Note: if it appears we jump between topics, it’s simply because I’ve edited out the questions that have already appeared in OXM.

DW: Why did you guys want to make a new Fallout?

EP: It was one of those wish list things. We were talking about what we want to do if we could get a licence, “Oh, this could be cool, this would be great”, and we realised Fallout was top of that list.

DW: What else was on that list?

EP: I think Todd and I had wanted to make a Batman game forever. I think we talked about Bladerunner at some point. Bethesda makes the Terminator games so I’m sure that came up. But for me it was Fallout. For some reason when Fallout hit the list it was like a pipe dream, it wouldn’t happen, you know? And then [when Interplay auctioned off its licenses] it was like “Oh wow!” We just jumped on it.

DW: So would you have made a post-apocalyptic RPG even without Fallout?

EP: No, it wasn’t like we were going to make a post-apocalyptic RPG and then Fallout came along. We were going to make Fallout or something else.

DW: Would you say you’re consciously making Fallout 3 for Fallout fans or making it for the new fans that you’ve reached through the success of Oblivion?

EP: We make games for each other here. We are the type of Fallout fans who play the original games and love them, but we love other games and we love free-form games. So that’s the type of person I’m making the game for, someone whom I assume would probably play Oblivion and likes an open-ended experience. But part of that too is I’m making it for someone like me who played Fallout back in the day but, you know, doesn’t worship the game, but remembers it fondly as a great game and would love to be in the world again.

DW: How do you think about the direction of each new game you make? When you look at the Elder Scrolls, each one seems to have sold better and better each time, do you look at those sales and think we’re on the right track here?

EP: The sales do tell us that we’ve got a market for this type of game, you know for these giant open-ended games people don’t get a lot of. We want to make games we know a player is going to want to get invested in and not a lot of people make that kind of games that we do. Bioware does and there’s Rockstar – you know, giant open-ended games that you can lose yourself in, that’s where I think we’ve found success.

DW: But on the other hand you can trace the Elder Scrolls games – from Daggerfall to Morrowind to Oblivion – they seem to be getting smaller and maybe more intimate and personal. It seems that perhaps Bethesda as a company is maturing.

EP: Yeah, I would agree. It’s two things: one, you want to reinvent yourself with every game you do, and two, we love quantity but you realise sometimes with too much quantity there’s no way you can control quality. I mean, I just read this somewhere that I think Daggerfall is in the Guinness Book of Records for having the largest landmass in any videogame. You look at Daggerfall and it’s procedurally generated random thousands of cities but they are all the same so it’s like… it’s ridiculous! We understand because of the giant size of the games we make, gamers are more forgiving of some things. It’s like if I can do this, this and this and sometimes this other thing doesn’t work quite as well, people are more forgiving because we gave them all the other stuff too. We’re still pushing the boundaries of quantity – in Fallout 3 we’ve made the wasteland bigger than we originally designed for – but we’ve now got a lot better at controlling our quality.

DW: Sorry, this is a bit of a long question. You’ve worked on Thief 2 and Thief 3 and you also designed the Dark Brotherhood quest line in Oblivion. I wanted to ask you about stealth. I’m a massive fan of Thief and pure stealth games and I always roll myself a stealth character in RPGs – I did it in Morrowind and Oblivion, the original Fallouts and now I’ve done it here in Fallout 3.

However, I often think it’s somehow less immersive than if I was playing a fighter or a mage character because you’re exposed to more of the underlying mechanics – you’re checking whether you’re hidden or you’re wondering if there’s enough lighting or if the NPCs can hear you. Also you’re worried about getting that critical hit in combat to get the x3 or x6 damage bonus.

Sometimes it seems like it’s more immersive to simply wade in with an axe or a fireball or whatever because it’s simpler and it’s more immediate and you don’t really think about the number-crunching going on in the background. How do you approach implementing stealth mechanics in an RPG where the player can opt for those more immediate solutions?

