When the original Xbox was the hot thing in town, there was a game. It was supposed to be awesome: a vast world to explore, a progression system based on your actions, deep choices and the ability to play hero or villain. Your adventure was supposed to take your character from childhood to old age, your model was supposed to change depending on many factors, including your weapon choices and your food.
What did we get? The original Fable. A game with limited exploration possibilities, stupid progression system that made your character age artificially, a boring story with only a few choices that had real consequences, a story unchanged by whether or not you were hero or villain. A disappointment to all who had been following the game’s development and Peter Molyneux’s, its director, wild promises. When you first can leave the tutorial area, your mentor asks you to meet him in the inn of a nearby town. However, I went for a little exploration and leveled up a bit. When I went out of the Guild, with my new spells and such, I had changed artificially. Instead of seeing my character grow while using a sword, I saw him grow by clicking on a button to increase my strength.
However, my astonishment went one step further: my character had aged! His training had taken 6 years of his life (yeah, I leveled quite a bit while exploring). No mention of time had been given, yet my status clearly recorded him as being 24 years old! Going to the town, the mentor was still there, waiting for me, as if he asked me to join him the day before.
Then I wanted to explore; but most of the world is in fact blocked to you. Until you’ve accepted a quest, and performed it, you cannot progress. So you have to ultimately do quests that in no way have a link to the overall story, like bringing stuff to a merchant beyond a forest, or some other crap, to make the story progress. The promise that quests could be done on two sides – for instance, if a farmer wanted protection from bandits, you could protect his farm or help the bandits! – was also a lie; very few quests in the game allowed you to do that. Most were basic, honorable, heroic stuff. Plus, the promise that the “epic" story was going to take a few years of my character’s life was technically true: discounting the leveling-up aging process, the story could take place in as few as a few DAYS, but clever storyteller force us to be captured at some point and leave us to be in jail for a few years. So technically true; but it was a cheap way to make a story seem to take a long time instead of a few days to be resolved.
When Fable II was announced, I tried not to hear much. However, the game did not do much better; side quests necessary to advance the plot, same enemies, same progression, linear path; a chapter where you are captured to make the story artificially longer; the arena also mandatory instead of being a side quest (grats for recycling your boring story elements, BTW); plus, at the end, it was really unclear I was fighting the final boss! Spoilers ahead: You just found the third hero that’ll help you defeat the bad guy, when the city is attacked. You run through some subterranean corridors, trying to escape, when you are met, on the outside, by a giant version of the flying, triangle UFOs. I beat it without even breaking a sweat. Then, we are transported to the huge evil tower, and we confront the bad guy… and there’s not even a fight. The final boss WAS the triangle UFO. Talk about un-epic.
Not to mention that without even stopping to level up and not doing all the side-quests, I ended up with just about every skill you could want! I think I had two or three missing, and I think I may have had a few XP potions left. Too easy.
Oh, but, but the game allowed me to buy houses. Great! Now I can play monopoly and make money to buy garbage! Color me bored.
So now the third Fable is about to be released. First we had a game that broke countless promises and turned out to be a bland action game with lite-RPG elements; then we had a souped-up version of the same game, with the ability to buy houses and a dog. Now… we can touch people? Is that the great gimmick in this game? That’s all they could come up with? Touch people to make them react to you? Wow. This feel like the most tacked-on feature I’ve seen in a game! You can hug virtual characters! Yippee! Why don’t you concentrate on making a quality game instead of adding useless stuff?
This may seem like a rant, but every Fable has incredible potential. Fable 1 was probably too ambitious, but Fable 2 does not have that problem. Fable 2’s problem was that they focused on unimportant elements and recycled some of what had been done before: the arena being mandatory in both games and the MC getting captured for years are inexcusable repeat of something that had been poorly done before. I’m not expecting Fable 3 to be that much better. And it’s too bad, because the series has its charm, I want to love it… it just left me disappointed and bitter two times too many.
No comments:
Post a Comment