It’s the late ‘00s, and fresh off the success of the first two Fable games, Lionhead should be too big to fail. Going for the hat-trick only made sense. “Fable 1 had🐽 done really well. Fable 2 had done spectacularly well,” says Peter Molyneux, co-founder of Lionhead and lead designer on the Fable series.
It’s true. Despite the troubled development of the first game and multiple delays for the sequel, Fable was riding high. However, as is the case in such a brutal industry, it would only take one miss for everything to start falling apart. That miss, regrettably, was Fable 3.
“It breaks my heart speaking about Fable 3. It really do𒈔es,” says Molyneux. “It was a really str🐟ong idea [...] the industrial revolution of Albion killing off magic, science and technology becoming more powerful than magic itself...”

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But before we can get into all of these big, ambitious ideas Molyneux and the rest of Lionhead had for Fable 3, we first have to go over how it all went wrong. As far as Molyneux is concerned, the first mistake came as soon as Fable 2 launched.
“The problem was we were now fully owned by 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Microsoft,” he says♔. “After the success of Fable 2, Microsoft came back and said, ‘Brilliant job, guys. But next time, do it on time’. That's not the way we worked. We didn't work by producing game bibles. We [make] the game, play it, go back to the drawing board, play it, go back to the drawing board. And that makes it very hard to predict the timing.”
Molyneux hesitates before pinning too much blame on the parent company, though. “Well, let's be fair to Microsoft. They never told you to do something, they just dangled a real🎃ly lovely golden carrot in front of you if you did something.”
With Xbox as big as it had ever been, Molyneux didn’t want Lionhead to miss out on those carrots. The Xbox 360 was dominating the industry as the , and now with the upcoming Kinect promising to be the future of gaming, there were plenty of reasons to stay on the company’s🎃 good side. So, when bosses said no more delays, there were no more del♓ays. Fable 3 was finished in 18 months.
Such a short development cycle didn’t make Lionhead any less ambitious. Developers who were there from the very start of the series decided to stick around, like Dene Carter and Georg Backer. Kostas Zarifis, who joined during Fable 2, also stayed on for the sequel and recalls how, despite having a much smaller development cycle, Lionhead refused to make the same 🐽game twice.
“We can't help it,” says Kos𒁃tas Zarifis, gameplay programmer on Fable 3. “It's kind of the blessing 𒁏and curse, the Lionhead way.”
Ideas on ways to separate Fable 3 from every other game on the market were pitched. This gives us the first sticking point for many, the Sanctuary: a menu that the character had to walk through to naviga🍎te.
“We had a physical UI, which was a big thing for Peter [Molyneux] to have in there,” says Zarifis. “﷽I always thought it was cool. Like many of Peter’s ideas, it's love it or hate it.🐬”
Fans hated it. Having everything you needed to toggle between tied to a physical location made changing weapons, spells, and outfits much slower. “I think, even𒆙 if you gave a group of Lionhead people the brief of making the simplest thing, they would still find a way to go. ‘Oh, but we could make it even cooler if we did this’,” says Zarifis.
With Fable making yet another design choice to differentiate itself from other games, I imagined the studio would be incredibly chaotic, perhaps more so than previous titles. Far from it - Zarifis paints a positive picture of how it was on the ground, at least in terms of the workload. He even feels it was smoother than Fable 2, specifically because all of the tools they needed had been developed going into the project. This was far from the mess Lionhead found itself in previously, when the much smaller studio🃏 was spread across multiple different engines. Now, as Zarifis puts it, “the ground was finally not so shꦦaky.” They were a well-oiled machine, and if anyone could finish a game on this short of a deadline, it was them.
Dene Carter, creative director of the Fable series, agrees, saying that crunch wasn’t the issue here, at least for as much of the development that he saw before he le🥂ft in 2009, before launch. The impression he got from the team was that the “process” of making a Fable game was “largely fixed”.

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On to🌊p ofཧ this old talent, Fable 3 had another thing going in its favour - a big budget. Something Georg Backer, a returning audio producer from Fable 2, fondly remembers.
“The amount of love and budget we got for audio just helped to create that immersion,” says Backer. “But it's not just that, it's everything. 🥀It's the art [...] it’s the music. It was just awesome to see that all of these things got the same amount of love and attention to detail. Nothing felt like an afterthought.
