Last week, I found myself bored at the video rental store, tired of just about every kind of movie or game I could have possibly rented. You know the feeling, when you’ve seen every episode of The Wire, Doctor Who, Deadwood and Arrested Development at least twice and all of the movies out there suck except the ones in the ‘Special Interest’ section that you know are going to be about why most everything sucks so bad.
I decided to examine all of the video games for something I might just want to try out, even though I had read the reviews of everything they had and knew that Lord of the Rings Conquest involved a lot of Cheap Deaths and Fallout 3 was really easy.
I found myself, however, in the mood to take a risk. Sometimes, during this extended stay in a pre-jump drive civilization, one becomes willing to risk 8.99 on the chance to live in another world for a little while. So there I was with Farcry 2 and Fable 2 in my hands, wondering what kind of experience I wanted.
I thought back to my experience with the original farcry, how I liked most everything about the game up until I started turning into a werewolf. But even the chance that they had actually, really this time, created an open sandbox world wasn’t enough to get me into the idea.
Fable II wasn’t really exciting me either. The last time I had been morally judged by a video game was back when I was playing Star Wars Jedi games on the PC and I never really liked it. I was always killing things I could have taken an hour to sneak around and before I knew it my character was evil and the cut scenes showed me killing all my friends for giggles.
I had been playing a lot of Call of Duty 4, attempting all of the missions on veteran(which if you haven’t tried is extremely frustrating), and Saints Row 2(but I had the attack helicopter, so everything seemed meaningless), so I decided to step back from the firearms for a week and see if I could come to enjoy slashing and spellcasting.
And be morally judged according to the ethos of Microsoft.
[Spoiler: I'm pretty good.]
Roleplaying games should always be judged first on their ability to immerse the gamer in the life of the character. Basically, if I find myself thinking about any of my real life problems as I play the game, the designers didn’t do their job. Fable II succeeds in this area. You start the game as a child beggar fighting for the chance at a better life while your sister is openly pressured by vagrants into becoming a prostitute. This gives you a chance to learn the basics of the game, including controls, display and morality. Then your sister gets shot by the head honcho guy and you somehow survive a fall from a 500 foot window.
So Fable II is not for kids, alright?
So, immersed in my character, I set out into the sandbox world to see what I could do and what I could not do. As sandbox worlds go, Fable II is a pretty small one. There are really only a handful of areas and although you can wander semi-freely through them(there are just some plants you can’t walk through), the game rations it’s space out with the story. You can’t really jump ahead or just explore for very long without completing the missions. I always wanted to go to Wraithmarsh for instance, because all of the NPC’s said they hated it, but I couldn’t find it. Turns out you have to learn where the teleporter is, and activate the teleporter, during one of the later missions.
While I was searching the areas I could go to for ways to get into new areas, I discovered that the map was, er, crappy. First, you have to push start and wait a couple seconds each time you bring it up. Then you appear as a giant arrowhead on the map, obscuring the pathways you are trying to look at. On top of that, the map is only annotated with colored symbols and you have to look at the legend to figure out what each of them are. But that won’t quite help because if there are two ‘x’ symbols on the map marking exits from the zone, there is no part of the map that will tell you which other zone it will take you to. You have to walk to it, and once there you only have a few steps with the name of the zone this exit takes you to on screen, before it just loads the new zone, which takes 30 seconds.
You wonder if the person who made this map had ever actually used one in real life….maybe that’s why mapquest isn’t as popular as google maps?
Speculations aside, you are going to have to find new areas because each zone has a limited amount of monsters, quests and things you can buy. If you want to be extra prepared for the next mission, then you are going to have to really work to collect that money and experience.
Albion, the sandbox world, has plenty of treasure boxes all over the place so you’ll find a lot of money, but creatures that you kill don’t drop anything. So when you kill five bandits who were coming at you with swords and guns, don’t think you can just pick those up and sell them like you can in any other roleplaying game. Monsters only drop experience.
I can understand how this improves game flow, you don’t have to revisit each corpse and press ‘A’ to pick things up. You do, however, have to hold down the trigger to collect your experience bubbles, which eventually becomes just as annoying. It isn’t clear how long you have to hold the trigger down before you have all the bubbles, nor is it clear how long the bubbles will just sit there waiting to be collected before they just disappear.
Microsoft’s implementation of the skill/experience concept deserves some discussion as well. In a roleplaying system, the designers have to find a way to quantify the progression of an individual through life in a way that legitimizes is believable and fun. So what are your attributes? Strength and skill are self explanitory and function decently to define the amount of damage you can take and how fast you are with a sword, but what about magic?
Dungeons and Dragons has Intelligence and Wisdom as your primary spellcasting attributes, and here Microsoft diverges. Fable designers chose ‘Will’, ostensibly ‘Willpower’ as the primary attribute required to cast fireballs and lighting strikes.
