Been playing through Fable 2 for maybe the 6th time with my wife and I am obsessed with this truly mediocre (but Actually Good) game. This is my thread trying to figure out why I keep playing this kinda bad (but High Quality) game.
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Exhibit 1a:
I heard a villager say “Every time I see a tree, I want to chop it into a thousand tiny pieces! Do you know of any jobs like that?” There was an awkward pause, and then another villager (who sounded exactly the same as the first) said “There’s a wood cutting job nearby!” Another short pause later, the first villager (who sounded exactly the same as the second) said “Great!”
Exhibit 1b:
My wife married a dude for a quest, and then sacrificed him to the Temple of Shadows immediately thereafter. She primarily did this because marriage is, putting it politely, totally broken (in Fable 2 (and possibly real life)).
Afterwards, a villager accused her of sacrificing her husband and told her that was despicable. I don’t know how this villager knew. I’m also not 100% certain this really happened - it may have been just a generic accusation of sacrificing people, not specifically aimed towards her husband, and I’m misremembering it. But here’s the thing: this very specific situation would not surprise me at all.
Exhibit 1c:
There is a villager who tells stories in the gypsy camp. I cannot get my wife to stop and listen to the stories, but I can say with confidence that I have never heard him say the same thing twice.
Exhibit 1d:
My wife left the game on for a bit to get some money from her stores. She was standing outside the pub. When we turned the TV back on, she was being regaled with bizarre compliments and insults by a drunk villager, who seemed to be torn between flirting and dimissal. It went on for quite a while before she (the villager) got bored and wandered off.
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(spoiler text is fat shaming)
Exhibit 2a:
Fable 2 is the only game, other than Saint’s Row, where you can get fat and you actually look like a fat person. Like, big belly, big arms, big legs, kind of round face, but not grotesque. To get fat, you have to buy 10 pies and eat them all at once. People will think you are ugly, but only a little. Bandits will call you fatty and threaten to cut the fat off of you. It’s a mixed bag
Exhibit 2b: Hammer, one of the primary characters in the game, is a big strong lady with (you guessed it) a hammer. She was a peaceful monk who sometimes chafed against the pacificity of her religion. When you meet her, she is singing a song about a tragedy that happened between Fable 1 and 2. She’s also getting drunk. Her father ends up being taken hostage and she drops pacificity for murderin’. After her dad dies, she becomes disillusioned by her religion. By the end of the game, she decides to live with monks who study violence so they can prevent it. She’s also pretty funny. I like her.
Exhibit 2c: You can have big bisexual orgies. Of all the things in this game that have a meter marking your progress or actions, your sexuality is not one of them. Nobody cares.
Of course, your big orgies always happen in a single bed either in a pub or your house, and it’s utterly ridiculous sounding, so…it’s a mixed bag.
Exhibit 3a:
This game is obsessed with meters. Everythings is tracked, and none of it means anything. There are two main meters, Purity/Corruption and Good/Evil. Let’s list the ways you can change these:
Purity/Corruption:
Raise/Lower your shop prices (the easiest and quickest way to to this. You can go from a slob to a pristine angel in 1 day)
Eating vegetables (purifies you)
Sleeping too long (corrupts you)
Eating meat (corrupts you)
Gambling may affect this, but who cares??
Evil:
Murder
Eating crunchy chicks (live baby chickens)
Various quests (murder all the very nice monks, kill a random farmer, etc.)
Stealing
Sacrificing people to the temple of shadows (more evil than run of the mill murder)
Scaring people into giving you a gift
Good:
Donating to the temple of light (easiest way to raise your morality, if you bought enough shops)
Various quests (don’t murder all the very nice monks, don’t kill a random farmer)
Eating tofu (hi @notbov)
Playing a lute in front of a crowd (???)
Doing nice things for someone until they give you a gift
Getting married
Good, evil, purity, and corruption primarily exist to affect your appearance. Their effects are totally malleable though. By going from good to evil, you can literally go from angel to devil. There is one demon door you can only open if you are evil. There are maybe 3 expressions that you can only do based on how good or evil you are.
Exhibit 3b:
The villagers say so many weird things relating to what you’re doing at the time that it’s ridiculous.Here are things you can do that will affect the villagers’ speech:
- what monsters you’ve killed recently
- whether or not you’ve changed your clothes
- how many things you’ve bought
- how much money you have
- how much you scare them
- what the prices are in your stores
- whether or not you are nice to your dog
- what clothes you are wearing currently (different than changing clothes)
- if you recently made a rude expression
- if you levelled up your skills
- your morality/purity is at a high level
- how much you drink
- your promiscuity
- whether or not you’ve murdered a guard recently
- whether you gamble too much
- how skilled you are at jobs
None of it means anything. It’s just flavor. Villagers might as well not exist for as much as they affect your actual playing. They just sort of wander around shouting things in your general direction. It’s incredible.
Exhibit 3c:
Every town has its own “Economy” rating, which is primarily affected by how much stuff you are buying, and whether or not the prices in your store are too high. Lowering the economy means that people complain very vocally about being poor, and the items that shops offer are both cheaper and lower quality. Raising the economy does the opposite.
But you can’t affect the economy of Fairfax Gardens, which is accessible almost from the beginning, and you can buy the highest quality items there, so who cares?
Exhibit 3d:
Shop prices are affected by the economy (see above), how much the shopkeeper likes you (or if they are scared of you), and whether or not you own the store, plus any sales that are going on. Stupidly, this also affects your sell prices in exactly the same way, so if you sell something to a shopkeeper who likes you a lot, then they give you less money than if they hated you. The best strategy is to have shopkeepers in one town love you, and shopkeepers in another town hate you, and then you just go to the loving ones to buy and the hating ones to sell.
