This is from a TeamXBOX messag board post.....

Fable 2: The World and the new engine (Monday, 14th August 2006)

During the past month the web teams at Lionhead Studios and Microsoft Game Studios have spent their time in meeting rooms, planning and preparing for the later half of the year. We are currently planning some drastic changes to all our websites and web services, obviously all for the better. It’s definitely going to be an improvement.

I spent a day sitting in with a High Level Fable 2 meeting where some big issues were discussed. The fighting, the back-story, the GUI (graphical user interface), Albion and the Bloodline, more milestones and how they were going to tackle the thousands and thousands of animations that are required (again, you don’t want to see Dene Carter in Lycra) were all high on the agenda. Oh yes, and nipples. Nothing we’ll be talking about in detail in this update, but just so you know there are a lot of things happening in the background at Lionhead Studios!

Luckily I also got to spend some time with the team members who are in the midst of designing and building the world. Role Playing Games come in many different sorts and shapes and I don’t think I need to explain to you what these are. It’s been mentioned on quite a few occasions that the world in which Fable 2 takes place, just has to be beautiful. And it has to be big. And at the very same time also be very interesting. And be lush or sinister! And leave room for exploration and most importantly, we want it to be unique.

RPG’s still having a tendency to be set in the tested (and admittedly, successful) “Dungeons & Dragons” theme, but with Fable 2 you know you are getting something different. Fable and Fable 2 are set in Albion, which has no direct relation with Albion as in Great Britain of the ancient times, though we are inspired by merry ol' England. This is a fictional world, in which we get to do whatever we want. It’s something that, during the days of the original Fable, was clear from the beginning and many gamers seemed to enjoy this new and fresh feeling. So we’re sticking to our approach and this time we’re making it bigger. And hopefully better!

The technical brains at Lionhead Studios are the ones who are responsible for making sure all the tools are in place to achieve this, since without the proper technical backing things would simply be impossible. The level designers then go out and build the world; I met up with Charlton Edwards who is one of the level designer on Fable 2. He explains; “What I do is help build the world of Albion, aided by SketchUp King Mike Green and Level Design Lead, Iain Wright. That includes placing important gameplay features, prettying the world up to a degree (ready for the artists at a later date), placing creatures, lights, particles emitters and, well, everything basically apart from scripts.” This might sound easy and a quite basic thing, but after having spent several hours with Charlton [aka Gradius1] I can tell you all that is a pretty complex process!


It's a forest - this is the closest you'll get to seeing Fable 2 for a while...

Dene Carter created 2D sketches of most of the areas that are used in Fable 2. Charlton then went off, using the Fable: The Lost Chapters engine, to turn those sketches into a “real” world in which you could walk around. The aim of this process was to get a complete feel of what it will eventually look like, while the technical guys were working on the tools and the brand new Fable 2 engine itself. It took Charlton about 2 – 3 days to create every area this way. The team could then walk around in the world and review each area and make the required changes instead of working with an engine that isn’t finished yet or designing all the levels on paper without a real feel of the final result. This “template world” allowed the design team to get a really good feel for the game and improve all areas even before being able to test them in the Fable 2 engine. Once all of this was done and the programmers and coders finished their initial work everything was transferred to the new Fable 2 engine, including the height fields which are so all-important. Don’t ask me why they’re that important, as I’m not completely familiar with all this vocabulary but Charlton mentioned it on more then just once occasion.

“The world definitely is much bigger and it also feels better,” Charlton explains, “There are more things to do within each area and we absolutely have to make them interesting and absorbing. Too many times have I spent playing RPG’s set in vast barren wastelands. Fable 2 retains the Fable 1 organic, intimate feel, while giving players tons to explore and discover. We are really trying to pack the world with exploration, interaction and secrets.”

