Strategy Informer  

Lionhead Studios' Fable II for Xbox 360 was the victim of "huge design flaws" admits creator Peter Molyneux. Microsoft rated them "super black".

That's the colour for 'oh uh' when it comes to quality testing for bugs. Fable II was the first rated that bad. They had to "reduce down" the game.

"Fable II, let's be honest about it, it has some terribly messy things about it," Molyneux said during Develop in Brighton, reports Eurogamer.

"Half of that, again being honest, was because we rushed at the end and we had this terrible phase where, the world looks this beautiful with this many game features, and then slowly transitioned into being less beautiful," he explained.

"On Fable II we had, at one point, 67,000 bugs. The Microsoft Test team rated us super black. No-one had been black before. They'd been red and orange and green. But we were super black. They said it's utterly impossible for anybody to come out as super black."

"That's why we had to reduce down what we had. But, to be honest with you, there were also huge design flaws in Fable II." Lionhead stumbled with Fable II because they didn't focus on its strong and unique selling points. Most only used 60% of game content.

Molyneux hated their choice of map: "It was boring and tedious and no-one even knew it was a map." The veteran designer also disliked Albion's females: "In Fable II, all our women looked like Russian shot putters." The bread crumb trail makes it into Fable III.

Instead of that really boring pause menu, with the billions of sub menus, we now get a 3D menu instead called the Sanctuary. It has everything you need to manage your character and even the world itself via the large world map.

One area Lionhead have been unable to vanquish is loading times. "I hate loading. I really hate it. I know the journalists – wonderful people that they are – are going to slag us off about loading. We tried to minimise it," said Molyneux.

"But we've got a big problem. Because a lot of our world is persistent, we can't afford the memory. We tried and experimented with trying to stream load it, but we didn't actually get it working." Fable III releases on Xbox 360 and PC October 26th.

Does all this sudden trash talking of Fable II by Molyneux himself have you a little worried about Fable III's chances? At least this time we PC gamers get some love.

Related games: Fable II (Xbox360), Fable II: Knothole Island (Xbox360), Fable II: See the Future (Xbox360)