How Fable Was Made and Why the Creators Hate it

Fable transported players to the enchanting world of albon in 2004 where players were granted unprecedented freedom to do whatever they wanted whether that was buying a house getting married becoming evil or even kicking chickens Fable gate players the power to create their own story quickly becoming a game everyone knew about but what many people don't know is the chaotic story of fable development everyone believes that the man Peter molanu was the sole genius behind the creation of fable when in fact Fable originated from the minds of Two Brothers Dean and Simon Carter the brothers had created a small team in Guildford England and were struggling early in development before they sought the help from their friend malanu Who provided the resources they needed but at the cost of their own sanity and their recognition this is a tale of teamwork ambition and the crippling effects of crunch within the creation of fable Peter malanu started bog Productions in 1987 and created some of the bestselling PC games of all time like populace and Dungeon Keeper but after EA bought bullfrog in 1995 malanu left and created his own gaming Studio lion head this chain of events affected many others like the two brother developers from bullfrog Simon and Dean Carter to venture off and create their own Studio Big Blue Box Studios with their friend Ian love it in 1998 breaking from the shackles of bullfrog men the brothers could finally Begin work to create their own dream game wishworld but they couldn't find any Publishers to give them any Financial backing which saw them working out of Peter manu's back bedroom again where they had originally created Dungeon Keeper together Publishers were looking for studios who follow the three golden rules of a startup the game needed to be small and scale within a well-defined genre and involve breast and or cars the design should use existing technology and should have a nice catchy title wishworld had none of these it was a landscape altering wizard against wizard Battle Royale game it was sort of a third person RTS that took the magic and World morphine aspects of Magic Carpet and combined them with elements of one of our favorite games Julian goop's chaos it was a very bullfrog game multiplayer first magical technically ambitious Dean whole time extension wishworld had little elements of an RPG and let players be a wizard in the academy and in order to enhance their magical combat skills the academy would give its students access to a number of landscapes in which they may practice their new abilities these are what were known as wish Worlds the character the player picked decided what magic they had like Malaki the Fallen Angel can turn mountains into volcanoes and flat planes in the volcanic waste or if a player had water abilities you could fill an ocean with Burman then make one of them very large and ride him into battle imagine playing a 3D Zelda where the world is constantly changing for you and where your actions alter the world for other players at the same time Dean said in the wish World design documents but after roughly 9 months of not Landing a publisher the three knew they needed more programmers to keep wish world's demo state- of art but there was a problem the brother's money was dwindling so they had to beg the bank for more with our savings dwindling things began to get a bit desperate Dean was the only person with a small amount of cash remaining in the bank Simon told IGN luckily they somehow managed man to get a small loan and hired Matt Dixon an Oxford physics graduate and Martin Bell who they worked with previously on Dungeon Keeper both of them chose to give up lucrative and secure positions to join the small group with Big Dreams with the extra help secure the wish World demo was kept up to date but the job of Landing a publisher still wasn't happening that was until the brothers and their friend Peter malanu thought of a plan that would benefit all of them Lin head Studios would create the lion head satellites program which meant big blue box would become a satellite studio for lion head and receive all the benefits of being a part of Lin head while still being able to do their own thing we needed credibility with Publishers we needed more resources we needed the freedom to develop games not push papers we worked out a potential solution to all the problems facing us lion head would create the lion head satellites a scheme to support new Studios creating original games the idea was that Lin head would provide us with technology testing design PR and business support leaving us free to actually develop our game Dean told IGN Simon also agreed it benefited Us in numerous ways from having real business partners who knew how to negotiate to help securing a bank loan to general advice and legal resources there had been no big blue box without lion head with their new plan in place the team sat back and waited for Publishers ready to sign them up yet it never happened two years went by before the brothers realized that wishworld was too ambitious for any publisher they knew they needed to change something and that something was brought up in a drunken conversation with Peter molanu at his house Peter's suggestion was that we focus on one wizard Merlin but allow players to make any kind of Merlin they wanted explains Dean we liked some aspects of that idea and decided to push it a little further making it into a game where players could become any kind of heroic Arch type they wanted this idea