With the news that Lionhead is releasing Fable II in episodic form on Xbox Live today, we spoke to studio head Peter Molyneux about the decision to retool a nearly year-old game into a new form. But this isn’t just about re-selling older games. As Molyneux says, this is also an experiment in creating games designed from the bottom up to be episodic. How they will affect such future games as Fable III? And how will they affect the game maker’s relationship with the player?

Why have you implemented this now in Fable II’s life?
There are two reasons, really. The first is that I had a look at how many active Live users there are – I don’t know the exact number but it’s 10 million or something like that – and compared to the number of people that have bought Fable II, about three million, and saw there’s a big divide. As a greedy game designer I ask why. I can sit back and moan about it and wish the game had more presence at retail or whatever, or I could do something about it.

Now, I hate demos. I think demos are the death knell of experiences. Over the years I’ve done demos and they’ve either completely ruined the game, given too much to the player, or they’ve confused people, so I said that we should give away the very first 45 minutes of the game, completely free, and just before you get to Bowerstone up comes this message saying, ‘If you want to continue playing press this button, but if you want to buy the rest of the game, press this’. So people that are interested but don’t want to commit to the full purchase can play more, and people that are into it can buy all of it, and they don’t lose experience or gold they’ve collected.

Presumably it’s also an experiment to see what does and doesn’t work in making episodic games. Why are you looking at this subject?
Yeah, the other thing is that the world of digital is developing, and I think getting ready for it – without saying anything in particular – is good experience. One of the things that was pretty tough to do was not only getting the technology together but getting everybody at Microsoft to see what it needs to work – ‘Oh right, that means we need this thing on the dashboard, we need this delivery mechanism, we need to bill it this way’. There are a lot of policy decisions to go through, and it’s really great to have been through that process already and not be burdened with that for the launch of forthcoming titles, without saying anything in particular...



So the idea has come very much from Lionhead?
Yeah, it really did, though it actually started with a conversation with Don Mattrick [senior VP of Microsoft’s interative entertainment business], talking about Fable and how it’s a great game but people need to play it before they realise that.

How are you dealing with download requirements for later episodes which require all of Albion to be available? Will players be faced with a 4gb download before they can play?
No – we’ve been fairly smart. To be honest, I don’t completely understand the technicalities, but there are trickle downloads and all sorts of things. The experience I wanted to lay out is that it shouldn’t be that you have to wait for hours until you can get into a game. If you make a decision to do something, you press that button and away you go. If I’m in an arcade playing Zombie Panic Revenge and it asks me for another credit and I have to wait an hour I’ll walk away. You’re in the middle of your experience, usually at a cliffhanger, and you don’t want that moment broken.

What have you learned about designing episodic games so far?
One of the really big inspirations for Fable III – you’ll think that this is so contrived – is Charles Dickens’ books. The fascinating thing is that he wrote them as episodes in such a way that there would be cliffhangers so people would go out to buy the next, but if you’ve got the whole book it doesn’t feel episodic.

This really changes the way you think about making games. I’ll try to be vague here because none of this has been announced, but one of the questions we’re asking is about why is it that you should go to a shop, buy a game and finish it over a weekend and wait for, in Fable II’s case, 16 weeks to get new content, and you play that over a day and wait 20 weeks for the next, and so on? If I said to you, go and watch six episodes of Lost and then there’s a massive break, it just fractures the whole experience. How can we create a much better way of having a relationship with the player so they feel that there are more things they can add to the world, even on the first day they play in it? I think that’s vague enough.