The second thing is that I’m going to give you characters in Fable 2 to interact with. Some of which that travel with you which are totally based on AI so they can be super reactive to what you’re like individually. That’s going to help a lot.
Thirdly I’m going to give you a combat system that you’ve never experienced before. That is really important to me because I know sixty to seventy percent of the time you’re going to be fighting. So if I can innovate that I can give you something that you haven’t, as a gamer, felt ever before. So I’m going to give you a combat system which is really simple, really easy, but one that you can experiment with, one that you will not find the full depths of and one that when you are fighting you are also conducting with. That your sword is like a baton in an orchestra and that every stroke you hit with the sword will activate different pieces of music. That will make you feel really cool.
What’s the most important lesson you’ve learned as a game designer?
That’s easy. Don’t do lots of little features badly, do a few features unbelievably well. So if you look at Fable 1, there were a lot of sins committed but the real sin was to have so many features but not enough features that were beautifully polished. So Fable 2 actually has less features but what we’ve done is taken the small number of features and just mixed them together in a way that gives you an awful lot more. That means you have less to polish.
You know I look at something like Black and White, Fable, and even going back to Dungeon Keeper , even things like Syndicate and they were so crammed pack full of features that it kind of meant that there was too many. What I should have is just taken a few of them and polished those. It’s such a simple thing, why didn’t I realize this years ago?
It’s always the Keep it Simple thing isn’t it?
I know, I know…. I learned it in college for crikes sake. Why did it take me twenty years to learn it?
We only have a short time left, where do you see video games going in the next couple years? What’s the next big technological jump…where are games going?
I don’t think there’s any technological leap necessary. I think, and I’m going to say this because I’m a designer, we’ve got to start designing games. We’ve got to start designing games properly because we’re not doing it. We are just taking little steps forward and sometimes steps back. We’ve got to start taking big leaps forward and I think if you talk to a lot of journalists what are they saying is exciting about the show? It’s all the games that are a little bit different. For me this industry, we can make huge difference with the hardware we’ve got if we just start sitting down and throwing away some of the foundations that we’ve got.