EP: You know obviously when I first came here Todd and I talked about the Thief stuff and how much of that stuff did we wanted to find its way into Oblivion. I mean the real issue of making good a stealth game like Thief or Splinter Cell is that you know these are linear games with one core gameplay mechanic, and that is sneaking. And you know when you work on a stealth game, you realise how tightly designed stealth gameplay has to be. In a game where you’re a fighter swinging in with a sword or where you have a gun, a lot of times the environment doesn’t make a difference. But for sneaking, the environment is half the gameplay. Back in the Thief days the game designers were also the level designers, they were creating the gameplay in the space they were building because they were so interdependent. Now that’s not really the case.

But that said, I think there’s a level of tension you get with stealth gameplay that you don’t get with anything else. So we started with Oblivion and the stealth system in Fallout is actually a lot more robust than the stealth system in Oblivion. A lot of that has to do with the enemy AI and the different search states that they have. In Oblivion you’re either detected or hidden, now there are stages in between and you’ll know when to be cautious. In Fallout people can be actively searching for you, they’ll actually do the Thief thing and you’ll hear “Where are you? I hear something” and there’s that level of tension there that you didn’t have in Oblivion. You know I was just playing the [Supermart area] fighting the raiders and it’s like a lot of times in Fallout, the feeling is so desperate and you feel like you’re struggling for survival and when you’re sneaking you really feel like “Oh god, don’t find me, please don’t find me”. You’d get that occasionally in Oblivion I think, but for me it actually works better in a post-apocalyptic setting than I thought it would. In Fallout it’s more like the stealth stuff complements your regular gameplay, but it’s definitely a viable approach.

DW: Just to go back to the immersion angle, you were saying how the environment is such a major part of a stealth game. I was noticing that when I was sneaking through the school, looking for the dark areas, I was analysing the way you’d lit the area. Why is that area dark or why does that lamp only have a small radius of light? You probably wouldn’t think about that sort of thing if you were playing just a big guns kind of character…

EP: That’s true when you’re sneaking around, you’re noticing the patches of shadow and stuff you’re right it’s not quite natural. But it should support the gameplay. We’re pretty good at having light coming from real light sources and controlling the ambient level of each space. We’ve gone back and forth so many times. Sometimes those discussions have been contentious, like “This area’s too dark”, but it has to be dark to support the stealth player.

DW: Do you design every space to be like a middle ground that every type of character can get through or are there areas in the game where it’s probably better if you’re a scientist or a stealth guy or a big guns guy?

EP: This is something as we playtest more and more, we try to find more paths and sometimes put more paths in. You can generally sneak anywhere if you put your points into sneak or you know you can always wait till night when the light levels are low and you have a better chance of sneaking due to environmental factors. You can generally use gun play anywhere and there’s a lot of stuff to blow up in the environment – that helps too. With the science and the speech stuff we’ve really taken pains to go back and put in the other paths for these skills. We sorta see it as there’s the gun play solution through anything and then there’s all these other little solutions like, if you’re facing this really tough battle then you can use your science skill to hack the computer to have a robot fight for you. I‘m also really proud of the fact that you can talk your way through a lot of the quests if you have put your points into speech.

DW: How do you make them more fun? When you’ve got a combat system that so far I think is really entertaining, how do you make the other parts as enjoyable?

EP: It’s tough! I think a lot of the fun there is in meeting the players expectation and making the player feel clever, making it seem like they’re not just clicking on an option you know? Like if the player took the Lady Killer perk early on and then when they get to a dialogue with a female character and there’s a Lady Killer option they feel smart, they feel empowered and they feel like they made the right decision early on. To a certain extent they feel like they earned that choice, like no other character would have gotten that choice. That’s where the entertainment thing comes from, it’s the novelty of knowing that no one else is doing this and it’s tough, it takes a lot of handling to support all those paths.