Being able to use the new Fable 2 engine is obviously a welcome position to be in, but it doesn’t stop there. The artists have to create all the 3D models for the buildings, items, characters etc… it takes a while to create these things, especially now that we’re in a real next-generation where the requirements are so much bigger and the stakes are so much higher. For that reason the world designers are using SketchUp software to create placeholder assets, these assets are always white and look plain and boring, but considering they are all the correct dimensions, the artists are able to use that information to create the final assets. They can run freely with their creativity and really focus on what’s important; which is getting that Fable-feel which everyone is so familiar with. Once this is done the designers can easily import them in the world editor and replace the placeholder assets with the final assets. According to Charlton this “White Boxing” as it’s often referred to internally, works really well and the team are actually able to get ahead of schedule. “It’s actually like a 3D concept drawing for the artists to run with and create some truly stunning assets.”

One of the areas Charlton showed me was [CENSORwood], only one of the many areas in Fable 2. For those of you, who played Fable 1, think of all the Greatwood regions, add them together and you come close to the size of [CENSORwood], and mind you this is only one region! Since we are planning to allow players to leap off cliffs for example, we have to be extra cautious with the design, as every effort has to be made to make sure that players don’t get stuck.

There was so much more that Charlton told me, things he explained or ideas he suggested. Since we don’t want to reveal anything too early, we’ll just say that, at this point, our tape recorder ran out of tape…

Finally, if anyone's interested, our design document currently stands at 1,364 pages, or 72,176 lines, or 549,259 words, or 2,623,422 letters.

- Sam -

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simulrelease w/pc version? Please? That would be nice......

well i just hope that they don't hype up their game and then release it with half the stuff missing like they did in the first one . ...

It would be really cool if they could actually finish their personality/emotion/learning engine that they were talking about for the first one. The thing that would let the citizens of Albion learn things like soccer and advance them as time goes by. That was the one really amazing thing that I was looking forward to for Fable.

I never got into the first one, just didnt think it was a good game. Lets hope Fable 2 proves me wrong. It looks awesome from what the trailer showed

The first one looked awesome, too. Let's hope they fulfill their promises this time around.

Quote: Originally Posted by EagleNova 74 I never got into the first one, just didnt think it was a good game. Lets hope Fable 2 proves me wrong. It looks awesome from what the trailer showed

the first one was a good game if you didn't read any of the news releases about it beforehand. it was also a little bit on the short side since I finished it in 16 hours and that's with doing everything (character maxing, finding all secret doors, etc). For an RPG, that is extremely short compared to others such as FFX (160 hours), FFX-2 (120 hours), Chrono Trigger (200 hours and counting, can't find 2 of the endings . ..), etc. Even Zelda games which aren't even true RPGs take a longer time than Fable did.

I feel that you may be exaggerating on the "normal" length of FFX, FFX-2, and CT - they took me 70, 30, and 5,000 hours respectively (okay so I'm kidding about the CT time but I have played through the game MANY times) - but I see your point that Fable was short.

Well, if you absolutely max your characters, then they may take that long ...

Quote: Originally Posted by Meta Well, if you absolutely max your characters, then they may take that long ...

I think Yosh spent about 150 hours on FFX, right?

Who knows? Probably.

Yeah about 90 hours on FFX, never played X2 though.
Spent about... ahh, who knows how any hours on FF7... to many, lol.
I dont know... i geuss i just got board with Fable, not sure what it was... could of been in bad mood that day or something.

Quote: Originally Posted by Vertical_Zer0 I feel that you may be exaggerating on the "normal" length of FFX, FFX-2, and CT - they took me 70, 30, and 5,000 hours respectively (okay so I'm kidding about the CT time but I have played through the game MANY times) - but I see your point that Fable was short.

well the "normal" length of the game is a lot shorter. it took my roommate who just played through FFX about 60 hours. X-2 took him about 20 hours.

Quote: Originally Posted by Meta Well, if you absolutely max your characters, then they may take that long ...

yeah i max statted my characters and went through every thing possible in the game so it too 160 hours. fable on the other hand with maxing out the character and getting everything in the game only took a little over 20 hours . ..