was not a problem for the brothers because in 1985 they made a vow to create the world's greatest RPG second on our list of game ideas was something Dean and I had been talking about for years we made a solemn brotherly vow that one day we'd give it a go just as soon as Simon got through puberty it would be based on our L of Ultima games in Jim Henson's the Storyteller a fairy tale RPG where the world was a nonlinear sandbox simulation says Simon we wanted to create a role playing game like no other the world would be breathtakingly beautiful place filled with waterfalls mountains dense forest populated with compelling and convincing characters with real personality who actually reacted to what you did we wanted each and every person who played our game to have a unique experience to have their own stories to tell the brothers told IGN and they would call this idea thingy while the lion headlink was helping the team get some Intrigue the issue was Publishers were apprehensive to create games on the next gen of consoles because of the cost at this point getting a publisher was looking grim and the team savings were again dwindling to the point of starvation but seemingly out of nowhere an unlikely publisher reached out to the brothers to offer them a publishing deal Microsoft Microsoft was fantastic they had an immediate understanding of what we were trying to achieve with our game and showed a huge amount of enthusiasm right from the beginning most importantly they realized that grass wasn't a nutritionally complete diet for a budding company a few weeks pass and big blue finally signed their contract the first decision the team made besides eating actual food was to finally move out of Malu spare bedroom to a nice cheap office next to a river in Golding 30 mi from London the next task was investing more into their team and expanding this proved very problematic for the brothers though as finding immensely talented hugely enthusiastic people that get along with everyone were hard to come by the interviews ranged anywhere from huge egos to devs depleted by their former companies because I work for an evil black harded company that crushed every last vestage enthusiasm I ever had I really think this industry is going down the toilet I mean computer games you know I haven't played one a months they're all rubbish really aren't they said an interviewer to the brothers this led to the five working at Big Blue to go through a ton of time they went through 700 CVS 18 recruitment agencies and 50 interviews to get their next 15 team members but it was the most important task they could do it cannot be overemphasized how important it is for a small company to make sure that every addition really fits in and well these are people you're going to work with closely for years whose every single annoying habit you will become achingly well acquainted with you need to get it right no matter how long it takes Dean told IGN big blue box now had everything they needed to seriously begin development of their game now called project ego developing a game is incredibly hard but developing a brand new IP in the world of RPGs is even more difficult the first real struggle for big blue was to figure out their core elements and and what to begin developing first as I didn't want to waste any time and effort on things that wouldn't have made a major impact on the game this is the first and possibly the most important question any game developer worth it salt will ask itself in general the priority is to work out which aspects of the game design are fundamental in making it fun playable and unique and to start with those the brothers said in their Dev diary but each person in big blue had their own idea of what was most important Matt thought that movement and how the game felt to a player was the focus Simon thought the AI in the game was most important because this would give players a sense of freedom and Power in the environment Leroy believed that their combat and Magic systems needed to be completed first or they would never get a real feel for the game and Angus the RPG lead would point out that the most important aspect of an RPG is the story which would make players invested and interested and give the whole thing depth the issue was all of them were right one of the problems with working on an action simulation stealth them up RPG with a proprietary magic system is that all of these elements are pretty much equally important certainly one of the biggest development challenges so far has been having to work on all of these big difficult areas of the game simultaneously just so we can get a true impression of the full flavor of the thing Simon told IGN the brothers in the team ultimately decided that the three core features would be to create a unique World filled with people who had real convincing lives and personalities that the player's actions would have a substantial impact on the story the world and the other people and finally that the world in which this all took place would be beautiful and this was one of the most important features the brothers wanted to use to separate themselves from past games most of the RPGs that have been out that didn't include technology always used the foolproof Dungeons and Dragons formula the brothers wanted to create something that was fresh new and different which is why they chose to go down the dark European fairy tale style inspired by the brothers Grim the brothers grim tales included environments like dense deep impenetrable forests that whispered in the wind