Peter Molyneux is holding my business card in his hand looking down at the green and the pink and the giant K and the Otaku, and his brow is furrowed.

"Oh, that site's coming along nicely."

It's a little after 9 a.m. and Molyneux is standing by a desk. A nearby television is showing the back of some hero, a sword and a long rifle crossed on his back. The sound of wind and birds fills the room from the game, Fable 2.

As we wait, I ask Molyneux the obvious question: Are you gunshy, I say, talking about discussing your upcoming games' big ideas? You know, since Fable and the whole tree thing.

"I am the most nervous I've ever been in my career," Molyneux says. "I'm going to talk about this feature and it's a scary one for me. There's a big chance that I'll show it and they won't get it. They'll turn around and say, 'OK, what about the big weapons.'"

After everybody arrives Molyneux launches into his pitch. He says Fable 2 will have three big features, but that he's only going to talk about one of them because the other two aren't fully implemented and the one he will be talking about is.

"I've gotten told off about talking about things that aren't fully implemented," he says.

He talks about the process, the painful process, of deconstructing Fable and figuring out what fans felt was missing, how they could make the game better.

"We are going to give you more combat and then we thought we would give you better spells, and a bigger world. We will multiply the world size by, I don't know, 100, and we would fill that world with beautiful things. There are 15 million poppies in the world of Fable, we also have bluebells and pansies and all of that."

But that's millions of poppies, thank god, aren't the big thing, Molyneux says.

That thing isn't even a thing, he says, it's something he found in the great moments of gaming, the things he remembers from those "heart-stopping, hair-raising great moments."

"What I came to realize was that the feature that Fable lacked and Fable 2 needed was drama," he said. "Yeah, we could make an impressive and incredible story with baddies, but we needed something else. The thing we really needed and this is the one you may not get is love."

"Why shouldn't you have a game which has at its core the ability for you to feel something from a game you've never felt before."

I can Molyneux is casting his spell, his charm over the audience. He just quotes the Beatles and everyone is so rapt they didn't even notice.

"If we don't think that Fable is going to be a landmark game what is the bloody point," he said. "We've got to strive to make a great game, we don't want to strive to make a good game."

So love, Molyneux says, will come in several flavors.

"You can get married, you can choose to have protected or unprotected sex and if you have unprotected sex you can have a baby and it can grow up and it will be as you, it can be evil or good," he said.

If you play as a woman, he adds, and you get pregnant you will have a little interlude.

"It's quite an interesting challenge having a female character as the lead."

That's one form of love. Another, your child. Experiencing the love a father or mother feels for his children. Yet another will be that the world and the people in it, as Molyneux said, will apreciate you. They will thank you.

But the main part, the emotional basket in which Molyneux is piling an awful lot of eggs, is a dog.

While you will have no direct control over dog, you can interact with him and he will learn. Sort of like in Black & White. Molyneux says the dogs artificial intelligence is made up of a series of Asimov-like laws.

The first rule is that he knows to never piss you off.

The second is that he cares about you, deeply, deeply cares about you and will do anything to make you happy.

Molyneux spends a bit of time showing off his dog. He calls it over, his character squatting and waving his hands to the dog. The dog comes running.

He then shows us how the dog will act as a sort of living map, that he will guide you on our way through your adventures. There is no hud in the game, Molynuex says.

When Molyneux comes upon three people he attacks one with his rifle and the dog charges off to attack the other two.

After the battle the dog, whimpering and limping, comes slinking back to Molyneux, it is a genuinely sad and touching scene.

Molyneux says you don't have to take care of your dog. I ask him if the game can have an Old Yeller moment, if, essentially, you can kill your dog.

Molyneux laughs and says that the dog will essentially recreate Disney's Fantastic Voyage. If you abandon him and run to a town to have a drink, the dog will track you down and arrive, bloddied and whimpering at the pub's door step.

Why, I asked, use a dog as the emotion in this game. Why not your husband or wife, or a sidekick.

"You can get married in the game, but you'll notice that after the first year of marital bliss your wife becomes a bit of a nag and she is certainly needy," Molyneux says.

People are like that, he points out. They have their own needs and wants, but animals can be slavishly devoted and everyone cares about animals.

In researching this concept they talked to psychologists and looked to hollywood, where they learned that one golden rule of movie making was to never kill an animal. That's the gold rule.

So will the dog die?

"I'm not going to talk about when the dog dies, how the dog dies, but I won't be wasting that emotion," he says.

Will their be different dogs, will all look the same, I ask.

"That was my dog, but your dog might be fluffy and cuter or maybe he will be a Doberman and have a spiked collar. This isn't meant to be any sort of announcement, but we now have downloadable content. It's pretty obvious what we are going to do."

As the talk winds down, Molyneux seems happy.

"What did you think?" he asks me.

"I like it, I like it a lot."

Brian Crecente

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