by [name redacted]

This article had a strict deadline; I rushed to finish it so it could go live before the whole Internet had reported on the demonstration. And then… I guess it slipped through the cracks. Oh well! Here it is.

As another note, I think this was the meeting where Molyneux creepily offered his audience cookies. I was the only one to perk up. Hey, cookies.

Peter Molyneux was in loopy spirits, discussing his new game. Who knows how many times he had been over the same territory that day, though he seemed to enjoy spinning his tale, finding the right notes to highlight, the right places to pause for dramatic tension.

“Sequels are tricky things,” Molyneux started off. “Not my specialty. The sensible approach is to give you more things you like, better.” More weapons, new monsters, twenty times the land, guns! When Molyneux was asked to provide a sequel, he set off doing demographical research to see just what people wanted of him anyway. Then he opened “the doors of hell” – the online communities – only to quickly, in his words, slam them shut again. There were so many demands, so shrilly phrased – “so many people mortally offended by the design choices in Fable 1” – that the best Molyneux could do was sift out the most common complaints.

Molyneux claims to have learned his lesson after the fallout to his early series of blue-sky announcements about Fable 1, describing features that would never be remotely feasible in the full game. “I’ll never do that again,” Molyneux said. “Well, probably not.” For a time, he admits, he was distracted by feature sets – things to put on the back of the box to show how clever the game is, that the sequel is bigger, more, prettier. (To that end, he says with a wink that he can exclusively reveal that Fable 2 will contain 15 million poppies.) Then he remembered that these things were not why he founded Lionhead. If he was to make a game, he needed a solid conceptual reason for it.

Molyneux observed that, for all of Fable‘s features, there was something lacking about it. He sat up for a long while pondering what made a game special to him. He never pays much attention to the feature sets in other games; what drives him, he noticed, was his emotions – certain experiences and bonds that stuck in his head forever. Molyneux recalled the ending sequence of Ico – the girl on a beach, and the emotions that swept over him at that moment – and realized that Fable lacked a driving emotion. The player could kill people, adventure, though was never really given a human reason to do so.

“Today I will try to prove that Fable 2 will instill in you emotions that you’ve never felt before.” Namely, love. “That’s an ambition worth striving for.”

Molyneux explained there were three ways he went about trying to foster a sense of love in the player – two cheesier and more manipulative than the third, though all important. In explaining the first detail, Molyneux raced through the process of procreation. The player can choose to be male or female; one at the age of consent, he or she may marry, and choose to have protected or unprotected sex. If unprotected, sooner or later there will be a baby. Molyneux is quick to point out that, if playing a female character, that character may end up pregnant, in what he believes is a videogame first.

The cheesy moment is that one day, the player’s child will rush into the house and exclaim “Daddy, daddy, I heard you killed scorpions on the hilltop. You’re brilliant!” From that point on, the child will idolize the player and strive to be just like him or her. The player’s behavior will reflect upon his or her family; if the father is evil, the son will grow evil to please him. In this way, all of the player’s decisions are reflected back. There is a tangible feedback loop, showing that the player matters in the gameworld.

On that note, Molyneux is sick of games in which you could save the world eight times yet people still refuse to give you a break or even so much as thank you for your efforts. In Fable 2, he says, people will appreciate the player’s actions and actively respond to them. They will come up to the player on the street and show their gratitude.

The big thing that excites Molyneux, though, is the dog. There have been other protagonists with a loyal pet, from the horse in Shadow of the Colossus to Hayate Musashi’s dog, Yamato. The difference this time is that the Fable dog is “uniquely yours”. In the same sense that the player’s character physically changes based on the player’s actions and his or her child will reflect that behavior, the dog’s appearance and behavior differs depending on the player’s personality. It is “fully morphable”; the hair grows, can be matted. It ages, as the player’s character ages. If the player overfeeds the dog, it can become fat.

The dog’s behavior roughly follows Asimov’s three laws of robotics: it must never aggravate the player, it must love the player more than anything in the world, and it must look after itself. As the dog is its own being, with which the player forms a relationship, there is no direct player control over it. Rather, the dog is sensitive to the player’s actions and probable desires. It runs ahead when out-of-doors, guiding the player and warning of danger. In-town it heels and waits outside when the player enters buildings.

When the player draws a weapon, the dog readies itself for trouble. If the player is wielding a sword, the dog will seek out any enemies with a projectile weapon. If the player has a gun, the dog will attack melee enemies. The familiar Fable “expressions” can be used to chastise, intimidate, or reward the dog. Molyneux demonstrated the dog’s reaction after he shouted “NO!” at it, three times in a row. The dog lay down and whimpered as if it knew it were the worst dog on Earth, though also became somewhat cross with the player.

The player can buy presents for the dog, such as a “bloody squeaky ball” to throw around. Molyneux comments that the game really ramps up with the player goofs around with both the dog and the kid. When the dog is injured, it moves more slowly. Molyneux explained that the player can easily run off and leave the dog behind – though such is the dog’s love for the player, it will track the player down however long it takes. He spun a situation where weeks later the player is sitting in a bar, only to hear a faint scratching on the door. Someone goes to answer, and the player’s dog – by this point a matted, crusty, bedraggled mess – stumbles into the building, to collapse in a heap in the corner. The townspeople will be aghast. “Is that your dog?” they will demand. “What kind of a person are you? How could anyone treat his dog like that?!”

Fable‘s world, for all its lush design, consisted basically of a series of narrow paths; citing this as one of the most common complaints, Molyneux has opened up Fable 2 to exploration. The player can climb on or jump over anything, including cliffs. Molyneux offered an anecdote about early testing of the game, in which he realized that Lionhead testers were having a grand old time repeatedly throwing the dog’s squeaky ball over a cliff in order to watch it go sailing over the edge, heedless of its own safety. This was why Molyneux added the self-preservation law to the dog’s behavior.

Moving on a bit as he wound down, Molyneux spoke a bit about the game world, and the player’s general relationship with it. Fable 2 takes place in the same world as the first game, though five hundred years on. Molyneux decided that he wanted an in-game purpose or use for the wealth that the player might accrue. He is sick, he stated, of games in which the player simply racks up fantastic sums for the hell of it, though can never really appreciate it. “I want a huge room full of gold I can run my fingers through.” In Fable 2, the player can buy essentially anything – any building, any structure, any object. The more money the player pumps into an area, the greater the local economy will change to reflect the influx.

There was far more that Molyneux might have said, were his handler not so good at her job. At this point Molyneux was steered outside for a smoke, and the meeting was officially over.