great fields and Lush hilltops overlooking Villages and giant mountains in the background they wanted it to feel authentic and not necessarily real we wanted to make sure Fable felt it was in a beautiful natural fantastic environment a place where you would want to live Simon told time extension with these ideas in mind the lead engineer programmer Martin Bell began creating their first landscape engine soon we were clustered excitedly around his screen watching 4 km of Wild Rock and scrub land stretched before the camera this was a feet in itself the brothers told ignan but there was an issue it was only landscape there was no Lush dense plant life that they knew they needed to achieve their look and doing that by hand would take months so Martin and the other artists came up with a brilliant idea to have the engine automatically recognize the type of soil of the various biomes and it would grow the relevant plant life on its own this was a crazy idea for 2001 and nobody was sure it would work but the first test proved otherwise the results were astounding a small Hill Rose above a field of reeds its grassy top soft and luxuriant against the blue sky blue bells shook with the high wind and Long Grass billowed gently against the player's legs it lent the whole scene a sense of real softness density and true fairy tale idealism this was going to be something special the brothers wrote in their Dev diary the world of albon and its sense of wonder wouldn't be complete without its music the head of music Russell Shaw knew it would be quite difficult to pull off Project eco's Music as it was not just a happy fairy tale it also included elements of sadness darkness and Sinister a big goal for Russell was to get all of those feelings across in a subtle way we wanted to make sure the use of music and Fable was much more subtle in a way that you weren't listening to music you were actually just getting the feel of the music behind what you were playing he told Xbox magazine the key to all of this was the help of Danny Elfman who helped create the game's main theme using the theme russellwood leave in these different emotional threads to create whatever feeling was necessary for the Zone a player was approaching with the team's expertise in programming and AI the villagers within project Eco were going to be quite Advanced as the game included five different AI systems that made the world of albon come to life the first was the global AI this managed the economy the population levels and the fame system this meant if a player was mean in another city and wasn't famous nobody would really care but if the player collected enough Fame the global AI would start allowing illers to spread rumors about them across the game This Global AI system also revealed some unintentional gameplay mechanics while it underwent testing a young teen beta tester went to a city and killed everyone who lived there because he believed the global AI system would allow the housing prices to fall which they did which then allowed him to buy all of the houses in the village then when the game repopulated the village with people he became the landlord of the entire Place secondly there was the town and City AI this was a system that controlled how people reacted to the player by what they did the idea for the devs was that each person would get their own personality and own memory of you they could like you hate you love you or be afraid of the player early in project ego's development the team found that children within the game to be incredibly emotive and realized that they had a huge impact on the people playing the game as a result we put considerable effort into ensuring that the little mites had an especially varied and interesting array of behavior the more sociopathic ones would Chase chickens and kick the stuffing out of them passive scholarly spawn would trundle to school in an orderly manner and turn up at home on time for din are like the real world consumer zombie counterparts Dean told IGN we made the little people more interesting with their own attitudes moods tolerances and biases just like real people some of them are idiots too just like real people his brother continued the third was the monster AI this was a system that controlled how enemies reacted to the players not wanting the AI to be too powerful and overwhelm players the team used a complicated will-based system for the enemy AI that made them follow a set of unfair rules these included don't hit the player when someone else is hitting him it might be a really good tactical ads but he'll complain there's only one of him don't hide where he can't see you yes I know he's allowed to but he is the hero and it's his privilege take plenty of time to attack stop yawn point to him hold up a bloody sign saying I'm going to attack you now if you have to but make sure he doesn't start moaning about how unfair everything is even if he did run into a group of 70 of you Bandit mates without looking and last but not least was the hero AI the specific AI would control what would become one of of the main features and selling points of the game the morphine of the hero character besides the idea of moving wish world to a single player experience malanu can be credited for the morphs within project ego as he allowed the brothers to use this idea in their game we had initially wanted to stay away from a morphing character as we didn't want to cannibalize the unique selling point of black and white lion head's first game but Peter gave us his Blessing they told ignan two