Owning a store will mean that anything you sell there will be at least 25% less than its actual value, unless you sell the store first. Which you could do. You could sell the store, sell your items, then buy the store back for almost the same price.
Exhibit 3f:
Your skills affect your appearance, and this is permanent. Getting better at magic gives you weird blue lines on your face. Getting stronger makes you big and bulky. Getting better at shooting makes you taller (what?).
The order in which you acquire your skills determines how much this occurs. So if you unlock a ton of shooting skills first, then do strength, you’ll be taller than you are bulky. But vice versa, and you’ll be more bulky and less tall.
Exhibit 3g:
Getting knocked out, i.e. losing all of your health, has two consequences. The experience sitting on the ground disappears, and you may get a scar. You can get loads of scars and look like a Mad Max reject. They fade somewhat over time but are otherwise permanent. You’ll never see them because the camera is too far away, unless you take off all of your clothes.
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A Real Mixed Bag
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Conclusion 1: My favorite thing about this game is how far the ambitions are from the reality of the game. It wants to immerse you in this world, so it has villagers shout at each other in exactly the same voice about local jobs. It wants to make you feel like your choices are meaningful, so you get a halo for not murdering people and eating tofu and giving money to the church. It wants to make you care about the characters, so…well, it does okay at this. But not great.
Conclusion 2: The combat is really mushy, but I don’t fucking care. It’s super satisfying to hold B for 10 seconds and then strike everyone around you with lightning and watch them twitch and die. They can turn into skeletons too which is fun.
Conclusion 3: Fable 2 is, to me, the beginning of the end of an era where people decided that games should be a collection of variables that track your actions and then change the game for each person. I don’t have any data to back this up, but it feels like AAA games went from this kind of lunacy in 2008 to something more like Gone Home in 2013, where the story is set in stone but you decide the pace and structure of how you discover it.
Upon slightly more thought, I guess Fable 2 sits somewhere in the middle of this Player Choice phenomenon, because most of it is set in stone, and the only things you can change don’t matter in the least. In this way, it reminds me of one of my other shitty favorite games, Sonic Adventure, for trying to bridge this unbridgeable gap. Sonic Adventure was trying to be a Cool 3D Story Game while trying to also be a Really Awesome Sonic Game and ended up failing at both. Fable 2 is trying to be a Highly Directed Experience while also being Affected By Player Choice, and…ends up failing at both.
But in interesting ways!
More thoughts to come as we approach the end of the game
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I’d instead use the frame of PC sim-like development (Lionhead’s heritage) running into linear console trends (which Western developers adopted). The console market, shaped by Japanese dominance through the late '80s and '90s, has a heritage of action and directed, constrained play; as Western developers transitioned out of PC-land and onto consoles, they began shedding the simulationist tendencies as they attempted to simplify designs (often hamfistedly).
GTA is probably the highest-profile simulationist console game, and I think it’s an interesting comparison with Fable; a similarly shallow world, with immense energy spent on reacting in aesthetic ways. GTA’s a lot more consistent about this and makes a lot more sense as a result.
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I approve of any game with a zombie wife
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that’s a good take
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always a good time to link:
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Yeah Molyneux is the tag-along to the big PC simulationists and Fable is just his particular version of that guard’s entrance into the “console” space.
I put console in scare quotes cause obviously the hardware itself has little to do with the design (although there’s something to be said for what control pads enable as opposed to kb/m).
The other way to put this dichotomy is “western” versus “Japanese” but that too is obviously oversimplified. Anyway, as parallel trends they’re clear enough.
The late 00’s didn’t see the foundation of new design but rather the obliteration of these old strains into one mega-philosophy we call AAA. Japanese studios started using western middleware and gameforms and western developers started to shave all the edges off their simulations til the only way you could really tell the difference anymore was aesthetic.
If this represented the entirety of games production we’d be in a hell of a bad place, but luckily the same globalization that collapsed the various strains of big-budget philosophies into AAA also opened up the indie space.
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The new King’s Bounty games are pretty good and the sequel has one of my favorite subtitles in a video game: Armored Princess.
In abstraction, sure, but developers respond to perceived audience difference, play expectations between couch and chair; in Lionhead’s case they very directly were dancing to Microsoft’s Xbox vision.
I like it more than Heroes of Might & Magic but I think I can only do one of those campaigns per lifetime
nonsense
D:
Yes, clearly. But the difference is mostly psychological? Which of course makes it real. It’s an odd phenomenon.
All I mean to say is there’s nothing essentialist about this, it’s just descriptions of trends.
Sure. It’s as real as anything to developers because they must be responsive to players, but player culture has grown these expectations in similar accidents as much human culture differences.
At least we’ve solved half the battle and I can play console-style games on PC with a controller.
Yeah but they don’t even make the other ones any more. The minor resurgence of the so-called “immersive sim” notwithstanding.
Sure they do, just not nearly as much in AAA devspace because it’s gone the way of blockbuster movies. The money risked in investing must be made back so there’s pressure to perform adequately to a large, global audience. Which means they becomes these monolithic properties targeting more platforms (fewer complex actions) and themes tending towards things we respond to at a lizard brain level (explosions, fighting, sex appeal, etc) so they can cross cultural boundaries more easily.
Yeah, I really don’t see too many genres not being represented well in 2017, unless your issue is wanting to see them all represented at a high budget
like no question that the late aughts were utterly dire between the combination of terrible repetitive designs and everyone acting like they’d finally cracked the secret to making blockbuster versions of old PC franchises but the last 8 years have been a massive improvement
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