“Fable for me is an open-world game.”
Peter Molynuex, the creator of Microsoft’s fantasy RPG series Fable, believes Lionhead Studios should have developed a fourth main installment in the Fable series rather than Fable Legends.
On the latest episode of our monthly interview show IGN Unfiltered, Molynuex discussed the “heartbreaking” closure of Lionhead and cancelation of Fable Legends, saying that if he could go back in time and prevent the studio’s closure, he would have had the team work on Fable 4 rather than Legends.
“At the end of the day, whether you’re an internal first-party studio or an external third-party studio, you’ve got to look at the bottom line,” he explained, highlighting the initial appeal of free-to-play games. “But as free-to-play has evolved, we’ve realized it actually can only be applied to a certain type of game. And that certain type of game certainly isn’t Fable,” Molyneux added.
“Fable for me is an open-world game. It’s a game which cares about people’s freedom, where free-to-play is about constricting people and keeping them along a path, so you can be predictive about their spending…. And that’s not what Fable is,” he said.
Molyneux founded Lionhead in 1997 and departed the studio in 2012 to found 22 Cans. For more from our interview with Molyneux, find out what he believes is the “big mistake” he made with the Fable series, and stay tuned for the third part of this month’s episode of IGN Unfiltered, which goes live later this week.
Alex Osborn is a freelance writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter and subscribe to his YouTube channel.