Molyneux Talks Fable 2's Emotional Investment With Love, Dogs

Microsoft and developer Lionhead have released the first in a series of video diaries giving players a behind the scenes look at the development of Fable 2 for the Xbox 360, in which the project's creative director Peter Molyneux describes the game's emphasis on emotional involvement by stating that “you feeling loved is really important to us.” Illustrating his point, the esteemed game designer again revisited the concept of the game's dog, which was first shown during a demonstration at the most recent Game Developers Conference in March. “I don't press a button when I go out with my dog for a walk,” commented Molyneux. “I just go out with the dog and the dog does his thing, and he knows that if I don't like something he's done then he doesn't do it. That's how you control the dog in the game.” He reiterated, “We give you no control over the dog. Just think about that for a second... No control over the dog. You haven’t got a dog button... You control the dog by playing the game. You control the dog by worrying about you as a hero. I think that the very fact that you don’t control him makes him feel real, makes him feel like something that has a mind and that has an agenda. And that agenda, first and foremost, is his love for you... his need to please you in everything that he does.” Building on this, Fable 2's senior programmer Jonathan Shaw gave his thoughts on love's importance in the game, offering that “because we deal with love everyday in our lives, and it's something we recognize and were intimate with, if it's faked on screen it can be vary jarring. Obviously it's wrong, and it's very difficult to get that right.” He added: “As we get more processing power, the AI will indeed get more sophisticated, and you'll be able to track a lot more variables and you'll be able to do a lot more with it. So one of the ambitions that we had for Fable 1 which we couldn't quite put in, we are bringing back to Fable 2.”