Peter Molyneux, venerated game developer and head of Lionhead Studios, was a little taken aback by the critical reception to Fable III. While the game was able to do markedly well in sales, Molyneux believes that the Metacritic score of 80 is inexcusable.
"I'm pretty ashamed of that, to be honest, and I take that on my own shoulders, not the team's shoulders,” Molyneux told Gamasutra. "When you have something like that, which you can feel as a kick in the teeth, you have to pick yourself up and fight even harder."
He adds that all is not lost for the Fable series, commenting, “I still think it was a good game. I just don't think it was a great game that took us to 5 million units. It didn't end up being the game that I dreamed it would be, because I thought the mechanic of the ruling section were really good ideas. I thought they were good ideas, but we just didn't have time to exploit those ideas fully."
"I've been here before, and it just means that you've got to make whatever you do next twice as good. You're going to make the process and the planning process much, much better because, in the end, that's where you really suffer."
He cites the development time, a paltry two years start to finish, as a major setback for the studio. With only two years to work on the release many features within the game suffered.
"I look at Fable III and it's hard to be completely honest without offending people; but I know, when I read in the middle of a review that said the quality just wasn't good enough, I actually agree with those reviews," he mused.
Lionhead is starting to work on yet another project, Fable: The Journey. The new title is meant to grasp at the Kinect, using a first person perspective. "We should take a deep look at what people really enjoy about the experiences that [we] might have made and try and focus on those rather than focus on the gimmicks, which we kind of love to develop," said Molyneux.
"That is being a little bit self-critical," Molyneux added, "but I think that there's times that you have to be self-critical. I think the worst thing that could have happened to Fable III is if it sold 4.99 million, because I think that would have made us slightly complacent, and complacency is always the worst place to be, in my opinion.”
The aim is to break away from the predictability of their previous releases. Lionhead has been focused on Fable since 2006, after the release of The Movies: Stunts & Effects. Molyneux hopes to move past that predictability, launching Lionhead into a world of creativeness.
"We should, again, double down on freshness and originality without sacrificing quality.”