of our earliest hires Martin Bell and Casper Dugard took these ideas and ran with them creating an engine capable of morphing detailed characters with wrinkles tattoos and body morphs and a bunch of other features that were quite remarkable for the time Simon told time extension the morphine concept would become a staple for the game as well as adding to the experience of creating your own story because now the choices a player made would reflect in his character and the world around him it always disappointed me when I had to play a game and I was forced to be a certain character Mal new told Xbox magazine but in Project ego players would see their character change physical appearance based on the morality alignment combat discipline and scarring the hero could grow taller change skin color become fatter change hair earn horns or gloring auras based on their decisions in the game this was all a part to make sure the player felt in control of who they were all of these ideas and Ambitions are why artists Damen buzug one of the few who would really impact the look of fa decided to join the team it was a beautiful pitch of a hero in this dark fantasy world but instead of just playing along to someone else's story you could shape it Dean spoke in detail of you as a hero passing some Bandits on a trail and your actions not only changed the nearby Village's future but also that of of the bandits it was the most ambitious game idea I had ever heard of in a long time and I had to help make it then he dropped in that your choices shape your character too little did I know this would come to haunt me as a character lead baz Zug told time extension while Microsoft G big blue their publishing deal project ego was originally being developed for the Sega Dreamcast this was because Microsoft did not have a console at the time of their own and because of a partnership deal the two briefly shared but sega's Dreamcast ended up being a commercial failure in 2001 and Microsoft inevitably did Greenlight the creation of their own console the Xbox and project ego would become an XBox exclusive Microsoft decided that they were going to make a game's console says Pete Hy head of production at lion head they put people on plans to meet the best developers in the world and obviously Peter molanu and lion head were on that list we ended up doing a much better deal in terms of financials Microsoft is just massive I remember at the time their Executives were saying we're just going to outspend everybody until we win this news was taken well by the dev at Big Blue when I joined in 2000 Microsoft were already on board which was excellent as they were developing this brand new crazy looking console recalls BBY what better fit than this brand new crazy looking game it seemed perfect to me but nothing is rarely perfect and the size of the console took everybody at Big Blue by a surprise the Xbox design wasn't exactly restrained Chuckles Simon if the PS2 Was An Elegant Japanese Bento Box the Xbox was a flame grill Double Whopper with extra cheese baz Zug was in agreement you couldn't get a bigger louder and brat looking console than that that thing had room for a family of four to easily sit around it and still have room to invite granny the massive dup controller was also a point of contention at that point we had the controllers that were the size of a large roast dinner and about as easy to handle said Dean out of sheer frustration we stole a couple of the smaller Japanese controller s joypads during one of the E3 shows a year later we ran into some bugs on the controller driver and rather helpfully reported this to Microsoft they said uh you're using controller 3.5 5 275b you shouldn't have those where did you get at which point we put down the phone and tried to pretend that the whole incident had never happened while Size Doesn't Matter the Xbox had the specs that back up its large size it was basically a PC in a box which for PC developers Fresh Off Dungeon Keeper was a joy remembers Dean the fact that it had a hard disk allowed an element of permanence in the world so every action players performed could affect each of the individual villagers without the hardest this would have been next to Impossible and Simon agreed Babel could not have existed without the hard drive we had a huge number of textures animations sound effects and meshes the game was nonlinear so we didn't know which asset would be needed up front and the hero and to a lesser extent the NPCs were all made up of these Lego sets of dynamic pieces that could morph everything was streamed and Fable we were piping hundreds of megabytes of assets through a tiny 32 megabytes memory cache for BBY the power of the system was instrumental in achieving his aim the graphics that Martin Casper and the engine team created on that Beast were stunning having been used to the PS2 at home this was a giant El for big-footed albon villagers I think it was one of the best looking games out there the hardware wasn't the only good addition for the team Microsoft provided the perfect producer to help them translate their game to Americans Rick Martinez we were very fortunate to have an extremely enthusiastic and knowledgeable Microsoft producer called Rick Martinez explains Dean his comedy taste ran to Black outer and Monty Python so when we said we wanted to make a dark fairy tale with pythonx elements he understood we were so grateful for his help especially when you consider another Microsoft producer heard what we were doing and said a fairy tale like with singing