“Fabl🐟e 3 was brutal. The amount of stuff we gave players and took away. We ಞgave them hope, we gave them opportunity, and then we just crushed them.”
Fable 3 has you play as a prince or princess. This is a very different start to Fable 2, 🌺but one that was decided while the previous game was still in development, given that its DLC ties into the events of Fable 3. In a complete tonal shift, Lionhead took the series to the Industrial Revolution, and now, the villain was our own brother, the tyrannical King Logan.
I think, even if you gave a group of Lionhead pꦓeople the brief of making the simplest thing, they would still find a way to go. ‘Oh, but we could make it even cooler if we did this.'
In this respect, Fable 3 is incredibly bold. Perhaps 🌌too bold, with its aesthetics coming closer and closer to modern-day Britain, as Molyneux♋ realised during development. “A big problem that occurred to me halfway through Fable 3 is that Fable 1 to Fable 3 is like 500 years of Albion,” says Molyneux. “And I thought, Oh my God, what are we going to do for Fable 4? Is it going to be set in space?”
Make no mistake, there was supposed to be a fourth Fable game from Lionhead. It doesn’t seem that these plans got very far, given the path Lionhead would go down after la▨unch, but this wasn’t supposed to be the end of the series.
“Going forward in Fable would have meant literally going towards the modern d♓ay,” admits Molyneux. “ꦗI probably would have made something called Fable Origins and gone back to what created the Guild of Heroes.”
This leads us to another issue facing Fable 3 - the uncertainty of what Lionhead would do next. For all of the aspirations the team had for Fable 3, I can’t help but feel that some were losing their love of the process at this point. So, it’s of little surpris🐭e that some at the studio were already looking beyond the rushed game in front of them.
When we spoke about Fable 2, Zarifis told me of how a group within Lionhead was always pitching new ideas, whether they be new game mechanics for Fable, or another gam꧑e altogether. All you have to do is look at Lionhead’s release schedule at this time to see that more and more of these ideas were being explored during Fable 3’s development, with two spin-offs released shortly after launch, and numerous other titles cancelled.
“We used to have, at Lionhead, these creative days,” says Molyneux. “We’d allow people in the studio a week or so to work on a creative pitch, and then we’d go to our local cinema, and everyone would pitch their idea. [...] We💃’d always allow one project from creative day to go into prototype.”
This is when the spin-offs came in, for better or worse. Two would reach fruition after Fable 3’s launch (The Journey and Heroes), but before this, there was a string of cancellations in Lionhead’s l🌟ineup, including the infamous Project Milo.
However, the one place where Fable 3 was able to match, or even better, its siblings was in the audio booth. Regardless of what was happening in the studio, the devs working on recording dialogue and music have nothing but praise for the process - especially Backไer.
“The voice of the Hobbes is done by Dene Carter and myself,” says Backer. “We got recorded doing these weird sound effects [Backer does a very impressive Hobbe impression]. All of that stuff. Then Russe🐻ll [Shaw, head of sound and music] com♐bined them all.”
Zarifis even got to move over to the sound team to put๊ together a music track for the returning ch💦aracter, Reaver.
“Russell was looking for some classical-sounding music, so in Reaver’s mansion, the soundtrack to that was basically jus๊t me on the guitar,” says Zarifis. “Russell gave me free rein on that. It was basically an amalgamation of different sorts of Spanish classical guitar tha♕t I learned while learning to play - but then with Fable themes thrown in there.”
The track was a fan favourite, but Zarifis says it’s “completely down to🎉 Russell” for taking a chance on the relatively new guy with a guitar and some spare time to jump in the recording booth. Eventually, others joined in too, witജh Reaver’s mansion becoming a medley performed by developers who weren’t composers. Their shared love of music brought them together, and some of them got together to form their own cover band, practising in the Lionhead cafeteria whenever they had the chance.
But this increased budget didn’t just make the audio team’s job easier, it helped them surpass the quality of the previous two games. Even now, Fable 3’s star-stꦅudded cast is unbelievable - and it was all by design.
“I was down at Lionhead, and we had a meeting about casting,” says Kate Saxon, lꦦead voice director on Fable 2 and 3. “The team talked me through the characters, what they would look like, and so on and so forth.