DW: Todd said earlier that something you’re not talking about today is whether we’ll see any construction set…

EP: No, we just don’t know, you know? I think people in the past have gotten very comfortable assuming we’re going to do that and they don’t realise the work it takes for us to put into that, so it’s something we haven’t been able to think about for now.

DW: Obviously you’ve done it for Morrowind and Oblivion. What do you guys think when you see what the fans do with those tools?

EP: Oh, we think it’s fantastic, I mean we’re amazed and we’ve just started highlighting that stuff on our blog. The fact that people still make mods for Morrowind is to me… the legs that that game has because of that, that’s why we love it. We love the stuff that people do, we think it’s awesome.

DW: Have you ever seen a mod and thought that’s a great idea and put it into the next game?

EP: You know that’s funny, usually when I see something like that I know the reason we didn’t do it because, you know, it’s…

DW: It was going to break all these other parts of the game?

EP: Exactly, it was going to break all these other parts or simply it’s a time resource thing. It’s taking a year to make a mod after the game’s come out, that’s development time that we might not necessarily have. Someone made all the thief tools in Oblivion as a plug-in and, I mean, come on, if we could have done that from the start I would have loved to. So stuff like that is just amazing.

Some US journalists I spoke with were disappointed that many of the builds they saw were the same as shown at pre-E3 events in June, but for international media it was often the first time we’d seen these titles in person. Ironic that what is ostensibly a US show proved more helpful for non-US media.

I saw a bunch of great games over the course of the week. Personal favourites included Mirror’s Edge, Prince of Persia, Far Cry 2, Age of Booty, De Blob, STALKER: Clear Sky, Colonization, and my pick for “best in show”, Left 4 Dead. But perhaps the most interesting demo I attended was for Microsoft’s Singstar tribute, Lips.

My time at the Xbox room was scheduled for Thursday 2pm – 4pm, the dead zone in other words right at the tail end of the show. It’s at this point that everyone is over it and just wants to go home. My time with Lips was at 3pm, precisely the same time Shigeru Miyamoto and his entourage decided to pay a visit and check out the competition.

Halfway through Keiichi Yano’s endearing presentation, Xbox’s US PR knocked on the door and kicked us out. Mr Miyamoto was clearly more important than some Australian journos. We’d been “Shiggy’d”. What was most frustrating – to be honest, karaoke games aren’t my thing so I wasn’t that fussed about Lips itself – was that when we had to vacate the room Yano had just hinted at how the motion-sensing Lips microphone could have other gaming applications.

There’d been a lot of talk in the lead-up to E3 that Microsoft would introduce “waggle” to the 360 in an effort to mimic the success of the Wii. Turns out they didn’t. But perhaps in the Lips microphone they did. I didn’t get the chance – curse you, Miyamoto! – to ask Yano about how sophisticated the motion-sensor inside the mic actually is, but the way he cryptically mentioned other gameplay possibilities (that they couldn’t demo at the show) gave me pause for thought.

Could the Lips microphone really be Microsoft’s “waggle wand”?

As usual, here’s an excerpt:

“Charting Bioware’s approach to RPG design results in something of a linear progression. While each new Bioware new title demonstrates an almost unwavering commitment to dramatic story-telling, expansive game worlds and player choice through dialogue and character advancement, equally there’s a clear determination to showcase combat in an increasingly immediate and immersive fashion. Mass Effect quite clearly continues this evolution.”

For me, Mass Effect is BioWare’s best game. Respect is probably the word I’d use to describe my feelings towards their previous titles. I always felt Baldur’s Gate, Knight of the Old Republic, etc were impressive games, but I could never find myself loving them in the same way I fell for their Black Isle and Obsidian contemporaries. Freed from the shackles of someone else’s IP, BioWare has taken the opportunity to shine. Mass Effect is seriously good.

