After sitting down to play a few hours of Lionhead's Fable sequel, I had the chance to catch up with series creator Peter Molyneux.

Sitting in perfectly angled leather chairs, legs folded comfortably, we discussed the pacing and production of Fable II, what Lionhead is up to next, and whether he believes video games will ever reach a truly wide audience.

Peter Molyneux: Have you been enjoying the game? Well, you probably haven't gotten that far yet, have you?

Shack: I just got past childhood.

Peter Molyneux: The difference is a difference of steps that we'll be introducing in the game. You just got through the first step, which is the beginner step. The next step is all about, really it's all about that breadcrumb trail, trying to get you to explore a bit, trying to pull you off that. Giving you time with the dog, not too many threats--I don't want you to die, I don't want you to feel threatened. Part of that is because I want you to anticipate combat, rather than just be thrown in. And the the step after that is all about the simulation of animals in the world, and then the step after that is all about combat.

Shack: That decision to slowly ramp up the complexity--the approach is slightly reminiscent of a game like Spore. Do you find it challenging to entice the casual gamers without turning off the core players who already know how to swing a sword?

Peter Molyneux: Firstly, what I've learned as a designer--and I think I've learned more on Fable II probably than any other game I've worked on--it's so tempting just to give you everything and say look, "This is what the combat is like, this is what the story is like, I'll give you big drama and a lot of big guns right from the onset." I've done games like that before, and I think Fable 1 actually suffered a little from this.

But when I sit down I say to myself, look, you're going to playing this for a while. I don't need you to give you everything. It's far better to give you something new--every fifteen minutes there should be something new. Maybe that new thing's on the horizon and you're reaching for it. Maybe it's a new combat style, maybe it's a new thing that your dog does, maybe it's a new region to go to, but just that feeling. I hate the feeling in a game where you think, "Oh god, I'm doing this all over again." I loathe that.

A lot of what it is--imagine if the features are a rubber band, and we're just stretching that rubber band out. We still have the same amount of features, we're just stretching them out, so that when you get these things you're ready for them. So it's a very interesting thing that hopefully you'll find psychologically, and even now that I've just told you I think it works, just at that point where you're just thinking, "Oh, I want something meaty to fight. I'm fighting beetles." That's when we hit you with the first bandit battle. And just when you're saying, "I've been talking to these people and nothing's happening," that's when you get to a city and realize that you've got money and realize how big the world is. We try to just pull those features out.

Shack: Almost like a film, where you're timing action beats.

Peter Molyneux: Yeah, in fact we've thought an awful lot about that in the storytelling. All of Fable 1 was basically [Lionhead Dean Carter] and myself, we did the whole story. There wasn't really scriptwriters to talk of.

But in Fable II, Dean and I discussed the story that we wanted, and then we had proper scriptwriters who did a proper script, that looked like a film script. We hired a sound stage, we got a movie director in to teach us how to direct actors. We got them to act out the entirety of the story just so that we could experience what the story was, because we just wanted a very simple, pure thing.

These are the sort of brazen things we get in trouble for, but: we just wanted to tell the greatest to tell the greatest story ever told. It was that simple. And actually when we started thinking like that, we started realizing we had to go this extra mile.

Shack: I was reading an interview with you once where you mentioned that Populous (1989) sold 4 million units, which would still be a pretty solid number today. Do you think the industry is stagnating?

Peter Molyneux: I really think--and this thought occurred to me in an interview once when someone was saying, "Do you think you're going to sell as much as Gears of War?" And I think at that time Gears of War was around 4 million units. And I thought, "Hold on a second. I got that question in 1989 when I launched Populous." Just how many more people is this industry really addressing? I know it's worth 49 billion dollars, but how many people are actually playing our games? How much are we actually affecting the culture compared to what we should be doing?

20 years ago we honestly thought that [large] percentages of the world's population would be playing computer games. And it's not, it's fractions of the world's population. And I think partly it's because we keep making games for these two separate audiences. We make them for the core gamers here, the casual gamers here, and there's a big great wall between them. If you develop games for casual gamers you're just frowned on a bit.

And maybe part of Fable is about this--look, can't we create a game that both of these people can play and enjoy? Okay, you've got to give the core gamers all the carrots they love, and casual gamers the accessibility that they want. And that's what we tried to do with Fable.

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