bugs and stuff Rick is also the guy who kicked our butts and told us to focus on the combat more you're going to be fighting at least 60% of the time you should be focusing on at least 60% of your effort on that Simon remembered like many people without his support there had been no Fable Dean remembers Simon continued it seems obvious now but Fable was a very odd British game that non Brit struggled with conceptually and Rick was able to win over skeptical Americans Josh Atkins at the time a senior game designer at Microsoft also shared our passion for fable and was immensely helpful in cleaning up some of the floppier design elements all in all Microsoft were a perfect publishing Partners on Fable they were supportive understanding and most importantly trusted the team which was great as the brothers in the team had one thing that scared them more than anything scheduling big blue was a tiny team there was just 16 of them and if they have to report every little thing that was getting finished and when it would have caused the team too much stress we're constantly grateful that our relationship with our publisher is such that we have so far managed to strike a decent balance between sensible planning and the flexibility we need on the one hand we've got detailed enough plans to know what features of the game are going to be finished and when and on the other we can still get our creative juices going Dean told time extension an example the brothers used was this last week one of our artist decided to get himself crushed underneath a washing machine cracking three ribs breaking both his hands and embedding his eyebrow piercing into his left temple he definitely wasn't scheduled to do that but in all seriousness the expression system and the emoting to communicate with the village was something that was sporadically thought of by Dean Dean came up with the idea of boasting where you can take your hero into the middle of town and boast about how brilliantly you'll perform on your next Quest if you then finish the quest successfully your Fame throughout albon will be boosted significantly however if you fail then you won't hear the last of it for ages it's a nice little idea one of the hundreds of nice little ideas that we've had for the game if every time we came up with a cool idea like that we would have to sit down and plan out exactly which textures sounds animations Etc had to be imp mented by whom and exactly when we'd soon stop coming up with cool ideas thankfully that's not going to happen Simon recalled in the dev diary but sadly nothing lasts forever this was because Microsoft announced that they wanted the game out in 2004 which caused massive problems for big blue as the game was too big to finish on time for such a small team this led Microsoft to force Lon head Studios to help big blue with the development for the final 18 months which in turn destroyed morale for a bit and caused resentment between the two two Studios Microsoft became increasingly keen on shipping Fable and Fable quickly became the most urgent project that needed finishing at lion head said Dean to the gamer so he made the decision to combine the Lin head and big blue box teams to get Fable finished this made practical sense but in hindsight the cultural impact of going from 16 people to 60 was much higher than I anticipated Lin head staff resented being pulled off their own projects and big blue box staff felt that they'd been assimilated into a company they hadn't signed up to the brothers remember the culture Clash well the team's more than tripled in size and consisted of a new mix of big blue box staff happy lion head staff resentful lion head staff contractors and even Microsoft employees drafted in to help out with the mammoth task of finishing a new 3D action RPG a very new genre none of us had ever worked on a 3D action game of any kind some line head staff even refused to work on it and some are even caught saying look what we've been reduced to it's safe to say that Fable no no matter what name it was under at any given time was not viewed as a guaranteed hit with two seemingly incompatible teams now forced to work together Fable development was beginning to look Grim the animations within Fable proved difficult for the team to program the hero would start with no abilities and could only Attack One enemy at a time but as the hero grows in Power Players would be able to take on multiple enemies at once to get this look the best they could there was a group of modelers that created all the characters in the game and the animators took these models and handcrafted over 5,000 animations in total for the characters they decided to opt for a real-time visceral Hands-On mey combat where players could Mash away at combos or use their skill with timing but there was still an issue with the way the animations looked it felt off and not seamless the issue the animators found was in the character posing they found that a quarter of a second to go from start to end pose was the most optimal time if it lasted any longer players would complain that the combat was too slow with the impose in mind the animators realized that players only see more of the impose than any other part of the animation so to make the animation work properly and feel good they focus more on the last animation to bring it all together however the most important thing we learned we learned from the best or more accurately from studying and copying every fine beat him up and action RPG we could get our hands on basically every single attack