I’ve fallen in love with indie games this year. Much of my life has been spent playing PC games – from Colossal Cave at my Dad’s office on weekends to the daily Quake 3 sessions when I worked at Next Media a few years ago. But when I left the editor’s chair of PC PowerPlay in 2005, I took something of a break from the PC and console gaming stepped in. Of course, I’d always played console games too, but for the first time they were now dominating my gaming hours.

My discovery of the “indie scene” has changed that this year. Today I’m more likely to fire up Audiosurf or Aquaria than switch on my Xbox 360. So I decided to write about the new wave of independent developers for PC PowerPlay. It’s in the new issue (on sale now!) and after the jump is a sample where I speak with Audiosurf creator Dylan Fitterer:

On his modestly-titled blog, www.bestgameever.com, Fitterer would set himself a challenge: to design a new game in just seven days. The wildly varied results – Free Parking, Loop Hoops, Travis Must Die, Gothic Blocks, to name but a few – would take a simple concept and build a playable, albeit again simple, game out of it.

Like a rock band improvising in the studio, these prototypes would contain moments of genius. One such moment arrived with a little thing called Tune Racer.

“Tune Racer stood out to me as a great experience that hit on something you couldn’t get from any other game,” says Fitterer. “It wasn’t the most popular of my prototypes, so it was a bit of a leap to choose that one to focus on, but it was my favourite. I kept going back over my music collection to get that rush.”

The nature of releasing each prototype on his blog meant that feedback from a diverse group of players was instantaneous. Fitterer took this idea further when developing Tune Racer into what would eventually be known as Audiosurf. He invited his readers to play.

“I emailed a thousand players inviting them to try the Audiosurf beta and within a couple days there were download links all over the net. It’s really important for players to see that the game is alive. It’s something they can help shape.

“My plan was always to sell it, but it took a lot of experimenting to figure out what it was. I just kept looking for something that I wanted to play badly enough to spend the time building it. That way even if it didn’t sell it would be worthwhile.”

For the feature I also spoke with Introversion’s Chris Delay (Darwinia), Jonathan Blow (Braid), Nicklas Nygren (Knytt), Joseph Tkach (Synaesthete) and Spiderweb Software’s Jeff Vogel (Exile), all of whom contribute some terrific and varied thoughts on the value of indie gaming to the PC platform.

I’ll quote a couple of extracts below in the hope of encouraging you to pick up both magazines.

From OXM:

“Conversation is presented akin to RPGs like Knights of the Old Republic. You choose from several lines, with the dialogue branching as you choose certain options. Sometimes your skills will influence these options: you may see [Speech] appear next to one option, meaning your Speech skill was high enough to enable you to persuade or charm or threaten convincingly. If you’re a male character, you may have chosen the Lady Killer perk (a perk is like a feat in D&D, an extra ability you can select when you reach a certain level) that allows you to sweet talk the ladies – as well as deal more damage to female enemies. The end result is that there’s a pleasingly wide variety of ways to interact, depending on how you’ve crafted your character stats.”

From PCPP:

“Fallout 3 reminds me of a lot of games I like. Perhaps as a result of my penchant for rolling stealth characters in every RPG, I got a distinct Thief vibe when skulking in the shadows, monitoring enemy movements from a position of (relative) safety before lunging for the knockout blow – usually a sniper shot to the head (attacks when undetected give you a critical strike and deal triple damage).”

And shortly I’ll finally get around to posting the unpublished remainder of the interview I conducted with Emil Pagliarulo (some of which appears in OXM). Fingers crossed!

“Alone in the Dark is a punishing and at times humbling experience. Some will think the controls are broken. They’re not, but they are needlessly convoluted and often just not as responsive as you’d like. The manual takes four whole pages to describe the various moves Carnby has at his disposal. It really is a million miles away from the modern trend of one-button context-sensitivity.”

“Successful hits increase Bourne’s adrenaline which in turn opens up the use of “takedown” moves. When activated, a takedown sees Bourne improvise a much more powerful attack, often taking advantage of items and objects in close proximity. This is precisely where you’ll see him grab a fountain pen off a nearby table to stab his opponent, or back slam his foe into a handy electrical box.”

