Peter Molyneux: " What I should have
done during GDC is stood up and said, "What have been the biggest
battles in Fable for a design idea to get past the team upstairs?"
One of those big ideas was the idea of saying, "Look, why do we have
these mini-maps in the first place? They take up so much screen space
or they're shrunk down to being insignificant, you have to get a
magnifying glass to make out any detail on them. They're very
old-school, and a lot of the time, especially with Fable 1, you could
kinda play the whole game on the mini-map. It was just madness.
"Let's try and be brave--this is what you have to do when you design--and say we're not going to use mini-maps."
That was the first design thought, when we said that. That means we're
going to architect our levels a certain way to be sympathetic with
that, and that also means we needed something that gave players a
strong idea of, when they want to go where they should be going, where
they can go.
That's where we came up with the idea of a breadcrumb trail.
This breadcrumb trail is dynamic, it's reactive to what you're doing.
It can glow brightly or it can glow very, very dimly. It can almost be
incredibly obscure, you can hardly see it at all--or it's the most
important thing on the screen.
It's very dynamic; it's driven by AI. If you choose to jump down a hole
and you choose to swim across a river, it will follow you and guide you
and always be there for when you actually want to get back on track. It
will glow more and be more excited the more important it is that you
get to your destination and the closer you are to your destination.
That filled in a lot of the problems that a mini-map supplied to you.
When you are trying to navigate from point A to point B, you don't
actually need a mini-map. You actually need a guide, and that's what
the breadcrumb trail is. That's the first thing.
The second thing was that when we were thinking about the design of
our levels, we made sure that we designed them in such a way that it
wasn't absolutely necessary to have a mini-map.
Now, we still have a map. We still very much have a map. There's a
world map, and there's a level map, and you can bring it up and you can
see, "Oh, there's a shop in this alleyway."
We've got maps like that, but the concept of a mini-map as the main way of navigating around the world has gone."
Thats what you linked me to. Would you care to pint out where Molyneaux says anything about fairy dust??
Next time try actually reading a link before you post it in a vain attempt to prove some sort of point.
Based on what PM had to say in that interview i think the breadcrumb trail is going to be a lot more subtle and well thought out than anyone is giving credit for. He says its dynamic, it can glow, get excited, react to what you do, become very obscure and even goes on to refer to it as a guide and says that it ties in with level design. I dunno how you can interpret that as "fairy dust".