Fable II

It is easy to make fun of Peter Molyneux and his tilting at windmills when it comes to game design. I admit that I do it for cheap laughs at this point, even though it may be a little unfair. It is a worthy and honorable goal he has set for himself, to change the way the player and setting interact in gaming. However, it is also worthy and honorable to shut your yap long enough to try and achieve your goals.

When I purchased my Xbox console years back, there weren't many games available at all, and few and far between were really immersive RPGs. Having just finished Deus Ex: Invisible War, I was naturally a trifle starved for challenge and... what do you call it? Oh yeah, good game design.

Now, at the time, searching for "Xbox" and "RPG" together would point you to dozens of articles about the upcoming Fable which began as something called Project Ego. The whole thing started years before as an idea to take role-playing games to the next level and was actually approaching completion around the time I started making inquiries. I was interested, but not just because I had recently taken up residence in Xbox Land, a bleak landscape at the time, where finding a game concerned with intellectual stimulation or emotional depth was even more difficult than finding a spot in my entertainment center big enough to accommodate the thing. My interest was piqued also because I had played Black and White (another Molyneux title). It was a game that, despite its many, many flaws, touched on something unexpected and visceral by incorporating the actual hand of god into the "god game." Not only could you interact with the world via a series of commands, "go there," "build that," "attack them," but you could actually grab and pound and throw. The cursor actually existed in the world in a way that was superbly fulfilling for a longtime RTS player like myself who had always longed to punish my soldiers for their failure by flinging them into the sea.

Sadly, Fable was months away and always had a bit of a problem with deadlines. After getting sick of the almost daily updates which read more like sermons from Molyneux and his acolytes which the gaming media faithfully relayed to the pliant consumers, convincing us that it wasn't so much a delay as it was a three-month long awesome injection, I decided it was time to look elsewhere. I told myself I was going to find something to play until I had Fable.

I found Morrowind, but that's another story.

Fable was eventually released. It was a solid action/RPG with some very entertaining skills and magic attacks, an intuitive combat control setup, but a touch on the short side, and... you know, completely fell short of the world-changing, balls-blasting, epic masterpiece over a decade in the making. In other words, it wasn't the game we were promised.

I'm certain that the gaming public would have been fine with it if they hadn't felt the need to talk it up so much. As it happened, Molyneux looked like an ass and the gaming media sources (I'm looking at you specifically, IGN) were exposed as the corporate shills they had always been and still are.

The story of Fable is a cautionary tale, really. A parable for the benefit of the industry, the media, and gamers alike. The morals being "Don't make promises you can't keep," "don't parrot ridiculous promises just because they let you hang out at Lionhead Studios for an hour," and "those other two just want your money and think you're stupid," respectively.

Now we have Fable II. Yes, I know it's been out for a while. My console was at the Xbox Repair Center over the holidays, so cut me some slack. Things seemed a bit quieter this time around. Granted, there wasn't enough time between it and its predecessor to even attempt to match it in pure hype volume, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here. I intend to at least feign journalistic integrity and try to review the game on its own terms.

In one promotional video, the protagonist is shown leaping a fence as if to say, "Remember how the first game was just a series of paths strung together? Remember how we promised something more sandbox-like? We actually did it this time." The problem is that there are maybe three open field maps like that and the rest of the game is the same linear point A to point B stuff from the first game. This is normally fine, but not when they advertised something entirely different. Make no mistake, the level design is basically the same as the first game, it just broadens somewhat at a few points, and there really isn't much out there to discover when it does. Just a few piles of junk for your dog to find and an angry beetle or two.

While they should have fired that guy, it appears they shitcanned whoever was responsible for the original Fable's outstanding control setup. In the first game, you can alternate between one melee weapon, one ranged weapon, and four spells without accessing the menu screen. It was very smooth and quite possibly the game's chief success. In Fable II, however, the targeting system feels slippery, the spells take too long to charge up, and the melee combat is slow and heavy. I played the sequel expecting at least the same standard of gameplay, but it didn't feel anywhere near as dynamic.

On the other hand, I appreciated the tweaks to the leveling system. Fable II is a title that combines action with role-playing character-building. What I like about it is that, in certain cases, the actual mechanics of combat actions evolve as you play. Dodge rolls, aimed shots, and melee flourishes are all unlocked as the player gains levels in the appropriate skills. You could end the game unable to perform simple maneuvers available to characters with a different focus. This may seem restrictive, but I think it's actually a very good idea when you look at it next to the Elder Scrolls' method in which every character is capable of every action, they just fail a lot. Since levels only influence the invisible dice rolls that happen when you try, you can still attempt something even though it's way out of your skill range. Admittedly, it is hilarious to take on a powerful foe with a bow and arrow when your character only has a passing familiarity with it, and you find yourself backpedaling rapidly and filling your opponent's face with projectiles to no avail. Unfortunately, it's far from realistic and breaks flow. In Fable II, a skilled gunslinger can take aim at an opponent's head for massive damage whereas a sword-swinging meat head can only clumsily fire from the hip.

I think Fable II it could benefit even more from my previous advice to Bethesda. If they want to go the sandbox route, then cut out the main story altogether because every quest you finish, hell, every step your character takes along that hideous glowing path pointing you to the next objective is time that could be spent exploring and personalizing. New players will be taken by surprise when the game story skips forward a decade while those of us who were around for the first one tiptoe about the map for fear of the cutscene that will end the current phase of the game because we're in the middle of something. The game's brevity and rapid pacing draw the player inexorably to the end and you can miss a lot of the ancillary material they're so very proud of themselves for including.

The game outside the main story isn't even very good. You can work tedious jobs, purchase homes and businesses, and attract a mate. None of these are particularly challenging activities, and they offer essentially no reward other than a few different lines of dialogue from the NPC you shove by on your way to the market. Fable II, like its predecessor, is unable to decide what kind of game it wants to be to the detriment of the whole experience.

I have yet to sample the downloadable content for Fable II, as I've been too busy liberating Anchorage from the communists in Fallout 3, but I fail to see how the addition of new content is going to save the game that can't properly organize the content it had at release.

I don't think the Fable games should try to be bigger than they are because there's nothing wrong with taking the time to really hone the action/adventure game, personalizing it with bits of RPG along the way. Peter Molyneux just needs to pull his head out of his ass and admit that's what he's doing. If it had a little more focus it could really be something special.