Fable 3 lead Peter Molyneux says he "should have fought for more time" to deliver the divisive RPG, and there's a Lionhead battle royale we'll never see as Xbox killed the studio

Fable 3 is undoubtably the most divisive game in Lionhead Studio's trilogy of vulgar fairytales, but its famed director Peter Molyneux blames its problems on one thing: not enough development time.

You see, the still-excellent Fable 2 came out at the end of 2008 and, just two years later, Fable 3 hit store shelves. The threequel was obviously built on top of Fable 2's bones, but its ambitious new ideas, like putting the player on the throne to make sweeping, world-impacting decisions, didn't have enough time to cook.

"The original vision there was: 'You've been a hero - now you can be king, with all the moral implications of being king!' But that game, I think, would have taken three years to make, whereas Fable III took 18 months," Molyneux revealed in an interview with Edge Magazine's 416 issue.

"I should have fought for more time," he lamented. "I think, if I hadn't left, I would have said, 'I'm sorry, the game's not going to be ready!' It's caused me unbelievable angst over the years. I shouldn't have left when I did, really. I should have done more to help Fable III through."

Molyneux also explained that after he told Microsoft he was leaving the iconic British studio, the publisher's "first reaction was, 'You're leaving, so we'll close the studio!'" Apparently a closure was delayed because Molyneux was able to convince the company that Lionhead "could continue to make them money."

"I'd done quite a lot of work making sure the people I left behind were smart and running the company properly," he added. "They had a design for Fable 4 in their back pocket, which the team had explored, and this other game that I had designed, which I'd left as something that they could develop. It was called All Of Us. It was absolutely crazy, a kind of cross between a world builder and a role-playing game and [what we'd now think of as] a battle royale, all mixed in one. You could go into a dungeon and, as you were playing the game, you could pull stalactites and stuff down. It was pretty cool. But I think it would have needed, like, a visionary to get it over the line."

Fable creator Peter Molyneux remembers his first board meeting at EA as a "school playground" filled with "idiots" and says 2001 decision to close Dungeon Keeper studio "was a dreadful mistake"