Peter Molyneux (cont.): Today, for the first time, we've got snow [worked in], because it's snowy at the start of the game. Now there's so much bloody snow you can't see anybody anywhere, it's so thick. All the balance that we'd done before, the subtleties about you seeing things out of the corner of your eye--there's a moment in the very, very start of the game where your sister, because you play with your sister, says, "Look at that beautiful castle. Wouldn't it be fantastic if we lived there?"

At this moment, you can't see the beautiful castle. It's playing through, coming up with perhaps a hundred things that are very slightly wrong with that scene, them going out to the team, them making those changes, coming back in again, and then giving more feedback. We just do that over and over and over again, pretty much, all day, every day.

We'll do childhood, probably from now until about 10 o'clock tonight, just playing it over and over again.

Shack: So you're in the polishing stages of the game?

Peter Molyneux: We're just driving. There are a number of these hurdles that we've got to get through. One is called a hurdle of code complete, which is coming at the end of this month, where effectively all of the programming code on the game is completed.

We're just coming up to that hurdle. We're just in the closing stages of Fable at the moment, going through these hurdles. There's content complete, then there's all sorts of different hurdles to get through.

If you were to be here now, and you'd see it and look at the screen, I think you would say, "Wow, childhood looks finished. When are you going to put it in a box?"

But there's a lot of subtleties there yet to go in, and what we've got left to do, is to play through as if we were not people who wanted to get through the game. A lot of the time, the way you play through is to say, "Okay, we think people are going to do this at this point, not try to break it."

We have to do a play-through that says, "Okay, supposing I want to jump off this wall at this point or suppose I want to go in a house at this point." There's a lot of steps to go through to get the game finished.

Shack: So, when are you putting it in a box?

Peter Molyneux: I'm not allowed to tell you. I'm not sure why I'm not allowed to tell you, because I've got the exact date, I know the exact minute that we're going to release this to manufacturing.

The only thing I'm allowed to say--there's a lot of staring at me, very viciously at the moment--is that it will be autumnal time.

I know the exact date, I think they're waiting for some sort of event, maybe there's an eclipse coming up or something, when Hillary Clinton announces that she's got the Democratic nomination, I don't know. There's some event, which I don't know about, when they want to announce the date around.

Shack: Speaking of things I know you can't say much about, at GDC you mentioned that only half of Fable 2's multiplayer component has been revealed?

Peter Molyneux: That's right. The couch co-op play is the thing I revealed. I think there's a bit of innovation in there, with the ability of having your persistent hero earn gold and experience and being given gifts that you can take back into your world.

But I was only talking about [one] Xbox. I didn't talk anything to do with Live or anything like that. The only thing I can tell you is that we at Lionhead love innovating and giving you stuff that you haven't done before.

Certainly, the stuff with multiplayer that we are unveiling--this sort of thing has never been seen before.

Shack: Is co-op just limited to two players, or can you bring more players into that?

Peter Molyneux: That is edging on the side of me giving away stuff. The only thing I would say is that I don't think conventional questions that you could ask would get to the core of what this is.

This sort of thing hasn't really been seen before.

Shack: You noted during your GDC lecture that Fable 2 won't have any mini-maps. I believe your exact words were, "Mini-maps are shit."

Peter Molyneux: What I should have done during GDC is stood up and said, "What have been the biggest battles in Fable for a design idea to get past the team upstairs?"

One of those big ideas was the idea of saying, "Look, why do we have these mini-maps in the first place? They take up so much screen space or they're shrunk down to being insignificant, you have to get a magnifying glass to make out any detail on them. They're very old-school, and a lot of the time, especially with Fable 1, you could kinda play the whole game on the mini-map. It was just madness.

"Let's try and be brave--this is what you have to do when you design--and say we're not going to use mini-maps."

That was the first design thought, when we said that. That means we're going to architect our levels a certain way to be sympathetic with that, and that also means we needed something that gave players a strong idea of, when they want to go where they should be going, where they can go.

That's where we came up with the idea of a breadcrumb trail. This breadcrumb trail is dynamic, it's reactive to what you're doing. It can glow brightly or it can glow very, very dimly. It can almost be incredibly obscure, you can hardly see it at all--or it's the most important thing on the screen.

It's very dynamic; it's driven by AI. If you choose to jump down a hole and you choose to swim across a river, it will follow you and guide you and always be there for when you actually want to get back on track. It will glow more and be more excited the more important it is that you get to your destination and the closer you are to your destination.

That filled in a lot of the problems that a mini-map supplied to you. When you are trying to navigate from point A to point B, you don't actually need a mini-map. You actually need a guide, and that's what the breadcrumb trail is. That's the first thing.

The second thing was that when we were thinking about the design of our levels, we made sure that we designed them in such a way that it wasn't absolutely necessary to have a mini-map.

Now, we still have a map. We still very much have a map. There's a world map, and there's a level map, and you can bring it up and you can see, "Oh, there's a shop in this alleyway."

We've got maps like that, but the concept of a mini-map as the main way of navigating around the world has gone.

Turn the page for talk on cutscenes and the Fable 2 XBLA game.