On the off chance that Peter Molyneux reads this, I’d like to ponder a few thoughts and ideas about the Fable series.
It’s fair to say that the Fable games are by no means perfect – occasionally making some bewilderingly stupid choices, such as trying to take the RPG element of an action RPG in Fable 3; toning the main story down to almost background ambiance in Fable 2 and starting an action RPG game series with ‘choices’ being at the heart while slowly witling down both the impact and quantity of player choices as the series continues. Despite being consistently plagued by stupid decisions, Fable still has a big fan base – which I make no bones about being in myself.
Thinking about it, I’d say that the success is down to it being quintessentially British; therefore witty, funny and brilliantly light-hearted whenever appropriate (i.e., sidequests don’t really affect the main story in any game, so there are usually funny resolutions available in Fable games). As far as games design is concerned, I wholeheartedly support this approach to sidequests – they should stem from the main narrative and/or game world, but because they’re not necessarily expected to evolve into anything significant, they should be little relieving tangents with various approaches to solving them for the player’s amusement.
For example, if an NPC asks you to complete a fetch quest, then sets you steadily more objectives (with the ‘while you’re there…’ tagline), the game should cater for at least the following resolutions:
- The player completes all the objectives for a bigger reward.
- The player ignores the extra objectives and completes the basic fetch quest, receiving a smaller reward and a few insults from the ungrateful NPC.
- The player gets annoyed and leaves the ingrate to his own devices.
- The player gets pissed off, kills the NPC and loots their corpse for a moderate reward, risking only legal troubles.
This is something that the original Fable attempted (well, all right, it was The Lost Chapters version that did it better), although hampered by limitations of the available hardware and software; it made a smaller appearance in Fable 2, although there was usually very little weight to the decisions as the quests felt like they evaporated rather than resolved; but while the potential was glimmering just out of reach, multiple endings to sidequests were almost completely abandoned in Fable 3.
What the Fable series reminds me of is Blackadder, and like Blackadder, Fable has had three instalments, all interesting and charming in their own rights, but nothing to set the world on fire. With the fourth instalment in production, I can only hope enough people at Lionhead have noticed this parallel and aim for a truly brilliant classic of a fourth instalment.
The timeframes are kind of similar for both series, so why not follow this trend and set Fable 4 during a global conflict, mirroring the themes of Blackadder Goes Forth (the insanity and pointlessness of war, with the main characters being caught up in it, doing what they have to in order to survive and avoid combat)? Not only would this lay the foundations for a subtly political, intelligent and intensely funny story, but the idea of a global conflict would open up the world of Fable, with new continents and cultures vital to the story, sneaky underground resistance movements, messenger fetch quests with some sense of meaning and an overarching quest of empirical expansion and colonisation, to name a few ideas. Also, why not bring in Hugh Laurie to play a character to befriend or rival Stephen Fry’s character? How about Rowan Atkinson? Just a thought, sprouting from the ever expanding comical British voice actor list.
I imagine this would probably be very difficult to implement, but surely no more difficult than making a dodgy Kinect spin-off that literally no one will get excited about, and will only piss off fans if anything.
Can someone please pass this on to Peter Molyneux before he makes a right arse of a series struggling to find its feet and reach its potential?
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