I selected the above passages to highlight the contrast between the two games in how they empower the player or enable him/her to do cool stuff.

Alone in the Dark is a mess of a game; for everything it does right – or at least aspires to do right – it gets another thing hopelessly wrong. Eden’s ambition takes it to places few other games have dared, but at the same time they totally fuck up basic elements of design I thought had been agreed upon years ago. As a result of the complex controls, even the simplest actions are demanding, and I would imagine, utterly impenetrable to an inexperienced player.

The Bourne Conspiracy is a classic example of empowering the player through readily understood and easily achieved means. You have a couple of basic controls, which when pressed at the right time or in simple combination, make your character do awesome stuff. It’s not that Bourne is necessarily an easy game, but it is one that caters to players of all abilities.

While Bourne presents spectacular canned moments at the touch of a button, Alone delivers an array of player-authored expression behind a veil of arcane controller manipulation. In both cases, there’s something missing: Bourne runs the risk of making the cool stuff too accessible, while Alone hides it all far too well.

There’s a fine line to tread when empowering the player. Make it too easy and they won’t care; make it too obscure and they’ll never find it. In both these games there’s plenty of empowering going on, but at what cost to the overall experience?

I’ve been thinking about change recently, and how gamers tend to be somewhat frightened by it. We want to be dazzled by new technology and we say we want innovation and originality, but it seems what gets us most excited is something familiar given a new lick of paint. So, on the one hand, Fallout 3 should be exactly what gamers want – an old idea updated with cool new graphics; on the other hand, it’s kinda scary. How do we know Bethesda isn’t going to ruin an old favourite?

When we talk about a company making a sequel we know it’s not really the exact same people involved. Staff turnover at the completion of one project often means a sequel is never entirely designed by the same personnel responsible for the original. Increasingly, as in the case of Call of Duty being split between Infinity Ward and Treyarch, a publisher will have two separate teams working on alternate iterations of the same franchise. However, in the case of Fallout 3, we’re looking at a wholly new team tasked with building the third in a series and managing a legacy they played no role in forging.

What’s notable with Fallout 3 is the length of time between Black Isle signing off on Fallout 2 and Bethesda applying its own seal to the series. Ten years is a long time in gaming. It’s enough time for entire genres to rise and fall in popularity; for new technology to change our perception of what makes for a modern game; for development studios to have created a history of their own, with all the expectation and baggage that entails; for new platforms to arrive and shift the commercial landscape; and for older games to be deified on the altar of nostalgia.

Bethesda has to combat all these factors. They have to bring a new Fallout into a world where multi-platform development is vital; where RPGs flounder without production values as high as the next big budget FPS; where many of the play mechanics of the original games now seem anachronistic; and where Bethesda has charted out their own successful course of what a role-playing game can be.

Other games and developers have survived such battles though, and perhaps more often than you think. Ion Storm took over development duties from Looking Glass for the third Thief game, although there was certainly some cross-pollination between the companies. Still, Thief: Deadly Shadows turned out to be quite a different experience to what the Looking Glass folks had envisaged. It kept some of the open world structure of the original design, but reined it back and applied a more discrete mission progression. Ion Storm were faced with the additional challenge of developing for a console as well as PC which no doubt had an impact, especially from a technology point of view. But ultimately, Deadly Shadows was a genuine Thief game, just served with superior lighting and some minor tweaks to the mechanics.

In a similar vein, Obsidian assumed responsibility from Bioware for both Neverwinter Nights and Knight of the Old Republic. Those guys had worked closely together at Interplay’s Black Isle RPG division and the development of both series continued fairly seamlessly. Fundamentally, the sequels really aren’t that different and, for the most part, merely benefit from newer technology.

