Fable 2: The World and the new engine (Monday, 14th August 2006)

During the past month the web teams at Lionhead Studios and Microsoft Game Studios have spent their time in meeting rooms, planning and preparing for the later half of the year. We are currently planning some drastic changes to all our websites and web services, obviously all for the better. It’s definitely going to be an improvement.

I spent a day sitting in with a High Level Fable 2 meeting where some big issues were discussed. The fighting, the back-story, the GUI (graphical user interface), Albion and the Bloodline, more milestones and how they were going to tackle the thousands and thousands of animations that are required (again, you don’t want to see Dene Carter in Lycra) were all high on the agenda. Oh yes, and nipples. Nothing we’ll be talking about in detail in this update, but just so you know there are a lot of things happening in the background at Lionhead Studios!

Luckily I also got to spend some time with the team members who are in the midst of designing and building the world. Role Playing Games come in many different sorts and shapes and I don’t think I need to explain to you what these are. It’s been mentioned on quite a few occasions that the world in which Fable 2 takes place, just has to be beautiful. And it has to be big. And at the very same time also be very interesting. And be lush or sinister! And leave room for exploration and most importantly, we want it to be unique.

RPG’s still having a tendency to be set in the tested (and admittedly, successful) “Dungeons & Dragons” theme, but with Fable 2 you know you are getting something different. Fable and Fable 2 are set in Albion, which has no direct relation with Albion as in Great Britain of the ancient times, though we are inspired by merry ol' England. This is a fictional world, in which we get to do whatever we want. It’s something that, during the days of the original Fable, was clear from the beginning and many gamers seemed to enjoy this new and fresh feeling. So we’re sticking to our approach and this time we’re making it bigger. And hopefully better!

The technical brains at Lionhead Studios are the ones who are responsible for making sure all the tools are in place to achieve this, since without the proper technical backing things would simply be impossible. The level designers then go out and build the world; I met up with Charlton Edwards who is one of the level designer on Fable 2. He explains; “What I do is help build the world of Albion, aided by SketchUp King Mike Green and Level Design Lead, Iain Wright. That includes placing important gameplay features, prettying the world up to a degree (ready for the artists at a later date), placing creatures, lights, particles emitters and, well, everything basically apart from scripts.” This might sound easy and a quite basic thing, but after having spent several hours with Charlton [aka Gradius1] I can tell you all that is a pretty complex process!

It's a forest - this is the closest you'll get to seeing Fable 2 for a while...

Dene Carter created 2D sketches of most of the areas that are used in Fable 2. Charlton then went off, using the Fable: The Lost Chapters engine, to turn those sketches into a “real” world in which you could walk around. The aim of this process was to get a complete feel of what it will eventually look like, while the technical guys were working on the tools and the brand new Fable 2 engine itself. It took Charlton about 2 – 3 days to create every area this way. The team could then walk around in the world and review each area and make the required changes instead of working with an engine that isn’t finished yet or designing all the levels on paper without a real feel of the final result. This “template world” allowed the design team to get a really good feel for the game and improve all areas even before being able to test them in the Fable 2 engine. Once all of this was done and the programmers and coders finished their initial work everything was transferred to the new Fable 2 engine, including the height fields which are so all-important. Don’t ask me why they’re that important, as I’m not completely familiar with all this vocabulary but Charlton mentioned it on more then just once occasion.

“The world definitely is much bigger and it also feels better,” Charlton explains, “There are more things to do within each area and we absolutely have to make them interesting and absorbing. Too many times have I spent playing RPG’s set in vast barren wastelands. Fable 2 retains the Fable 1 organic, intimate feel, while giving players tons to explore and discover. We are really trying to pack the world with exploration, interaction and secrets.”

Being able to use the new Fable 2 engine is obviously a welcome position to be in, but it doesn’t stop there. The artists have to create all the 3D models for the buildings, items, characters etc… it takes a while to create these things, especially now that we’re in a real next-generation where the requirements are so much bigger and the stakes are so much higher. For that reason the world designers are using SketchUp software to create placeholder assets, these assets are always white and look plain and boring, but considering they are all the correct dimensions, the artists are able to use that information to create the final assets. They can run freely with their creativity and really focus on what’s important; which is getting that Fable-feel which everyone is so familiar with. Once this is done the designers can easily import them in the world editor and replace the placeholder assets with the final assets. According to Charlton this “White Boxing” as it’s often referred to internally, works really well and the team are actually able to get ahead of schedule. “It’s actually like a 3D concept drawing for the artists to run with and create some truly stunning assets.”

One of the areas Charlton showed me was [CENSORwood], only one of the many areas in Fable 2. For those of you, who played Fable 1, think of all the Greatwood regions, add them together and you come close to the size of [CENSORwood], and mind you this is only one region! Since we are planning to allow players to leap off cliffs for example, we have to be extra cautious with the design, as every effort has to be made to make sure that players don’t get stuck.

There was so much more that Charlton told me, things he explained or ideas he suggested. Since we don’t want to reveal anything too early, we’ll just say that, at this point, our tape recorder ran out of tape…

Finally, if anyone's interested, our design document currently stands at 1,364 pages, or 72,176 lines, or 549,259 words, or 2,623,422 letters.

- Sam -

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