Determinance screenshot

The Fable 2 Divide

I think that El Hombre and I may be developing a difference of opinion over Fable 2.

Here’s what I think so far, and this is after about fifty minutes play…

Fable 2 is casual Oblivion.

Now, I haven’t played Fable 1, so I can’t talk about sequel interrelation – this makes me a bad reviewer.  However, if we sideline my personal inadequacies for just a moment, I’ll explain myself a little: the “open-world” nature of Fable 2 is clearly influenced by Bethesda, but the core philosophy of the game is a paradigm shift away.

Fable 2 wants to be an open world fantasy game that puts no pressure on the player.  It wants to tug you gently in certain directions, mostly intended to encourage you and say, “Look at this weird cave over there” or “Look at this ridiculous hat you can get when you progress”, but it doesn’t want to punish you for…well, anything really.

That’s an interesting proposition to me: I like designs which try to eliminate the nonsense parts of gaming.  I don’t know why I should be hunting around for the right direction to go all the fucking time in a game – that is my personal bugbear.  Fable 2 just completely takes that out of the equation (for the main quest at least) with the controversial breadcrumb trail.  I love the breadcrumb trail.

Now, it’s known that I’m broadband rubbish at games.  I get lost all the time in the most simple environments because, well, I’m a bit of an idiot.  I don’t pretend that I’m important as a demographic, but someone coming along and saying, “This thing you hate? Yeah, we don’t need that”: pretty gratifying.  I liken getting lost to insta-death in adventure games: people used to think you needed insta-death as a stick to threaten the player.  You don’t, and I believe it was Lucasarts who proved that.  People weren’t playing those games so they could die.

Fable’s core goal is to simplify everything, then turn down the intensity to the lowest possible setting.

I think this is going to be the cause of the divide between me and El Hombre, who recently declared that he “nearly fell over with boredom” on entering the first dungeon.  The slow-burn, cotton-wool nature of everything will probably get to him and make him kill himself, because (and I’m trying to elucidate someone else’s needs here, so he’ll almost certainly disagree with me even if I’m right, which I don’t profess to be) he needs to feel profoundly in control of his character and to be exerting a strong influence on the situation.  I found the first dungeon relaxing because you basically don’t have to do anything – it’s essentially there to introduce the first real combat and teach you the idea of diverting from the path occasionally.  Lionhead have targeted this game SMACK at the casual market – it tells you what to do all the time; it teaches you very, very slowly.

Now, if that continues then, for me, the game will become boring, but I’m anticipating that the pace and intensity will start to be ratcheted up as you gain familiarity with the systems.  I’m hoping, anyway.

Here are my current negatives:

1. If you’re shooting for simplicity, why are you using every button on the flipping controller?

Button juggling is very prevalent in this game, yet still the A button is confusingly overused, and certain actions are not particularly predictable.  There’s tapping, holding, pressing, combining, bad menu page design…LOTS of simple interface problems.

I find the menus, and triggering conversations, so ANNOYING, I’m not sure I want to get into all of the deep stuff in the game, like trading etc.  That’s a bad problem: it’ll become easier with familiarity, but it’s still bad.

All this stuff, making it hard to find key items in the menus – big problem for the casual player.  The dog elixir is in a STUPID place like “Misc items” or something, not with all the stuff that heals you WHERE IT SHOULD OBVIOUSLY BE.

2.  Animation

Animation breaks too much for my liking, and the transition between directions is pretty poor.

3.  The camera in co-op mode

The camera makes offline co-op unplayable.  I played for 5 minutes and couldn’t REACH a valuable item because of the camera.  Why doesn’t one player have control of the camera?  I’m assuming there’s a reason for that I haven’t thought of actually, because it would seem to be the first port of call.  But the solution of giving control to nobody and using a shit zooming camera was not an adequate one.  I’m not playing offline co-op again.

4.  My 360 is too loud.

That’s not a problem with Fable 2.

I’m not willing to straight out say that I love it yet, because it still hasn’t opened up into a proper game (after the first dungeon and the “bandit” mission).  I’m betting on it doing so soon, and then I’ll be able to consider my overall reaction, but until then I embrace its slow-burning nature, and hope that more designers will get rid of stupid gaming appendices like being lost.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 30th, 2008 at 6:30 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “The Fable 2 Divide”

  1. malakian:

    § November 30th, 2008 at 7:30 pm

    Yeah you like it now, but it’s going to be over by the time you’ve realised it’s begun.

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