“They said to me, ‘If you were thinking blue sky casting, just in your wildest imagination, who would it be if we c༒ould afford it for these roles?’. And I said, ‘Absolutely, Michael Fassbender for Logan. No questions. Stephen Fry for Reaver, John Cleese for Jasper, Simon Pegg⛄ for Ben Finn, and Naomie Harris [for Page], and so on’.”
Turns out, this is exactly what Microsoft had in mind. “Mic🎀rosoft was saying we should get more big-name actors,” says Molyneux. “We felt a bit of Hollywood - we had an open chequeb⛄ook from Microsoft.”
So, to Saxon’s surprise, Lionhead was able to secure everyone on her wishlist and then some. Throw in Bernard Hill, Nicholas Hoult, and Ben Kingsle🗹y, and it’s a wildly impressive lineup, even compared to modern triple-As today that go after famous actors as a matter of course. “I never expected when I left that meeting that they were actually going to go and offer these actors 🤡roles,” says Saxon. “They decided they could afford to do that.”
Fable 2’s dialogue was a huge undertaking for the audio team, but Fable 3 upped the ante again. Now, they had to cram even more dialogue into a project with a bi🦩gger cast - and whose cast members had a much fuller schedule - with a deadline that couldn’t be moved.
“It was one of [ou๊r] biggest recordings at that point,” says Backer. “We had three studꩵios running simultaneously for six months.”
Microsoft was saying weဣ 🙈should get more big-name actors. We felt a bit of Hollywood - we had an open chequebook.
At its peak, Backer and Saxon were managing four directors across four recording studios, “living andꦫ breathing” the Fable series. Their cast ranged in experience massively, with some coming straight from Fable 2, and others picking up their first voice-acting gig.
For the first time, the player character was voiced too, courtesy of soap stars Louis Tamone and Kellie Bright. Backer says the voiced protagonist was considered “controversial”, possibly detracting from the ability to roleplay, but with such a tight deadline, there was🗹n’t mucไh time to reconsider.
No time for doubts, and from an audio perspective, no need either. Molyneux and the gameplay team may regret how the final product shipped, but in the recording booths, Backer and Saxon are still proud of the performances they got from the actors. Saxon vividly recalls working with each cast member, and how they all took a different approach to a medium that was very new for them. “There weren't many actors that sat down in the booth,” says Saxon. “I think M💙ichael Fassbender is the only one who used to sit down.”
It’s easy to see why many of them couldn’t help but move around. As Saxon told me previously when we were discussing Fable 2’s development, she’s a big believer in actors of aღny medium being able to work on games - even if it took some of them some time to get used to being in a recording booth. As she would tell them, it's not “just the voice”, it's “the voice is everything.” Even seasoned actors could find this quite vulnerable.
“Nicholas Hoult was really sweet because he was quite nervous actually,” ♚Saxon recaജlls. “It was quite early in his career - he'd already made a name for himself, but he was a lot newer than he is now and a lot younger.
“Ben Kingsley hadn't done games before either. He checked in with me a lot to make sure that the performance was pitched at the right place, and that it was working we💟ll.” Yet, as Saxon also found with Fable 2, some actors took to voice acting incredibly well, finding the experience very theatrical.
“[Bernard Hill] enjoyed doinཧg it, his character was quite p🍬hysical often,” Saxon tells me. “That took a lot of energy because the more physical a character, the more you've got to embody that and your voice.”
On the complete opposite end of the spectrum, th💃ere’s Simon Pegg, who Saxon remembered as al♏ready being a big believer in storytelling through gaming, and loving his time on Fable from the start.
Lionhead wasn’t shy in using this to its advantage. The whole voice cast appeared in a to hype up the game, and it was enough to catch the atten꧂tion of the mainstream pဣress.
But hype and celebrities could not cover for a bad game, so work still needed to be done. As Backer says, every area got extra 🔴love and attention, and Lionhead wasn’t afraid to try new tricks. The only problem was, the deadline was fast approaching.
With Molyneux ruling out telling Microsoft it won’t be ready, that left two options: crunch, or start cutting content. Given that the꧋ scars of the first game’s overwork still hadn’t healed, this wasn’t a hard decision.
“We hit our dates and Microso🗹ft 💧gave us a great pat on the back. But the game was a third of the size that it should have been,” laments Molyneux.
