today's media environment.
I
do have one real question that I've been really interested to hear your
reaction to. It was announced that the cooperative play would be added later,
after the game shipped.
PM: That's not quite...
Please
clarify.
PM: We thought this was a complete
non-event. But let me explain why we thought it was a non-event. Because we're
from the PC world originally, and of course you always patch PC versions, and
we never intended not to do it for day-one ship.
When you're doing multiplayer, as you
probably know, you need to get single player completely bug-free before you
weed out the final bugs on multiplayer, because if there are any
inconsistencies in the two versions when you're playing over Live, it just
won't work. You end up trying to fix multiplayer bugs but you're actually
fixing single player bugs.
So we got to the end of doing the single
player game. It went into certification; it came out the other end. And we knew
we had three weeks left just to weed out some of those final bugs in the multiplayer.
And we greedily used that time. We always intended for it to be a day one
patch.
We were totally mystified, in a way, that
people got so upset and thought that we were taking features out of the game.
And it wasn't that at all. The multiplayer is now in certification. It looks
almost certain that it is going to be there for a day one patch. These things
are never 100%, but we've never failed certification before. So I'm 100%
certain that it'll be there day one.
I think you'll see this more and more. That
the extra three weeks that you get when you don't have to manufacture disks,
it's invaluable.
[Ed.
note: The patch was completed and put up for download October 21, the day the
game went on sale in North
America.]
Most
big games and probably even many small games have a Title Update the day you
put the game in the drive, so it's nothing new. I think what it is, is that the
broader question is, you said you're surprised to hear this reaction. Do you
think that things got blown out of proportion? Or that people maybe not
intentionally, maybe intentionally, misconstrued what was happening?
PM: Well I looked at a lot of the posts and
some people were saying, and I can completely understand this, "Oh my God,
it's happening again. We were promised features, and they're not going to be
there." And with the heritage that I unfortunately gave Fable I, I can completely understand
that.
And I just don't think we thought it
through. And I think actually we should have waited a little bit longer and
said, "Oh look, it's going to be a day one patch." But instead we
were a little bit more diplomatic and said it may be a day one patch, which
made people...
The
PR cycles are getting -- the feedback loop is getting tighter and tighter and
people are so plugged in these days that, even if a big story only lasts 24
hours, it'll create a lot of noise.
PM: Yeah. I know. It is. And in some ways
it's quite exciting. It feels like you're on the edge of this whirlwind that
could just blow up in your face at any time. And in other ways it's amazingly
invigorating, in that, if you say something in an interview like this, to see
people react.
Because normally, to be honest with you, I
think I sit opposite you, and I think "Oh God, this must sound so bloody
boring. I'm sure nobody's going to take any interest at all." And then
when you get these explosions of interest, it is a fantastic feeling sometimes,
when it goes well. You lose sleep when it goes badly, definitely.