must be covered up with so many big sparkling spangling effects that the player is too busy having an epileptic fit to see anything else Dean said to IGN our initial aim was to create a massive very relevant RPG where players who didn't play RPGs would see why this form of gaming was fun why it could appeal to them despite the fact that maybe they never owned a d andd rule book in their lives Dean Carter explained and nothing could be as important in an RPG than its story originally Fable story started off as a Revenge one but that ended up getting scrapped for a story of power tasking the players to see how they dealt with it as the story progresses from a small boy whose mom and sister were captured to an older hero the game would challenge the players's morality by giving them light and dark choices visually altering their character's appearance the game's open World sandbox was filled with many side quest for players who enjoyed straying from the main path things like saving villagers hunting Bandits or looking for buried treasure something Malu especially wanted in the game the real feeling I wanted people to have when they played Fable was Wonder to be constantly surprised even if they went off track of the main story line to make sure players never got lost the devs opted for a Min map that always pointed the players to the path to continue their Quest while the world was big for its time the game's narration was larger Fable writer James leech explained that Fable had roughly 160,000 words in the game onethird of those words came from the story and the other two3 were all of the village AI within the game there were so many words and scenarios associated with them that some players might not ever figure out how to hear them all the brothers and the rest of the team spent countless hours in a kind of Devotion to their designs in the game even if they didn't quite turn out how they originally imagined them this was especially true for the design process of the creatures in the game in the beginning of each creatur's design process there there was a tiny description and a sketch that captured what the basic idea was the menine balverine that plagued the hero in the villagers of albon was Dean's baby he chose the name balverine for its gaic language meaning of night creeper it was going to be a big human dog thing with big teeth this description with Dean sketch on the back of his calendar where all the artists had to go by to create the creature but after a meeting with an artist named John mccormac it was revealed that the Gaelic name was completely false and the balverine name originated from a misremembered street sign Dean drove by every day even with this little mixup John worked extremely hard to create Dean's balverine he spent a ton of time researching drawing concept sketches which he used to get feedback from the whole design department and other artists then he spent a few weeks modeling the creature and texturing it one of the big benefits of having a single artist work on a creature from start to finish is that they get hugely passionate about the thing JN came up with loads of ideas about the creature's behavior all from having been in its head for weeks we remember with fondness the way he'd leap out at people punched over and snarling trying to get a feel for the way balverine moved dean explained to IGN after John had finished everything up the balverine was passed to the animators and the programmers to bring the design to life we decided early on that we wanted the balverines to hunt in packs and generally at night and that you'll be able to hear them howling at the moon from quite a distance away they also have a tendency to hide in patches of Shadows and Long Grass where they wait for you to walk past before pouncing out eyes blazing attempting to surround you before rendering you limb from limb the first time we had a tester stumble across the balverines well proud to say that we can still see the faint staining on his chair we always believe you can tell the quality of a game by the quality of the skin marks it leaves behind Dean remarked to ignan as development went on it was finally time for project ego's first public unveiling e3202 to say it was less than stressful as an understatement the team not only needed a playable version of their game they also needed a full presentation trailer to go along with it now being the developers that they were all of this needed to be perfect they attempted to cram over 6 months of work into a demo in one week right up to the last minute before they needed it finished everyone thought this would be an easy task with the collective mind of their programming background seamlessly creating the perfect demo for E3 but that was hardly the case if You' popped your head into our office yesterday you'd have found Simon chain smoking menthol cigarettes Matt's body convulsing with a thousand simultaneous nervous Twitches Julian and Adam shrieking at each other about how the other one shouldn't bother looking the next time he crossed the road while our lead artist Ian was falling on his knees screaming why the rubbery hell isn't the balverine still working useless bunch of idiots in front of a white boy listing the odds of which member of the team was going to crack next the brothers described in their Dev diary while this was chaotic and unhealthy the team wouldn't have it any other way there's nothing in the world like the sense of achievement you get when you've come through an intense experience like this and you've delivered