Then there’s Tomb Raider, where Crystal Dynamics has done a terrific job rescuing the series from the disaster that was Angel of Darkness, while of course Eidos remained on publishing duties throughout the developer switch. You could see that Core Design was desperately trying to refresh the formula with AoD, whereas Crystal has given us a bona fide reinvention of a stagnant series. The difference is that Crystal went back to basics and built upon the strengths of the early Tomb Raiders, while Core lost its focus and took Lara in too many directions that were completely ill-suited.

Silent Hill is perhaps an even more interesting example. A Japanese developed game that draws heavily from American film and literature is now being developed by an American studio. The Collective is currently working on the fifth Silent Hill game, Homecoming, with Team Silent veteran Akira Yamaoka again overseeing production. It’s perhaps too early to judge the success of this move – after all, the game has yet to be released – but it does appear that Homecoming will adhere closely to the Silent Hill formula in terms of play mechanics. Whether The Collective – best known for its work on Marc Ecko’s Getting Up and Buffy the Vampire Slayer – can compose the hauntingly ambiguous atmosphere to match Team Silent’s best work remains to be seen.

Closer to the mark, Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia revivals almost replicate what Bethesda is doing with Fallout, and not just because of the similar time difference between original and sequel. You can see a clear evolution from 2D to 3D in which many of the defining tenets – the fluid animation, the balance of platforming and combat, the distinct aesthetic – have survived intact. Although in this case it may help that Jordan Mechner, the Prince’s original creator, apparently consults on the projects.

For me, based on what I’ve seen of Fallout 3, the nearest comparison is with Retro Studios taking on Metroid. Although Retro certainly didn’t have the pedigree of Bethesda when they took on the project, they opted for overhauling the existing template to the same degree. Metroid Prime was just about as perfect a re-imagining of the series as you could have hoped for, regardless of your personal position on the 2D vs 3D debate. The move to first-person afforded a new perspective on a familiar world that resulted in a freshness and originality that another side-scrolling iteration would not have achieved.

So there are plenty of similar stories for Bethesda to look at and learn from, even if none mirror their specific circumstances precisely. History shows us there’s no reason why Fallout 3 can’t be a great game; equally, there’s no reason why it can’t be a great Fallout game. Everything I’ve seen so far points towards Bethesda accomplishing both those objectives. More often than not, change is nothing to be afraid of. After all, wasn’t the original Fallout merely a modern update of Interplay’s own Wasteland? And that seemed to work out quite well.

So, Execution is a game where you have a choice – indeed, just one choice. And the consequence is permanent. Shoot the guy and he remains dead when you start a new game. Hit ESC without shooting him and you “win”. At least, that’s how it seems.

In fact, there’s only a consequence for killing him. Quit the game without shooting then restart and he’s still alive, tied to the pole. You could leave him unexecuted for eternity – there’s no reprieve for this guy, no pardoning; no possibility of escape. Perhaps it would be best to put him out of his misery.

So you “win” by refusing to play the game. It’s interesting how the designer plays with your expectations by framing the game at the outset as something you can win or lose. I figured a so-called “experimental” would be a little quirky, and so my approach was to think counter-intuitively. I decided not to shoot him. After shooting the wall, the tumbleweed, the ground, I pressed a few obvious keys and “won”.

Now I’m wondering did I decide not to shoot him because the idea of killing this guy was repugnant – after all, he’s tied to a post, immobile and unable to defend himself, and I have no idea as to why he’s in that position. Or did I decide not to shoot him because I wanted to win the game?

I think it’s the latter. Despite what is presumably meant to be a game of morality, my instinct was simply to beat the game. “Oh, you think you’re so smart, Mr Game Designer, but I’m onto you!”

What if the game had told you up-front that you could either shoot him and lose or hit ESC and win? Or what if you won by killing him and lost for cowardly quitting out? How would that change your approach? Remember, kill him once and you can’t undo your action, you’ve got to live with the consequence.

