Gaming: Fable, two views in one. Is this good or bad? (no pun intended)
To start, congrats to all those that actually syndicate my feed directly, you get a custom rant of sorts. Actually a bit better, you get my own insights as a game designer on a popular game, and your own opportunity to provide your own feedback which I definitely welcome.
Let me start off by saying, two times through the same game is rough. The first time through I was the good guy and everything clicked. I was angelic, beautiful, got all the girls (and guys), etc... Nearly every game play element was aligned towards this eventuality. There were some options (attack versus defend the farm and other two sided events), but in general they were very limited. In fact, many of the primary quests within the game didn't appear to have too many options, including the Bandit's quest. You'd figure this last quest would have been played from a drastically different perspective from the evil standpoint.
What does it mean to be good in Fable? Well, play nearly any hero based game. You are the hero and at the end of the day you feel like superman with everyone chanting your name and digging your presence. You can't really say much about this alignment, except that you can't steal or kill civilians if you want to stay good for a long time. All in all, this is very easy because it plays into your sensibilities and there is still plenty of other stuff to do.
What does it mean to be evil in Fable? It basically means being a jack-ass. I guess they thought the expressions you get as an evil character would make up for the fact that the only real effect you have now is to be completely destructive to the world. I don't care how evil you are, without people surrounding you that want to be like you, there isn't much room to travel. Unfortunately everyone in Fable is a goody two shoes. As an evil character you can't participate in marriage, meaning no dowry's and no free gifts from the wife. In return you get to steal things. Now most of the shops have very limited equipment laying out in places where you can easily steal it. Instead the reserve the good stuff (that your wife would have given you) to the front counter where they have their beady little eyes on it. That means you can't steal discretely and instead you have to snatch and run.
I guess they balanced the game using these methods in order to ensure both alignments would get a sufficient amount of money throughout. In the beginning the evil character tends to excel since you have great equipment and plenty of cash. What I've noticed is that at some point, you really don't get that many experience points or cash. I think the difference lies in the weapons, since most evil characters with stealing abilities are going to be archers. You tend to get fewer experience point in this line of work, since the concept of an archer is slow and steady which doesn't make for great combat multipliers (a way of multiplying the amount of experience you get). Believe it or not the mental strain of being an evil character is also quite draining. If you thought getting praised everywhere you went was bad, wait until you get boo'ed. I definitely think there is a real psychological impact while playing the game through in this manner. Maybe some players won't even notice it, especially if you focus on limited game-play times.
Is the game meant to be faster the second time through? I swear some of the shops are selling different equipment than they were before. Not new equipment, but much larger equipment. In the first game they didn't sell that equipment until very late in the game, after the arena had been beaten (master equipment). It is possible each play of the game has some impact on future games. The impact is so far so slight, that it wouldn't be worth it to play the game many times through to try and judge some long term impact.
Lack of multiple story lines really brings this game to it's knees. Like I said, playing through from two different perspectives would have been very nice. There are games out there that take on this role. I have a PS2 game which I can't recall at the moment where you first play from the perspective of a young boy and then a girl. Each gets different weapons as they go through and you have to beat the game twice in order to unlock everything that is available. Both perspectives are quite different so you don't get stuck with the boring tedium of the same game and same quests/events happening. In fact even the storyboards they use are different.
With the lack of story lines comes a lack of evil content. As mentioned the main story is geared towards the hero, not the bad guy. The bad guy should be able to interact with the bandits on an equal level, perhaps even become their hero. There is a main boss character called Jack of Blades that is a very convincing bad guy. Being able to play the game from his perspective would be interesting. At the end of the game, you get an option to use the sword that is the pinnacle of all your quests either for good or evil. Now, what kind of impact this has I'm not sure, since the game ends after you make the choice. If you try to continue or use your old game you start right before the final quest. Tell me that isn't bogus. It is possible the choice I made is what had the slight impact on the world the second time through. There won't be a third, so I won't know if the evil choice I made the second time actually has any impact.
If you want to add evil to a game do it right. I don't know what fool sat around a table and decided that allowing you to kill a shop-keeper was ever a good idea. With him dead, how are you supposed to buy his goods? The short answer is that such destructive allowances tend to dead end the game. Nothing you can do as the good character would derail your quest for the end or disable you from purchasing needed goods. Anytime you fail a quest or something important you get shoved back to a save point. With the evil character, no such equivalent exists. You can clear entire towns of people if you wish. In fact I may play through a third time just to see the extent of the destructive forces that you can put into play, so I never make the same mistake in my own games. In reality there may be people that have the destructive powers equivalent to the in-game character, but they are also faced with a much larger and more vibrant population of people to combat them. A game where you spend 25 to life wouldn't be much fun at all.
Fable definitely offers a good deal of playability. There are options in the game that make you step back and think of how cool having that option is. However, there are an equal many options that should be available that aren't. This type of one-sided programming is common in video games because you can't program in EVERYTHING. You want the game to be somewhat consistent, so you can't drive it with truly ingenious adaptive programming. And that points out what Fable is missing most, and that is balance. While on the surface the game supposedly allows a player to make any choices they would like, it is really a game about good and evil. There isn't any middle ground and for the D&D players there isn't the option of being chaotic good or lawful evil. Where it should be a matrix defining the morality off your character it is instead a see-saw that only gives you the option of being on one side or the other.