Q&A With Fable Co-Creator - Dene Carter!

Channel:

Skyrionn

Subscribers:

189,000

Published on June 25, 2019 11:32:48 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=am7zebg4ySk

Game:

Fable (2004)

Duration: 8:06

4,332 views

316

Hi Guys! Skyrionn here!
I was lucky enough to get a Q&A with the co-creator of Fable, Dene Carter. I found out quite a bit of information about Fable. I hope your find this interesting too!
The background video is a timeline of the events that happened just before Fable.

I could only post half of the questions here, I'll post the questions and answers somewhere else.


I asked ten questions about the Fable series and it’s development.

Questions and Answers
1: So we had Project-Ego, then WishWorld and then Fable. How did you come up with the name Fable?
It's kind of dull, really. We wanted something that seemed closer to fairytales but wouldn't turn off an audience of teenage/young-adults. And once we thought of it, it just fit. I think I thought of the name, but that's the thing with creative discussions, I'm sure Simon does, too.

2: The history of Albion was amazing storytelling. From The Void, to the formation of The Guild to the return of the Jack of Blades. Where did all of this come from?
So, for the record, I hate backstories in games. I especially hate canonical backstories known by everyone in the world. It's ridiculous. Nowhere in the entire world will you find a community of people where every single person is a historically accurate encyclopedia of information. So that's on one hand...
...on the other you have the fact that the game was initially going to be entirely procedurally generated. We were going to set up the overall theme, but we genuinely planned to have 100% of the narrative created by some clever algorithms.
So, we started work on that and got a nice little village sim working. The villages would add houses when the economy and population allowed, homeless communities would develop as the economy slumped. It wasn't ridiculously complex, but it did all the things people would notice...
...and then we started trying to make all this stuff look nice. It couldn't. This was recognisable human stuff we were talking about: washing lines, bricks and mortar, paving, statues. You can't just make those 'vague'. You can't let a machine just dump that stuff around the place and hope it looks nice. It requires 'specificity'. My artists were the first to notice. They could see that everything was going to be bland and they were craving details. "You want a pub. What kind of pub? How old? Who owns it? Is it popular?" They needed these things to make it look real. I initially said: "Just make a pub." You could feel the daggers.
One of them said: "Okay. So what's it called? Tell us that at least." And so I said: "The Cow and Corset?" And I felt the room breathe a sigh of relief. "Finally" the breath said "Finally we have some faith that you can make up random crap like the rest of us."

At this point the tech for the random generation was clearly not going to cut it and we realised that we needed a concrete story. We contacted Mike Carey, the writer of Lucifer and asked him to help out. He provided the notion of William Black, an elder hero who started the Guild.
A lot of other 'things in the world' came in piecemeal from conversations with artists, comedy shows, favourite movies and so on. My job was generally to try and provide a glue that held everything together. Theresa, is one example. One of our artists, Angus Syme came up with her and thought it would be nice to have a blind character in there as it seemed 'mythic'. My job was to fold it into the main story and then to extend the idea of how her heroic blood would alter around her disability. Most of the story was like that: bizarre accretions of lore over time due to people asking for details on things. What people don't understand is that Fable 1 took 4 years of solid work. A lot of stories accumulate over that time if there's a desire for them.

3: Would you have considered the history as a plot to a Fable Game?
I don't think we ever considered a 'prequel' based on Fable lore. We were too wrapped up in the 'Blackadder' notion of following this world through its history, and how it dealt with things like a loss of faith in magic, and - eventually - industrialisation. If I'd been given the keys to Fable 4, I think that the backstory would have been prime material; Fable needs magic.




Dene’s Discord
https://t.co/VDdWHdt1D6

Dene’s Twitter
https://twitter.com/Fluttermind

Diaries
https://uk.ign.com/articles/2004/03/19/fable-developer-diaries-unabridged

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