something you're happy with in addition sickening though as it sounds it's always a great way for the team to pull together and to do the whole bonding thing Simon told IGN but while the team was cramming in countless hours back in the office their friend Peter was busy talking to every reporter possible hyping up Fable to meet unrealistic expectations the worst part for big blue though was the fact that he never corrected anybody when they said it was a lion head game when it wasn't and with the hype of e3 over Microsoft's dead line was quickly approaching and this is when the worst part of fable development began the crunch everybody crunch said molanu that meant a lot of stuff got done in a very short amount of time but it burnt through people terribly it was so bad that it broke many people like completely broke them says BBY crunch is the one thing I detest about the industry and we did it for almost a year and a half luckily I was young and naive so I was the prime target for doing one last push for the game for the milestone for the demo but there was always one more push one more speech by someone who you barely know asking you to sacrifice everything for their annual bonus it was insane and I vowed to never crunch again B Zug be told time extension the crunch culture back then was extremely rampant with management not caring or handling the situation well at all responses varied from you can't do this to people to if you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen depending on the particular management member you asked Carter remembered the thinking was overwork isn't as bad as everyone losing their jobs which is if not necessarily good management a horrible truth of sorts even the brothers and the rest of big blue didn't think they would pull off such a game I deeply regret the effect of this level of overwork out on the people making the game including myself said Carter on the other hand I have no idea how a team so lacking an experience with this kind of game could have p bu something of this desired scale off in the time available in 2002 this kind of live to work attitude had been established for decades everyone hated crunch but accepted as just the way the industry was we doubted ourselves every week it didn't work it was just too big too ambitious says H how do you tell a meaningful Tale in a simulated open world no one had ever done that before it felt like what we were doing was completely mad but the crunch was felt worse by the lion head employees that had to move over and help big blue finish a game that they never even cared about out when it got to panic time and us shipping at all was looking Rocky I think it was all hands on deck for them there were some people who understandably didn't sign up to make a fable game near an angry swan in Golding laughs Biz Zug but during the grueling crunch period what left a bad taste in the mouth of Dean and Simon Carter as well as the rest of the big blue box team was Peter molanu their friend that helped them when they needed him the most just couldn't stop talking nor stop taking the credit from everyone who actually worked on Fable the lone genius Creator myth is something I wish the game industry would get over lamit Simon to credit any work of this size to just one person diminishes the efforts of every single other person on the 100 plus team adds Dean the idea of focusing on a story within a simulation was Pete's we were already working on Village simulation within wishworld but Peter was the person who suggested we focus on a single player story and on leveraging the simulation to make the story more personal but like most others on the team there are a lot of aspects of fable considered mine albon the world its characters its creatures and its spells and the missions its mood and its tone but that also gives me far too much credit many ideas for characters in quest came from my conversations with other people on the team and every idea was implemented by people given a large amount of autonomy whose efforts made everything they touch so much better than the initial idea anyone can have an idea genius lies in the execution and I was happy to be working with quite a few of those Dean told time extension artist BBY has a more vocal answer to this issue though this question more than any other gets me pointing and shouting at people down in the pub on the tube and and sometimes at weddings Fable was created by an incredible team of hardworking and dedicated individuals working together not one man who stood in front of the camera basking in a spotlight it was the brainchild of Dean Carter who was supported by his brother Simon and their longtime artist comrade Ian love it these three hired and grew a pretty small but incredible team and each and every one of those people created Fable all the poor SS at linehead who had to help us finish it they created Fable they gave everything to that game their time personal health and mental health I was wasn't privy to any lead meetings so I never heard from or rarely saw Peter molanu at all during the development of fable what upsets me most is Peter would never correct journalists and say oh that's not my game that's my satellite Studio making that I don't think I have ever heard him credit big blue box or any part of the team that actually made the game that still leaves a b taste in my mouth bable was released on September 14th 2004 making Microsoft's deadline it sold well with 375,000 copies sold in its first week rising to 1 .4 Million by March of 2005 becoming