Fable III will be out in a few short weeks. Peter Molyneux’s been barnstorming for the game for the last few weeks and I had the chance to chat to him about the next chapter of the action-RPG series. But the man responsible for the upcoming threequel also answered my questions about the missing-in-action Milo project that got folks buzzing about Kinect back when it was in its Project Natal cocoon. Here’s the pertinent bit from my talk with him:
What’s going on with Milo? Different reports have been heard about whether it’s a tech demo or it’s an actual game. What should we expect?
The thing about Milo, it’s an incredibly ambitious title. About three weeks ago, I gave a talk at TED and showed how the project’s progressing. I actually showed the first hour-experience; I had to compress it down to 18 minutes because TED’s very strict about talkers. You know, they literally have a sniper gun on you if you’re overrun. And, so, we are progressing the title, there’s a full team working on it. It’s definitely–the way it’s crafted, the story that we’re telling in it–is different than anything that we’ve ever done before or anybody’s ever done before. I prefer to call it a tech demo so that when don’t get people all too hyped up on when is it going to be released. But for me, Milo is alive in this incredible story. This is the thing that wasn’t covered in TED: if you have got a character in a story that feels alive and notices you as an individual, then it, for me completely rewrites all storytelling abilities now. I mean, if when you open this comic, this character looked you in the eyes and said “You know, I think you could be a superhero,” that would change everything, wouldn’t it? Just doing that would change everything, and that’s what we’re creating. It’s something which is not just about Kinect, it’s not just about the ability to talk to Milo, it’s not just about the ability for Milo to see what you’re wearing, it’s about the ability to tell a story in a completely different light.
The TED talk that Molyneux references just went up yesterday and it does show very clearly that Milo’s grown (pun intended since) audiences last saw him in 2008. A virtual kid with a crowd-sourced cloud database for a brain could be like nothing else in pop culture–much less video games–right now.
[ted id=932]
The comic-book reference gets explained in the rest of my talk with Molyneux, which will be showing up next week.