Fable 2's technical art director Ian Lovett revealed the visual aspect of the second installment of the game was partly influenced by famed film director Ridley Scott (possibly most known for Blade Runner, but also for more recent works like Kingdom of Heaven, Matchstick Men, Hannibal, and Gladiator). Who would've thought?

Eurogamer: You moved straight from Fable on the Xbox to Fable 2 on the 360. What was it like taking a visual style developed for one generation of hardware and trying to make it work on the next?

Ian Lovett: We looked back at what was good about Fable - that's the first thing you do. I always felt that Fable was about these incredible, lush, green environments, and about really quirky characters. Not necessarily the most beautifully realised characters - but there was lots of personality there. It had a certain atmosphere to it that we wanted to recreate.

Once we had our pillars, our visual pillars, then we sat down and talked about how we wanted to re-imagine it. We did a horribly wanky thing, actually, which is that we came up with a visual mission statement. Although it's awful, nasty, business yuck, what it helped us do was to concentrate our thinking into how we'd really describe it. Secondly, it helped us to sell it up the chain. You know, Microsoft weren't just going to rock up with a fat chequebook of X million, or whatever, and say "hey guys, go ahead, we're going to take a punt on you despite the fact that you were years late with Fable - do another one for us!"

What we decided was that we wanted Fable 2 to be like Fable, but done by Ridley Scott. That was our mission statement. The idea behind that is that Microsoft understand Ridley Scott, they understand that this means that we wanted to mature the franchise a little bit. Not losing its charm, but basically trying to grow it up ever so slightly. I think that fits in very well with the jump from Xbox to 360. It's not that it's a change in audience - it's just a new layer of sophistication.

chautemoc via eurogamer.net »