Peter Molyneux, God love him, doesn’t really “like” traditional pre-order campaigns, so instead, he and Lionhead came up with Villager Maker to entice gamers into dropping a fiver instead.
Announced earlier this week, Village Maker lets you create an importable character into Fable III should you decide to pre-order it. This gives the consumer something interesting to create instead of just a silly outfit or cool looking gun.
“[Customers] can change their mind at any time,” Molyneux told USA Today. “That $5 is like a deposit for any game in the store, not just your game. But the industry takes an enormous indication behind pre-orders. I thought there must be a design thing we can do around that.
“I’m kind of bored with pre-ordering stuff and getting a little bit more content that doesn’t make any difference at all to anything. So what?
“[Pre-orders for Fable III] still get extra stuff, you get an extra house in the world or a few extra bits of clothing. But for me, the most exciting thing I’ve found I can say to someone is ‘I’m going to put you in the world, so when you come to play the game you’re going to meet yourself.’
“I’ve done this lots of times and thought, ‘Why not make that ability for everybody?’ So if you pre-order you can go on and design your own character whether it be yourself, or a friend or someone imaginary that is going to appear in the Fable world that will be a small player in the Fable story. Then, when you finally buy your copy of Fable you are playing the game and you will meet that character named your way with the personality you want with the look you want in the world.”
This kind of content is something Molyneux hopes other developers start including as well, so when customers “put that five dollars down” and create their own character, they’re “more likely” to use the deposit for that particular game.
The Villager Maker tool can be used by anyone and everyone, but you only get a code to input your character into Fable III when you pre-order the game – and you get a unique quest and 1,000 game gold to boot.
Fable III is out in October on 360, a new release date for PC is expected soon.
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