The Living Population of NPCs is a fascinating addition – what does that offer the player?
Fulton: The Living Population is our cast of over 1,000 NPCs, each with roles, personalities and routines. That whole concept of persistent NPCs, each of whom is unique in a whole bunch of ways that you can go and interact with and mess about with, is incredibly complex.
When you start working on it, you realize that every settlement has to have enough houses with enough beds, for everyone in the settlement to go and sleep in at the end of the day. It was a fun day when we explained that particular requirement to our environment art team [laughs], but they rose to the challenge like they do with everything.
In games, you don’t normally have to connect the dots quite so precisely. You know, you’re just building a nice-looking town. But in Fable it also has to be a functional town.
As an example, early in development we couldn’t work out why one town was so empty during the day. And when we zoomed out into debug mode, it was because NPCs were getting up to go to work, but they lived too far away from their jobs. So, they started walking to work, but didn’t get there before their schedule told them to turn around to go back to bed.
It’s required a lot of working through, but it pays off because, honestly, as you play the game, you get to know the names of the individual NPCs. You get to know what they like, what they’re looking for in a partner, where they live, where they work, all that kind of cool stuff. It’s an extra dimension to traditional NPCs.
Does the Living Population tie into the main quest?
Fulton: Tying the main quest and the Living Population together in a really overt way didn’t seem like the right way to go, so we’ve deliberately linked them in the lightest possible fashion. You know, there are some times when characters in the main quest will reference your reputations, or the things you’ve done previously – but we never want to force a player to have to go and interact with those things in order to progress the main quest.
We know there are some players – we call them ‘Bards’ – who are just going to play through the main story. They’re going to start at the start, and they’re going to get to the end, and that’s going to be their experience. That’s entirely fine, that’s a totally respectable way to play.
But there are some players, who we call ‘Architects’, who we know are going to go and mess around with the systems and just see where they can push them, see what they can achieve with it, and we want them to have the freedom to do that at any point as well.