A friend of mine I showed the game to said he felt cheated in some way. To quote him:

“The entire game is setup to give you the impression that the goal is execution. Your choice is contextualised by the name, the setting, the mechanics, by your understanding of what an execution is – so it seems a little disingenuous for the designer to go, ‘Oh, but it’s all about free choice and consequences!’ To me, it’s as though you’ve been taken to a bowling alley, given a ball, and then – after you get a strike – you get told that the goal was to get a gutter ball. I thought [there may have been a trick to it], but I figured it might have something to do with the way you shoot him, or with how long you take, or something like that. It didn’t occur to me that quitting the game was the way to win it. That’s a bit of a ruse, really.”

We tend to take things at face value when playing a game. We’re conditioned to accept things almost without question. We’re used to having content designed for us and solutions prescribed to us. It’s funny how a “short experimental game” such as Execution can in just a few minutes say much of what BioShock wanted to say over the course of hours.

Randy Smith has written a quietly defiant column over at Next-Gen – which originally appeared in a recent issue of EDGE. Quiet because the former Ion Storm designer has an easy-going, almost laidback style. Defiant because he’s railing against – albeit in a casual way – a prevailing trend in game design: hand-holding, or to put it another way, the design philosophy that states the player should always be having “fun”. What’s interesting about this last aspect is that it’s implied that there’s only one way to have fun, and the game designer knows best.

Let me summarise: in ye olde days circa Ultima V (i.e. 1988), games were objects of investigation, players had to explore and experiment to discover the rules of the virtual world. Indeed, players were allowed to make mistakes, to not achieve something, to get lost, and even die, horribly and repeatedly. Today, heavy focus testing has given us game experiences streamlined to maximise the fun output. Why should a player settle for only getting a portion of the fun when – through some subtle signposting and a choreographed sequence – the designer can ensure each player gets 100% of their fun allocation.

Personally, I can’t help but feel this push towards accessibility – or, more accurately, this stampede away from the experiences of Ultima V described above – has resulted in the diminishing of something valuable. And something valuable at which games truly excel: the idea of exploration and, with it, immersion in a virtual world.

I had read Randy’s piece a few weeks back, but my thoughts returned to it in the context of Fable 2. In particular, comments from Peter Molyneux that Fable 2 has dispensed with that RPG staple, the minimap, offering in its stead a trail of bread crumbs to guide the player. According to IGN, the bread crumbs resemble a “line of fairy dust sparkling from your feet” and lead you to quests and objectives. (Your canine companion can, apparently, sniff out side-quests that aren’t signposted by sourdough.)

Now I haven’t played Fable 2 – and neither have the forum posters currently objecting to the bread crumb feature – so I can only speculate on its effectiveness as a navigation tool. Clearly, Peter’s design goal is to make his game more accessible and inviting to the inexperienced gamer. He doesn’t want to scare off novice players who feel intimidated by an open world of exploration or – perhaps worse – become bored when they get lost on the way to some quest’s specific objective. And in a sense, the trail of bread crumbs is – at least, conceptually – more immersive than a colour-coded minimap in the corner of the screen; the player is focused on the actual environment rather than a more distanced layer of representation.

But at the same time it is a contrivance that breaks immersion and runs contrary to the game world’s internal logic. Ultimately, it’s a way for the designer to tell the player who strays from the trail: “Stop, you’re doing it wrong!”

Understandably, a chief concern of the novice gamer is the fear of doing it wrong. Indeed, even veteran gamers will have felt that nagging doubt of “What am I meant to do?” when, say, stepping off the boat into Seyda Neen in Morrowind or walking out of the bunker into Stalker’s wasteland. At times like this we need navigation tools, we need signposts, and deep down we really just want someone to hold our hand. At least for a little while, anyway.

It’s a tough problem for today’s game designers. How do you balance the needs of different types of gamers and different levels of experience? What sort of hand-holding mechanics not only serve their necessary purpose but manage to sustain the player’s suspension of disbelief? How do you design a game for those players who want to bake bread and for those who just want to follow it?