GDC: Low-price hardware "really important"

Peter Molyneux has said that while he would prefer to have a hard disk to work with as standard, he believes that backing low-price console hardware is "really important".

"Given the choice, I'd obviously choose a hard drive every day of the week," he told Eurogamer.net in an interview published today. "But the balance to that is you're supporting a system which is an awful lot cheaper.

"What I'm trying to address with Fable 2 is say 'Look, anybody can play this game.' That's what I really want. So supporting the cheaper price is really important."

Molyneux's Lionhead Studios was bought by Microsoft in 2006, and is currently working on action-RPG Fable 2, which was given centre stage in Microsoft's GDC keynote.

The game - which is designed to be accessible as well as rewarding for core players - will be among the first to benefit from a shared reward system that allows certain Xbox Live Arcade games to hand out virtual currency that can be spent in the world of Fable 2.

"I think it was my seed of an idea... Was it my idea? I don't know. It was a cumulative effort really," he told Eurogamer when asked about how this came about.

His colleague in the demonstration added that he remembered it as having been Molyneux's idea "to start talking about how we could use the infrastructure".

"Yes, then they went off and designed the games," added Molyneux.

A new preview of Fable 2 is also available on the Eurogamer website now, while his earlier comments on the state of PC gaming can be found here.