In a candid interview with gamingunion.net, Fable developer and icon Peter Molyneux commented on his upcoming Kinect-inspired title Fable: The Journey, first demystifying the assumption from E3 that it's an on-rails adventure:
It's not on-rails!… he press briefing and these demos have to be so tight that we didn't have time to show how you navigate around. We just set the press briefing demo on-rails.
To a certain extent, we need to convince you that Fable: The Journey is a 90+ [review score] game, and if it was on-rails our chances just go through the floor. It's NOT going to be on-rails.
But developing for the Kinect isn't such a breeze:
I'll admit that Kinect has got some problems. As an input device it has some real problems. Without a thumb stick, navigation is a real problem. You haven't got any buttons, so ordering the player to do something can be somewhat of a problem. But what Kinect does have is a great sense of freedom and emotion. So that's what we've tried to do with Fable: The Journey.
Thankfully, the game's got a dog horse as the player's faithful companion:
We want to make you believe your
doghorse is alive. You are going to bond with yourdoghorse. When you first get yourdoghorse, it doesn't know you and you don't know it, but after a little while you can teach it things. For example, you can teach it whatever voice commands you want. If you want to say [Makes clicking sound] 'Move on', it will learn that word. If you want to teach it 'Move on you old nag bastard', you are completely free and open to do that.Absolutely. You can use your own vocabulary. I just know somebody is going to… well, god knows what obscenities they're going to shout at that
doghorse, but whatever floats your boat, that's fine with me. There's a lot of drama we're going to put into that.
We haven't heard all that before. Isn't that right, dog old nag bastard?
[Source]