(And here I kept hearing Magenta from Rocky Horror saying ‘It’s a triumf ov your Vill!’)
I can’t help but think that this is Microsoft’s internal corporate sigma 6 style philosophy, that humans alter their environment with the power of will alone, that wisdom and intelligence and any other trait you might have can be summarized by this one. (There are nazi overtones also, but I won’t go into those.)
Another important aspect of Fable II is the aging system. After a few missions you will notice how fat you have become. And you will have scars, venereal diseases and white hair. However, this will never affect how many women want to follow you around in the towns so long as you have enough ‘renown’, which you pretty much just get for completing missions. Fatness is really oversimplified and is totally avoidable if you just never eat meat(Fable II is, after all, a PETA friendly game) only the food vendors in Albion only ever have one of each product. It’s not like you can just stock up. In town you can buy ten vegetables and ten meats, or you can buy ten vegetables. So if you want to be skinny, you better need less food(which, btw, you only use for healing). I didn’t discover this until I was already fat, so maybe I should have read the manual, but who cares, the chicks still dig me because I’m totally famous!
I found myself disturbingly attracted to this ‘fame’ aspect. For some reason the gender balance of albion is way off, so you find yourself the only available male who isn’t a dowdy functionary or complete deadbeat. So women just want you in their pants. The men too. In fact, it eventually becomes difficult to have sex in a motel room without a dozen people showing up. Then the guys start thinking you are into them because they somehow thought they were involved in the sex and, well, this game could swing a lot of ways.
So once you have sex with a woman, she wants to marry you and won’t have sex with you again until such a time. So I had sex once with every woman in the towns and left them high and dry every time they mentioned marriage. By the end of my week with Fable II, there weren’t any women who would have sex with me anymore and I was mobbed with marriage oriented nagging every time I went to the city to shop for a better giant cleaver.
I really thought about getting married though, it’s not like I was totally opposed to the idea, but these women were just not turning me on. They didn’t want to do anything I wanted to do. If I took them with me to any area outside the city, they would get killed by balverines(read: werewolves) in the first battle and didn’t have any sense to stand out of the way.
Nor did my character(or me) and these women had anything in common. Nor were they particularly attractive or unique. Their faces looked the same and they were all the same height. The depth of their characters were just that they liked this or that type of pie and the thumbs up. And, not surprisingly, they generally dislike hanging out in Wraithmarsh(which should be called Banshee-marsh unless I missed the wraiths)
I just didn’t find a relationship I could really get into in Fable II, and this left me wondering if it was a failure of the game designers or if I was just too picky as a man. It got wierder when I was at the [real] store checkout the other day and I actually considered smiling right at the cute attendant and flexing my muscles to impress her(one of the npc interaction options in the game that universally causes characters to like you more) My experience with checkout clerks has been pretty negative in the past, so I was willing to try anything. Maybe it is just that simple!
This brings me to my big complaint with Fable II, the whole game seems like a training introduction to another game, like World of Warcraft or Elder Scrolls. Or it’s for people who like choices, but not too many of them. Weapon choice, women choice, location choice, monster types, mission types, job types, everywhere you look there are just too few options.
The same could be said of moral choices, the game only gives you three or four, unless you consider how it counts romance or your treatment of random fowl. Will you torture to complete your mission? Will you sacrifice of yourself to complete a mission if it means your hair will be gray for the rest of the game? Will you accept a mission to vandalize someone’s property or take revenge for a ghost? And sure, you could kill all the villagers or constantly freak them out.
(this is one of my favorite parts of the game, when villagers mob you and you cast some loud, glowing spell and everyone freaks out and runs away…gosh I wish I could do that in real life)
So what is the point of this moral judgement when it’s so clear what the results are going to be? What does it mean when I choose how I will morally behave in a video game? What does it say about me when I try to be as good or bad as I can?
And what does it mean when I just act natural, like I would, as if I could forget there was this screen and console device between me and the imaginary world and the game designers, and Microsoft, who I consider evil, tells me I am fat, diseased and pretty decent?
I thought that in the course of this review I would get somewhat closer to the answer of that question, but it’s been a thousand words and I’m not.
So my search for a categorical imperative continues….
In Short:
The Good
does not scare away the newcomer, auto-targeting, visceral combat, decent story, dog finds everything for you.
The Bad
inevitable fatness, looks like a children’s game but there are condoms, eventually becomes very easy, npc’s all the same, few areas to explore, dog finds everything for you, vendors only have one of each thing (i.e. fruit store has a single carrot), few quests, few items, just in general a small game.
Recommendation: Rent and if it’s fun then you will enjoy Elder Scrolls of Oblivion.
Recommendations for next version:
-more areas
-more free running(i.e. can jump over all things that look like you can jump over them)
-more quests
-wider variety of npc’s
-wider variety of weapons