It doesn’t sound like this is an exaggeration. Molyneux tells me that they made huge cuts to the final third of the 🤪game - the part where you take the throne - and it shows. Infamously, this grand seat of power that’s been your goal throughout the entire story boils down to a handful of basic choices, such as whether or not to end child labour, and whether you can foot the bill of opening up a library while you prepare for war.
I still love the concept […] but🐽 I hate the fact that we had all this potential and we🐼 didn't do what we should have done
Molyneux tells me that this was meant to be much more in-depth. But there wasn’t time for this, so your year as the ruler of Albion is b𒁏roken up into several awkward timeskips, which at its worst, cuts from having 121 days until the big battle, to zero - with absolutely no warning.
“It was never supposed to be like that,” says Molyneux. “What we wanted to do is give players the feeling that they could be whatever king they wanted. If they wanted to starve all the people and live in a palace, fine. If they wanted to give their kingdom away, fine. And there would be consequences for all of your actions just like in Fable 1 and 2♔.
“It was supposed to be the first third of the gam𝓡e was your claim to power. And then the next two-thirds of ♌the game was all about the exploration of power and responsibility. We had to cut that back so much that it became ten mini-events.”
There 🌠was supposed to be an entire story element about how the Indꦑustrial Revolution was intruding on the magic of Fable, with the player able to fight to bring the old world back once they were in charge. This is absent from the final game. Fable 3 is still largely a magic-less world by the end of the story, with the main character never even getting to dive into their own Hero lineage.
“It may have been my fault actually,” Molyneux admits. “[Previously] I would go to publishers and say, ‘Look,𒊎 I know you're going to tell me off and we're going to be in your bad books, but we just need more time. The game’s just not ready.’🌜 But as a studio [...] the bonus structure was incentivizing us to hit our dates, rather than hit the quality.
🌸“I still love the concept […] but I hate the fact that we had all this potential ꦇand we didn't do what we should have done, and [said] it needs another year and a half. It needed double the time, basically.”
As so much was being left on the cutting room floor, the bad news just kept coming. Dene Carter, who had been there since the beginning, left before the game was finished. “I'd had enough of working with teams,” says Cart🙈er, adding that he stayed in contact with his former colleagues. “Other forces were conspiring to make the design of the gam𓆏e painful. From what I heard about what it was like at Lionhead after I left, I was very glad I was no longer working there.”
Everyone I spoke with is full of praise for Carter’s work, crediting him with giving Fable its identity, and even “protecting” it from becomin🉐g something Lionhead didn’t want to make.
Even with such a huge departure, the show had to go on. With more and more content being cut, Fable 3 was finished - and for🐼 the first time in series history, finished with time to spare. It went on to launch on October 26, 2010, and while it was by no means met with a negative reception, it was far from the praise heaped on the first two games.
Looking at reviews of the time, the overall feeling was that the game was just too simple. Critics noticed the final act had been rushed, and that the comb🤪at had been stripped back far too much. Fable 3 never quite resonated the way its predecessors had. Knowing how quickly Lionhead had to write a story and implement it into the game, it’s no wonder that reviewers felt this way.
In retr😼ospect, Fable 3 is 🎃considered to be the beginning of the end of Lionhead. It was the first major misstep, and as we know now, it was the last numbered sequel we’d get from the original devs.
Dene Carter was gone, so any sequel would be starting its life without the series co-creator. Even Georg Backer, who still lives and breathes Fable to this day, left shortly after Fable 3. “I just felt like it was such a good run, but at some⛦ point, you just have to go and do your own thing,” he tells me.
Maybe that was it - Fable wasn’t their own thing anymore. During the first game’s development, Carter and his team and Big Blue Box had to advocate for Fable with everything they had. Many withi🐭n Lionhead were actively against its development, and at several points, it could have all fallen apart. Now, they could all leave, and Fable would continue without them. Whether it be spin-offs or just skins for Xbox users to put on their Avatars, the series had taken a life of its own.
Peter Molyneux, however, wasn’t quite ready to join the departures. Nor was Zarifis, who’d previously turned down offers from Sony and Rare to work at Lionhead. In actual fact, Lionhead was far from over and was🍬 still full of ideas for the Fable series. The story of all of the games that came after Fable 3 - including the ill-fated Fable♎: Legends, will be up on TheGamer soon

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