Dene Carter, Fable’s co-creator, has admitted that the world of Albion could have been different.

Carter didn’t even take inspiration from the same genre, which is why it’s unusual (and surprising) that the inspiration for Fable’s world came from Capcom: Carter revealed on Twitter that Lionhead was inspired by Devil May Cry! I’m sure everyone knows this hack already, but I will talk about it anyway. On the off-chance, it saves someone from going completely off-the-rails during their dev. It’s a hint about scope. When you’re feeling lost: steal it. 100% rip it off from another game. How did the world of Fable become that size? Because I’d played Devil May Cry and noticed that the world was like 82 zones. It didn’t seem excessive. It re-used and recontextualized areas. It worked for a relatively short but high-quality game. I counted the number of zones, the size of those zones, and the average time spent in those zones and used that to block out the entire world of Albion.

At the time, we were spiraling out of control, convinced we had to make something ‘big’ (whatever that meant). Copying the scope of Devil May Cry, the interaction density of Silent Hill, and the encounter style of the first Way of the Samurai changed Fable from a floppy, undefined, never-ending death march to something we could complete *without* ever having worked on a 3D game. Did I feel icky about it? No! I wasn’t using the other games’ themes, ideas, or creativity, just their scope. It was like seeing that most movies were 90 mins and saying: “Oh. I guess that works. We can do that!”

Not everything in your game is going to be original. Very little will be. Manga, anime, Star Wars, etc., nearly all rest on some framework or structure set up by folks long before you. Focus on the bits that make your game yours, not ‘avoiding using L3 for Run’. I’ll just be waiting here for the bad-faith ‘fAbLe cReatOr adMitS hE rIPped OfF oTHeR gAmeZ!’ bulls__t to roll in. What a wonderful world,” Carter wrote.

You can talk about it without such insults…

Source: PCGamer