Back at E3 2009, LionHead Studio showcased The Milo Project which would later be known as Milo & Kate. The idea behind the project was to create an AI that users could feel an emotional connection with. Months after E3, the project would fade away.
At E3 last year, Peter Molyneux showed Fable: The Journey. This marked the first time the studio made an attempt at a Kinect title since Milo. LionHead hoped the game would be a similar experience of emotion and technology. Molyneux, however, came away from the demo unhappy due to the game being presented as a dumbed down game that was on-rails.
In The Journey, LionHead has moved away from the franchise character’s bloodline for the first time. Gabriel, a traveler who roams the land by horse (which players can either care for or bully) is introduces as the game’s protagonist. The game is set in Albion, where all roads lead to hero-dom. While the on-rails elements are still very prevalent, Fable: The Journey has all the ambitions of Molyneux’ Milo.
“What we’ve taken is a premise which is what Milo‘s all about: empathy and emotion,” says creative director Gary Carr. “We’ve got empathic stuff that’s called ‘Audio Empathy’ which comes from Milo. That basically takes rhythms of the voice, and the horse can twitch his ears and nod his head.
“You can also hurt your horse. If you do that on a controller you don’t really care. There’s a window between you. But there’s something about physically doing something like pulling the reigns or petting the horse. You physically do that, therefore something in your brain triggers in effect and we can use that to make you feel guilty. We can use that to make you feel like you care. We can use that in so many ways.”
One of the main interests of the studio is to create an emotional bond. In Fable II, we were playing with a dog companion. Now the studio has included a horse, hoping that the ability to carry the protagonist will create a physical and emotional bond. While LionHead is still trying to master creating emotionally-charged AI, studio co-founder Marc Webley states that they are not quit Hollywood, but they are working on it.
“Having someone cry in a game would be amazing,” he says. “We want to play with people’s emotions. But looking at other mediums, looking at Hollywood – they’ve got years and years of experience doing that. You can’t really do that easily with a game because you’re forced to ask yourself as a designer ‘what’s the player doing while this long cut scene is playing out?'”
In order to accomplish this, the studio decided to take a linear approach. The Journey will be a long-play title; featuring a 10-hour-long campaign with the potential of 20 hours of replayability via an arcade mode, shooting gallery, and in-game collectibles. Although the game does not include a protagonist of the series’ normal bloodline, the ever mysterious Teresa will be present.
The Journey will highlight what Kinect is great at, promoting physical interaction. It will also be a great example of LionHead using their position with Microsoft to push the technology further in the direction to a new narrative. To compliment the long-play narrative, LionHead used some technology from its earlier Kinect title. The skeletal tracking system used to detect user’s gestures was taken from Milo, so was the inclusion of seated gameplay. Fable: The Journey is playable while sitting down. This technology is a recent advancement made with the Kinect. Other games that are payable with Kinect while seated are Forza Motorsport 4 and Gunstringer.
“With Forza you had to sit slightly on the edge of your seat. But they were a year ago, so we’ve got an extra year on that. In Journey you can slouch. It doesn’t worry that you have your coffee table over there, you don’t have to clear space. That was an important step change: people don’t have to re-jig their living space. When you look at houses here in Guildford, England or in Japan where the living spaces are tiny, you need to offer the ability to sit down, which is a concept that came from Milo.
“I think that with Kinect there are going to be some step changes that will make the games come through,” says an enthused Carr. “And one of those things is seated gameplay. Because I think a lot of developers were just waiting for that kind of technology. It’s easier for us to develop it because we’re first party, we’ve got Microsoft supporting us. It’s not fair on third parties to write this kind of technology. It takes time and it’s probably taken us the best part of two and a half years to write it. Now I think once this is released back to the industry, we’ll just see lots of long-play games where you can sit down and play.”
In order to limit the ability of the player to veer off the narrative path, LionHead decided to experiment with Fable from a different angle. In a series first, the game will be in first-person. The idea is to make the story as much yours as it is that of Gabriel. Every action the player does has an effect on Gabriel; punch your arm into the air and a bolt flies out of Gabriels, wave your hand in front of a digital pond and water will drip off his. The goal is to be more physically tied to the player.
“Like, the problem with Fable 1, 2, and 3 is we had this awesome simulation population but – and this is my personal feeling – you then just got married to a random person,” says Lionhead designer Ted Timmins. “They had some random name like Bill but it didn’t really quite mean anything. So in Fable: The Journey we wanted to actually create these characters that stand out, they have a personality, they have a name, they talk to you, and they know you.”
(Via The Verge)