Peter Molyneux is standing in front of an audience of professional game developers gathered in Singapore to hear his keynote at the Games Convention Asia.
 
He begins by talking about his obsession "to create a game for casual gamers and core gamers."  The lecture is ostensibly a post-mortem of the recently completed Fable 2, but Molyneux uses such consistently current description of his "obsession" that you can't help but wonder if his new title will be something that's core and casual at the same time.
 
There's a stigma, says Molyneux, especially in Europe and America, that a hardcore player cannot play a casual title.  He's simply too dexterous and trained for twitch action.  "The thought of playing The Sims…you'd rather be caught naked."
 
"That's my obsession – to create a game that both of those audiences can play," states Molyneux in the present tense.
 
When the designers first started on Fable 2, they wrote a million features on a whiteboard.  They team was proud of all the technical features, but "it wasn't going to bring casual and core gamers together," Molyneux says.  "It wasn't going to be a step towards a revolution."
 
So they flipped the whiteboard over, and wrote down three words that would:
-Drama
-Accessibility
-Sharing
 
After explaining the ways in which each of those casual-friendly features turned out to have depth and complexity that hardcore games could appreciate, Molyneux told the audience, "I think this is an important lesson for industry."  One that he hopes other developers can take to heart.
 
Story filed by N. Evan Van Zelfden in Singapore