Molyneux: Fable II was "rushed"

Microsoft exclusive RPG Fable II was "terribly messy", "rushed" and suffered from "huge design flaws", creator Peter Molyneux has admitted.

Speaking at the Develop Conference in Brighton this afternoon, the Lionhead Studios boss went through a long list of Fable II features that he hated, before telling the audience how Fable 3 will improve upon them.

"Fable II, let's be honest about it, it has some terribly messy things about it," he said.

"Half of that, again being honest, was because we rushed at the end and we had this terrible phase where, the world looks this beautiful with this many game features, and then slowly transitioned into being less beautiful.

"On Fable II we had, at one point, 67,000 bugs. The Microsoft Test team rated us super black. No-one had been black before. They'd been red and orange and green. But we were super black. They said it's utterly impossible for anybody to come out as super black.

"That's why we had to reduce down what we had. But, to be honest with you, there were also huge design flaws in Fable II."

Molyneux said Lionhead failed to concentrate on Fable II's unique selling points. Players used only 60 per cent of the content of the game, research revealed. "It's just a crazy thing to do," Molyneux said.

Molyneux hated Fable II's map: "It was boring and tedious and no-one even knew it was a map." And he hated Fable II's female characters: "In Fable II, all our women looked like Russian shot putters."

In Fable 3, the 2D GUI has been replaced with a 3D space called The Sanctuary. And the game's women "have curves and soft bits".

One criticism of Fable II Lionhead appears to have failed to address is long loading times. "I hate loading. I really hate it. I know the journalists – wonderful people that they are – are going to slag us off about loading. We tried to minimise it.

"But we've got a big problem. Because a lot of our world is persistent, we can't afford the memory. We tried and experimented with trying to stream load it, but we didn't actually get it working."

Peter Molyneux might have hated Fable II, but we loved it. We gave the 2008 hit 10/10 in our review.

We're interviewing the man himself later. Head over to our Fable 3 hands-on to see how Lionhead's follow-up is shaping up. Fable III will be released on 26th October, simultaneously for Xbox 360 and PC.