Peter Molyneux is known for being an innovator in the gaming industry. Over his 20-year career he’s sold over 15 million copies of highly regarded games like Populous and Black and White. Known for the “God Game”, where players control their environments with divine-like powers, odds are you've played one of his games, or a game he's influenced. So when the famous, brilliant game designer offered to give us the ten things we need to know about Fable II's revolutionary new concept, we were all ears.


1. Why a dog?
It was a problem: and this problem was: how can I get you to care about something? I wanted to tell this fantastic incredible story and it was really important to me that the player remembered the story. I could have hired countless script writers and story people and told a wonderful story but it wouldn’t have really meant anything. That’s when it dawned on me, what you really need is something to care about because if you care about something you’re much more likely to remember it. What is the one thing that people just melt over? Dogs. As soon as that happened, I went into the office and I said to the team. I know what the big feature in Fable II is going to be. Everyone thought I was going to say is a sword or a new magic spell or something. I said no, it’s going to be a dog.


2. It’s just a dog
Everyone looked away and said, “Well, yeah, that’s great we could get him to wag his tail really fast, and he could fly”.
I said, “No, you don’t understand, it’s just a dog. It can’t do anything magical. It’s got no superhuman properties at all. It’s just a dog. And the more we can make it like a dog, the more impactful it will be”.

Normally, if you have a character in a computer game, that character tends to follow you, because you’re the tyrant. It wasn’t until we made the tiny little bug, where the dog would shoot out in front of you. As soon as we saw that, the connection suddenly came.

3. The Dog Rules
Then we started to sort of develop the dog more. We gave him a mind and gave that mind its rules. Isaac Asimov has this book called I Robot and had these very famous rules about an artificial intelligent mind. We gave him those sorts of rules. His first rule was he mustn’t annoy you. His second rule is he must look after you and his third rule he must look after himself. He literally slowly began to become alive. Now, I can’t imagine playing Fable without him.


4. Train Your Dog
We have experience with creating these sort of things, with a game we did some time ago called Black and White, where your job as a player was to train this creature’s behavior. You could train your creature what to like and dislike by punishing him and rewarding the creature. That kind of became the whole center of the game. When we implemented that in Fable, we kind of realized people are worrying far too much about their dog’s behavior and not enough about the actual game. We pulled back on this a little bit. there are three basic ways that you teach your dog. The first is a very coarse way- you can literally buy a training manual and you can teach your dog by reading this training manual and your dog will learn things like to roll over and to jump up and to beg and to play dead. Those are very coarse behavior and some of those are included in the ability to fight with you, the ability to hunt, and the ability to sniff out treasure. The second way is by you punishing them or by rewarding, If you find that he’s being over aggressive. You punish him. You kind of feel a bit mean for doing that, but that’s how you train a dog after all. If you see him do something, you can praise him. But the most important way that his behavior is changed is by the amount of attention you give him and by what you’re like in the world.

5. Dogs Look Like Their Owners
In Fable, I want you to be yourself. I don’t want you to think that you’re going to be a great noble hero and you must play it like that or you are going to be an evil corrupt hero. I just want you to be yourself. The very fact that everyone can be themselves, causes your dog to take on your personality. I was really inspired by the saying, “Dogs look like their owners”. Slowly over time your dog will change. If you’re bad, his features will become more like a Rottweiler. If you’re good, and very noble, he’ll be more like a cute Labrador. What your dog looks like is a reflection of the way you’ve played, and hopefully a reflection of what sort of person you are.

6. Burying Things
Quite often you make a game, and you’re never quite sure, where people see the things that you want them to see. Dogs are great [for] pointing out things that I want you to see. He can smell these things called dig spots, where we’ve hidden stuff in the ground. You’ll be travelling along and suddenly you’ll hear this dog bark. He’s got lots of different tonations to his bark, so you’ll slowly recognize what they are, and he will point toward the place. If you just walk in the way that he is pointing, he’ll lead you to that dig spot. That can be very useful if you’ve missed any treasures or hidden objects.
He’s great at helping with the story as well. There are occasions where you kind of feel lost, and your dog is there to help you out.

7. Guard Dog
He can hear things that you can’t hear. He can be an early warning system because he’s out in front of you, he can warn you if there’s an ambush coming up. You can also train him to help you fight. He can’t leap through the air at the speed of sound. If you knock somebody down during combat, he’ll attack that person on the ground. If I’m fighting with my dog, I’ll use a move to knock somebody on the ground, and I know my dog will just finish him off.

8. Poon Dog
He’s great at helping you with flirting with members of the opposite sex. One of the ways to find a girlfriend is to have a dog. It’s better than going on the internet to find somebody. If you’re charming towards women and you can chat women up, he’ll help you in that. If you’re doing a wolf-whistle, he’ll be extra cute to the person you’re trying to wolf-whistle to.


9. Paris Hilton DLC
Can you put bows in his hair? I find that bizarre—the thought of my dog having a bow in his hair, or a jacket or a scarf. We don’t support it, but I suppose if enough people want it we will be reasonably interested to do. If anyone did that to my dog in the Fable world, then I know what I would use my weapons for. That sounds positively grotesque. I don’t think of him like that at all. He’s funny and charming, but he’s got a rough edge to him. He definitely wouldn’t wear bows in his hair, but I suppose some people’s dogs will be like that. We’ll have to do the Paris Hilton downloadable content.

10. Animal Cruelty
Some people actually don’t want a dog. Now I think they’re hateful human beings that probably should have been killed at birth.  There’s only one thing you have to do with your dog. You don’t have to feed him, he’ll look after himself there. You don’t have to brush him or anything like that. The only thing you have to do is: if he gets hurt, you have to heal him. If you don’t heal him, he loves you so much; he’ll do his utmost best to keep up with you. But because he’s hurt, he cannot move as fast as you can move. And that means, we completely allow you to leave him. Over the course of hours he will gradually make his way to where you are. Don’t be surprised to see your dog sort of crawl through the door of a pub somewhere, where upon everybody will be so shocked that you’re such a cruel owner. That is real emotional pull.
 

Fable II is available now on the XBox 360.