Shack: Were there any ideas you had to cut from Fable 2, for whatever reason?

Peter Molyneux: There were things every single day which we had to pull back on. There's loads and loads of things in Fable that we had to pull back on. A lot of the time it's due to the fact that, when you actually sit down and think about, "Okay, players are going to be doing this at this point in time and this at this point in time," when you actually lay that down there's so many things in Fable 2.

It's just incredible the number of things that you can do in this game. It's really incredible. A lot of times you think, "Gee, we haven't finished implementing this feature yet and god knows where this is going to fit. Where are we going to be telling the player how to do this?"

There's a very good example of that, where we thought, "Hey, wouldn't it be cool in Fable 2 if you could wear disguises? If you could disguise yourself so you could go into a town and you could commit a crime and then you could be chased out by all the guards, and then you could put this disguise on and come back in town and creep around and hear what people have to say. Wouldn't that be cool?"

We realized that if we were centering the game around disguises, that would be cool. But it being a hidden feature that people have to discover for themselves? Balancing that against the idea that to do disguises you would have to have three less costumes in the game, we chose to have three more costumes.

There were a lot of things like that within Fable, where we sat down and thought, "Wouldn't it be cool if we did..?" and we didn't fit it in. There's a ton of things, a list of about fifty things that we thought of, which may have been experimented slightly with, or we partially implemented and then realized or saw that the experimentation didn't work, or they didn't fit in the game, or it was too complex, or it took up too much processor time.

The funny thing is, the way that we work this is kinda the way I've always worked, has been to be very ambitious at the start, and then pare back, which some people would think is a pretty fool-hearted way to work. The reason I like that way is that even if you get to half of the features that you thought of, it's a better place to be, to try and get innovation in the game, rather than saying, "Look, we'll be safe about doing this game."

Shack: What are your thoughts on the current PC market?

Peter Molyneux: I think anybody that looks at the PC charts, certainly here in the UK, they can see that the PC charts are centered really around two basic products: The Sims and World of Warcraft.

While I suppose both are incredible games, what the PC lacks is that huge variation which it had only a few years ago, where every month there was a new game coming out and there was some fantastic innovations in RTS, first-person shooters, and, oh gosh, the action-adventures--all of their homes exist on the PC.

[There] doesn't seem to be that innovation going there at the moment.

But let me just say this. Really, there is something else happening on the PC, which is kinda not happening on the consoles, is that the PC is slowly but surely being owned by non-gamers. It's being owned more and more by casual gamers, who are playing games from a variety of sites.

They are beginning to own the PC gaming space. Now, they are really under the radar at the moment, but there's an awful lot of them playing these games, an awful lot of people playing Flash games.

I think the PC is just reinventing itself. What there isn't is the spectacular triple-A titles coming out on the PC with the same frequency that they came out with before.

Which I think is sad, because there's no other gaming platform which is quite so comfortable to take on a plane and play. You've got handhelds, but they haven't got the same tour de force type games.

Shack: Do you feel that the lack of innovation is due to the increasing popularity of console development?

Peter Molyneux: I think obviously a lot of developers have switched to console, and that means a lot of innovation is happening on the console. But the trouble with innovation is, a lot of times, innovation is masked by the fact that it is hidden within games that are existing franchises. I think there was some innovation in Mario Galaxy, I think there was some real great little gameplay moments in Mario Galaxy and there was a huge number of them. The fact that it was in a Mario game kind masked the fact that that was innovation.

If you look at the Call of Duty series--okay, that was on PC, but it was also on consoles--I think there's an enormous amount of innovation in that series. But again, that's masked because it is, essentially, a first-person shooter. And that first-person shooter is really innovating an awful lot.

I do think though, that innovation is a scary thing these days because it costs so much to make a game. I mean, it costs tens of millions of dollars, and when you've got crazy designers waving their arms around like me, saying "Why don't we try not using a mini-map," or "Why don't we try having interactive cutscenes," then people are going, "Yeah, well, okay, you can try that, but it's gonna cost you twenty million to do." That is very scary for a lot of people.

So, innovation is much more difficult when a lot of money is on the line. It's just far more comforting when you're making a game to say, "I'll make another one of these because at least I know that that one was successful."