Molyneux began with a discussion of the considerably altered combat system...

"I want a system which is really accessible to use within a role-playing game, but a system that is much, much deeper than it was in Fable," he claimed. "[Fable's] combat was a little bit too button-mashy for my tastes. There wasn't enough variation there."

Surprisingly, his solution to this quandary was to simplify the control scheme, eliminating two of the three combat buttons from the original game. ...

"I know that's a pretty strange choice," he said, "because normally, in [Fable], we had the attack button, we had the block button, we had a parry and flourish button. We had three buttons, and we've reduced all that down to one button. But we want to try to make that as deep as we possibly can."​

With that, Molyneux launched into a brief discussion of how death is portrayed in video games, calmly (but sharply) voicing his displeasure with how recent games have used checkpoint systems as a crutch. "The idea of most games, including Fable, is that when you die, you go back to the last checkpoint or the start of the level," he said. "I just think that that's stupid nowadays. It really pisses me off. And I really feel ... if I do it more than twice, I feel like throwing the controller across the room. Because all the flow of the combat is broken by that, by you being defeated."​

In place of such a system is one in which the player will fall in battle, but not actually die. Instead, as the surrounding enemies continue to pummel the hero, he will earn permanent scars that will shape the way he is perceived by other characters. "If you 'die' a lot, you get scarred a lot," Molyneux said. "You get scarred a lot, people react to you differently. Your wife, when you go back home, will come out and say, 'God, what happened to your face?' And that is a new emotion."​