Xbox fastest selling game to that point Fable received positive reviews from audiences and critics with major praise for its combat concepts of Free Will and the ability to be good or evil but Fable did have complaints about it it short story was one of them but the major issues came from all the features the game did not include that Peter molanu had been mentioning in all of his interviews who eventually had to post an apology on the lion head forums even with malanu creating false promises and angering the team with no mention of their Studio the brothers and the rest of the team still respected their friend and admittedly know that without him Fable had never been made in the first place without Peter's help we wouldn't have been taken seriously by Microsoft and without Microsoft there would have been no Fable said Dean Publishers were all very conservative at the time and only Microsoft were interested in hearing about anything weird also without Pete's bold claims as to what the game was going to do nobody would have paid much attention to us in our peculiar action RPG this of course was a double-edged blade honestly in addition to pushing us to make a game with more of an emphasis on social interactions I think Peter's biggest contribution was his willingness to direct The Entity of lion head to help big blue box finished the game it ate into the work of Black and White 2 the movie and a ton of other later canned projects I don't think that's an easy thing to do to take on a property that isn't really 100% yours and devote a majority of the remaining years of the company to pursuing that shared dream Dean told time extension Peter was Fable Champion Knight in glittery armor flying the flag from his Lance as he galloped up and down the country side courting the Invaders from across the sea and dazzling the throng as he regaled Tales of heroism and legendary Deeds back in the castle though all the peasants knew it was The Wizard Dean stirring The Cauldron and creating magic other than being the pr Behemoth Peter does contribute out of the blue ideas that at first people grown at but often makes sense or can really add to the game it was incredible to witness just how much weight he had with the press and how famous he was in game development even after a number of years working with him I would still think that's Peter molanu as he drifted past and you can hear the creative cogs turning if you listened hard enough Charles Edwards lead test designer of fable to time extension while Fable didn't have everything malanu promised the crunch didn't allow big blue to add everything they wanted in the game either as a tester on Fable I wanted more open areas said Edwards I thought the levels were too linear in light corridors when the game was known as project ego and I first clapped eyes on it the world was open and you could go anywhere sadly that all had to go Babel was smaller and less ambitious than we' planned admit Simon I look back at Fable now and I find it irritating it's slow clunky the levels are not great the combat is awful and the flow is all over the place Edward said the time extension I personally wanted to polish all the stuff we'd already put in Dean remembers there's so much I look back on and say that part was just not shippable we Wasted Years chasing so many wild geese and tried to do so many things that didn't work out and still haven't in any game that we ended up crushing 5 years worth of development into just over a year but everyone was still happy what they had accomplished in the environment they were put in however there was so much love put into the game by so many people that I think fans could feel that and they were kind B fans are the best Dean said I live for mood and tone my goal was to create a world that felt unlike anything anyone had lived in before at least in video games I wanted players to look at a screenshot hear a snippet of music or catch a fragment of dialogue and say oh that's albon that's Fable every so often I hear from people who love the same things I loved about the game it brings a big wide smile to to my face every time Dean told IGN and Simon felt the same way we combined a fun action combat system very complicated Ai and simulation systems a unique visual style European folktales British humor a hero that morphed according to the way you played and hundreds of other Innovations into this weird wobbly wonderful thing that somehow held together the original Fable created countless memories for players at a time when games were created by developers pushing the limits of what was possible Fable took players to land where they had the freedom to live out their RPG dreams without being put into a serious setting at Fable core was the understanding that fantasy RPGs are very very silly but take themselves very very seriously Simon said we tried hard with Fable to embrace the silliness gently without breaking the illusion and while players can feel Fable humor and comedy Dean Carter still feels the stress and anxiety of creating Fable to this day I still love Fable and regularly interact with the fans of the series however any anything which reminds me of what it took to create it still causes me extreme mental discomfort if you enjoyed this detailed development story then click on this video here as you'll probably enjoy that as well

Channel: GameStudioLore

Views: 212,943

Keywords: fable 2, fable 3, fable the journey, Fable, Fable 1

Id: 5IzamQvbYhY

Length: 37min 9sec (2229 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 15 2024