"Fable II was rushed" says Molyneux

During a talk at the Develop Conference, Lionhead Studios boss and Fable creator Peter Molyneux candidly spoke about the second entry in the series, admitting it had "huge design flaws" and was obstructed by an astonishing amount of bugs during a rushed development.

"Fable II let's be honest about it, it has some terribly messy things about it," Molyneux said "Half of that, again being honest, was because we rushed at the end and we had this terrible phase where, the world looks this beautiful with this many game features, and then slowly transitioned into being less beautiful."

Molyeux also revealed that Fable 2 had over 67,000 bugs at one point in its development, making it the first game that was rated "super-black" by the Microsoft Test team. "No-one had been black before. They'd been red and orange and green. But we were super-black," Molyenux explained. "They said it's utterly impossible for anybody to come out as super-black. That's why we had to reduce down what we had. But, to be honest with you, there were also huge design flaws in Fable 2."

What those "huge design flaws" were, though, wasn't specified. But speaking at the conference, Molyneux also revealed that Fable 3's development is currently "very, very tough," with an amount of bugs that evidently is even surpassing Fable 2's. Because of the game's size and scope, "it's got more bugs, more active bugs, than any game that [Microsoft Game Studios] has ever had in its history -- and the team of over 100 people are working insanely long hours, and they're coming down. That's the way it is."

This isn't an issue exclusive to the Fable series, though, as Molyneux says it's a similar problem with development of big, triple-A games across the industry. "We're in the same position as many, many other developers; if you read the post mortems of Uncharted 2 or any game, they all say the same," Molyneux said. "We find our game so late on in the process, that it's very hard to pull it all together -- and that has to change."

We did'nt get the chance to play Fable II because of its 360 exclusitivity but this time we'll try it for sure.

Fable III's scheduled for a PC release sometime in October.