Eurogamer Expo Sessions: Peter Molyneux talks Fable III

You played a character still part of this Bloodline. We still had the Theresa character there who didn't seem to have aged but was certainly a lot wiser. You went out and saved the land of Albion again, but this time you saved it from a character called Lucien, who was building this Spire. We never quite said why he was building the Spire. So then Theresa guided you to save the land of Albion from him. At the end of the story you beat the bad guy and you come to Fable III.

Exactly. The Spire was for her. And you don't know quite what she was doing with the Spire. So we pick up Fable III, 50 years has moved on, when you left Fable II you left it being the unquestionable hero of the land and people then went on to crown you king. In that 50 years you then died and bequeathed your heritage to two of your children - one, called Logan, you bequeathed the throne to, and one you didn't seem to bequeath anything to, which is the youngest of all the children, which is the character you play.

Now, Logan seems to have gone a little bit mad. He's become this huge tyrant and he's ruling Albion in the most despicable and awful way, and there's a lot of poverty and suffering. He's executing people for standing against him in the most minor and trivial ways, and that's where the game really opens.

You wake up in the morning, in bed with your dog. Your butler Jasper opens your curtains, you're a prince, you go out of your bedchambers and meet your girlfriend, and your girlfriend - or boyfriend if you play a girl - tells you how the land is suffering. You then go to the front of the castle where there's this big protest going on, and that's as far as I'll take the story...

But you start off as a prince, and within about 25 minutes you become a revolutionary, because we've got this big dilemma and dramatic point that happens in the first 15 minutes.

Well, I tried to be evil, but I realised - and this actually shaped a lot of Fable III - that a lot of choices were so unbelievably despicable... In the end I saved my dog, I mean I had no question about that, I don't care about killing thousands of people just to save my loved ones. So like most people I tried to be evil but couldn't help going down the side of slightly good. I think I would say in classic Dungeons & Dragons terminology that I would be chaotic evil or verging to neutral.

I'm not a reliably evil person, let's put it that way.

That's what's so interesting about Fable III. The first really big, true moral choice you have is far less about good and evil and far more about... Actually. for example, this doesn't spoil anything by me saying this, the very first choice you have in the game is whether you want to kiss your girlfriend or hug your girlfriend. Well there's no good or evil there. The second moral choice is you've got to give a speech to the staff to motivate them, and do you give them an aggressive speech or a passive speech? That's less about good or evil too.

I think it spoilt the game a bit if you felt like you had to go down the good or evil path, so they're much more thoughtful, and certainly the first big one you get after 15 minutes makes you go, "What?! There's no way I can... There's no right decision here." So you get much more of, "Oh, what would I do?"

Yeah exactly.

Well, I'm a really ambitious person - that's been my problem. It was me, Dene and Simon Carter were sitting making a game called Dungeon Keeper at my house, and we were talking about role-playing games and how ridiculous it was they didn't have this big story arc, they'd just have this slightly crazy... Okay you play this game and that's the end and then they have to reinvent themselves. And wouldn't it be great to make a role-playing game that, first, wasn't massively techie and secondly had this idea of you are how you play, rather than you are what you choose at the start of the game.

We then spoke through this big story arc and definitely spoke through the idea of moving on through time - that you shouldn't stick to one particular period, that you should be able to move through time. Since we thought of that there have been things that came out that were like that. One of the things that's very similar in terms of the epochs it's moving through is called Black Adder.