We only attended one presentation today due to having a small booth on gamescom and checking out the games on gamescom.
Peter Molyneux – Choice: The Ultimate Game Mechanic
I just had to see Peter Molyneux one time live to see what visions of his he would talk about. He talked a lot about Fable 3, which I learned only afterwards that it was announced on the press conference earlier the day…
I took some notes, so I will just put them as bullet points here.
- Choices can but don`t have to be about good vs. bad, example: revenge quest from Fable 2, where players had to enter a relationship to revenge someone and where a lot of players chose to not complete the quest the intended way, which lead to morally ambiguous choices.
- Choice tells us something about the players, helps in building an emotional connection
- Some rules how to use the choice game mechanic
- Don’t have the outcome of the choice be too unexpected
- Don’t branch to totally separate threads, instead weave.
- Don’t forget game play.
- Don’t spend too much time on small choices.
Some details about Fable 3 were also revealed:
- Be bold with the game mechanics, question the foundation stones
- Be bold with the story and drama.
- First half is about leading a revolution against a tyrant king, second half will have you as ruler
- The choices will affect the whole kingdom, the family plays a role
- New game mechanic: Judgements
- For writing the Story, they use : “Staging”, scenes played by actual actors, used to experiment how choices affect players
- Coming out in 2010 on XBox 360
- Character from Fable 2 will carry over indirectly, you play the child of your Fable character
- New game mechanic: Touches: Gives the player to possibility to touch other characters, influences relations, social status, …
During talking about the Touches game mechanic, he used a lot of body language, maybe that`s a hint that they are going to integrate with Project Natal (which would make sense, with them being one of the largest third-party exclusive developer)…
gamescom
We spent the rest of the day visiting gamescom and staying a bit at our own booth. It was an interesting experience and I fear I`ll have to buy a lot of those games… I saw The Old Republic (“I killed the captain” btw), Risen, Venetica, Haunted, Alan Wake, Uncharted 2, …