Gamasutra has a nice interview up with Peter Molyneux on the topic of Fable II and the process of putting a game together; there's also plenty of discussion on lessons learned from Fable I and the uproar over the cooperative play issue. There's a certain air of bewilderment that pervades the article, though the Fable team apparently got over their bafflement at the reception of Fable I to try and improve the second installment:
At the end of Fable I, we sat down and we kind of thought, firstly the reviews were... some of the reviews were very mixed. We asked ourselves, "How did we disappoint people?" — with those reviews. The second thing, the boards were unbelievably passionate about some things. Incredibly passionate and very focused on, "Why isn't there free roaming? I thought there was free roaming, this should have free roaming, it's supposed to be an open world." That was 100%, everybody was passionate about that. There were some other things that were very confusing. The length of the story was immensely confusing because a lot of people said it was far, far, far too short and a lot more people said, "Actually, it's just the right length, and it was the only game I finished because it was that length."
It's not a massive interview, though there's a lot of discussion packed into four pages, but it's an interesting look behind the scenes — and it's definitely interesting to see Molyneux's position on some of the criticisms aimed at the Fables. Peter Molyneux: Fable II, From Conception To Reality [Gamasutra]