Molyneux: We didn't have enough time for Fable III

Lionhead Studios head Peter Molyneux admitted in an interview with Gamasutra that Fable III didn’t live up to his expectations because he didn’t have enough time to develop it, thanks to the development process they used. He promises that Lionhead will use a “very, very different process” from now on. He stated, ”The process, the way that we designed, and the way that we crafted – meant that the game came together very late. That is one of the things that we’re changing; that is just such an old school way of working.”

According to Molyneux, one of the game’s ambitious ideas was ”to take leveling out of the user interface, abstractly represented by numbers, and put it directly into the game – tie it to the world, the character, and key moments in the story.” Molyneux regretted, ”The real dream of that leveling process was that, as you went through each gate, there would be these tough choices for the player. Which chest should I open? This one or that one? The feeling that you’re going through the game at your own pace, but having to make these tough choices, was never actually realized.”

Thanks to their inability to implement Molyneux’s ideas, Lionhead will change their approach. ”So we’ve got a very, very different process of designing now,” Molyneux says. ”We’ve spent a long time thinking about that and doing our research on how you can have a creatively-led production process and how you can take the complete randomness out of the way that a lot of ideas are developed and evolved.”

Fable III was released to mixed reviews, but still sold over 3M copies worldwide.