Gaming: Fable, must or bust?
For some industry background, Fable is a game in the making for nearly 4 years. In the gaming industry an average development schedule is 18 months or so, while there are still quite a few games that take between 2-3 years from start to finish. 4 years, I think, is exceptionally long. When you release a game after such a period it must be better than anything on the market and push the genre forward by a leap and a bound instead of making baby steps. Since you can define a game by its leaps and bounds let's take a look at some of the leaps Fable has made.
- Rich social play? I put that in question marks because I feel a number of people will find the expressions system to be quite a leap forward in social game play. The player controls his/her actions in order to gain favor in either a good or evil alignment. Various interactions between the player and in game characters spawns game long relationships.
- Marriage? Asheron's Call had marriage, but they drew the line at marriage between members of the same sex. The marriage system is quite advanced allowing for basic marriage, sex, and even divorce. You are able to lure members of the same sex into marriage as well, something that should definitely bridge a few gaps and raise a few eyebrows considering the current political trends to disallow homosexual marriage.
- Time elapse system? There is a long term time elapse system based on the character's own advanement in experience. This is different from say a fixed time system where the time is elapsed based on time in game. This is disconcerting and you wind up running through your first 10-15 years in only a few hours and then spending many hours to gain a single level later in the game.
All of Fable's leaps and bounds are questionnable in terms of implementation. The social play is actually very easy to manage with only a few interactions. The deep possibilities simply don't exist and often when you think your expressions may make a difference in the game-play they tend not to. The water is flowing, the plumbing just isn't there. The same holds for marriage. The social interactions required to marry are quite simple and only take a short time to accomplish (seconds at times, but less than a couple of minutes in nearly all cases).
The time elapse system truly does hold merit, but it breathes problems for other areas of the game. For instance, you are able to buy homes, improve them, but you only get money from renting them as time elapses. It takes a great deal of money to buy these homes, and there truly isn't enough time in the game to recoup your entire investment. Each home does yield a dowry if you use it as a marriage stead, after which you can later rent it again. This extra dowry money may offset your overall loss in accumulating rent. At the end of the day, you can always sell your house for the amount invested. We weren't talking about homes though, instead time elapse. This is just one example of the many systems that seem to fall prey to holes in time elapse.
Maybe the hype was too much, maybe I expected too much, but I can generally only play a game through once and I always expect some amount of game time for my investment of $50. Fable offers exactly 8 hours if you are playing it through for the story. It offers another 8 if you play it through under the reverse alignment. The game-play is insanely linear even though it attempts to be extremely parallel and playing through the second time requires that you really play the extreme roll to that you played the first time. If you plan on playing what you might call the sub-game of "living" within the world, there is probably another 4 hours to 8 hours you could sneak into each run. Are we expected to live with 16-30 hours of gameplay?
You'd think a company with such a background in alignment oriented gameplay, after Black & White, wouldn't take take 4 years to serve me a mediocre derivative. Black & White offered much more stimulating and complex interactions. It is always possible that a complex and feature rich system lies in the darkness behind a much simplified interface, but what I can't see, what I can't attempt to manipulate isn't a playability feature. It is instead a trap hole to be fallen into by the unwary game player. In such a game it can be seen as a fault if a player falls into a specific role with too much ease. Having played the game through, most of the content is geared towards the good player, and further a first game through almost always yields a good character unless you purposely try to be extemely evil.
Games with similar elements: Morrowind (better), Animal Crossing (better), Wind Waker (same), the Myst series (better)