Lofty pursuits

Adrenaline carried me this far.  The flight from Tampa, by way of Miami was long and cramped.  I had to get to airport around 4:00 AM (read 1:00 AM PST).  I caught a little sleep on the plane but it didn’t really help.  I landed here about 11:30 local time.  I was checked in at the Hotel Diva and was ready to hit the street by 1:30 PM.

Other than the geography, the first thing that hit me is how alive San Francisco is.  I haven’t been in a real city since I left Boston 5 years ago.  It was a warm day and a pleasant walk from the hotel to the Moscone Center.  As I approached the Moscone, the first thing to strike my eye was the Metreon, that bladerunner-esque edifice to urban commerce that Sony built (and later abandoned) around the turn of the century.  The Sony Playstation store is all that remains of that bold promise and they’re pulling out at the end of the quarter.

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Of the games in my que right now, I was least looking forward to Fable II.  It makes sense then, that GameFly would choose to send it to me first, over Fallout 3.  The envelope sat unopened next to my game console, while I attempted a second playthrough of Deadspace on “Impossible” mode.

It’s not that I had anything against Fable II.  I hadn’t played the first game or, for that matter, any other fantasy role playing game for the original Xbox or 360.  But my roots in the genre run deep.  I started gaming in elementary school, in my parents garage playing Dungeons & Dragons with other boys from the neighborhood.  I used to lay in bed at night, pooring over my copies of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide and Monster Manual.  One of the first video games that I ever played was Sierra’s King’s Quest.  That was a long time ago.  Since it was first announced at E3 in 2007, I’ve followed Fable II’s development through the previews and the interviews with developer Peter Molyneux and I knew that I would have to check it out on release.  Thankfully, that day has come.

My preplay impressions were that Molyneux and his cohorts at Lionshead Studios approached the creation of the second Fable game with some very abitious ideas about the emotional investment and overall immersion that a player would experience in the Fable II world.  They tried to make a play space where you, as the player, would feel loved (or hated).  Lionshead also tried to give the player an ethical or moral choice for every action and implied that a player’s choices would effect their character’s development, the game environment and Fable II’s outcome.

You start off as young Sparrow, a child of about 9 or 10 years of age.  The only initial aspect of your character that you get to customize is gender.  You can choose either male or female.  This choice seems to be largely aesthetic and does not have any real impact on the hero’s development or the progression of the main story.  The gender choice is unique, however, because every other choice that you make in the game effects the alignment and appearance of your character as well as the appearance and interactivity of the world around you.

In the orientation mission, the initial objective that you, as young Sparrow, are given is to earn a few pieces of gold so that you can buy a music box that you suspect might have a magical property that could literally wish you and your orphan sister out of poverty.  So, you set off across your hometown that is set somewhere between Cinderella and an early colonial Dickensian fairytale.  Along the way, you encounter various townspeople who are willing to part with a piece of gold, in exchange for some basic errands.  In the pursuit of each of these quests, you’ll find an alternative (”evil”) quest that you can perform for a third party, in exchange for the same reward.

For example, the town drunk employs you to find his missing bottle of booze.  When you return to him, with bottle in hand, his wife offers to buy the bottle from you instead.  If you give the bottle to the drunk, he’s likely to continue his bender.  If the wife get’s the bottle instead, temperance and sobriety are likely to be in someone’s future.  “The choice is yours,” as they say.

Some choices have more impact on the world than others.  Also in the orientation quests, you can either retrieve some lost arrest warrants for the town guard, or sell those same warrants to the friendly neighborhood extortionist.  I chose to sell the warrants and found, when I returned to my old neighborhood ten years later, that the guard had long ago been fired and that part of town was now effectively beeing run by the local criminal elements.

For the most part, Fable II plays this game of cause and effect very well.  Throughout my many quests and battles, I soon realized that the game environment wasn’t the only thing changing because of my actions.  My character started off looking like a spry teenage girl.  By the end, she was looking something like an overweight female version of Marvel Comic’s Dr. Doom.  Getting knocked out in battle will earn you a permanent scar.  Eating food to restore your health will eventually contribute to a more bulky appearance.  It also seemed that the more I used my magic, the more I would appear bluish and “demon-like.”  The demonesque appearance could also have had something to do with my evil alignment, because I killed and pillaged with ruthless abandon!

After orientation, your character is separated from the NPC sister and ushered into exile.  The story picks you up 10 years later, when Sparrow is nearing adulthood.  After a few rites of passage that include showing off the melee, projectile and magic combat systems, you are set out into the world and given your main quest, to find the evil king Lucien; the one who banished you and separated you from your sister.

Of course, there will be plenty of side quests along the way and although most of these are not mandatory, you will find that doing a bare minimum of side quests will be the fastest and easiest way hunt down Lucien.  In order to advance in the main storyline, you’ll have to earn the renown of the townspeople and the fastest way to earn renown is to battle your way through a few hundred hobbes, trolls, hollow men, bandits and slavers.  Thankfully, the side quests offer just what you’ll need.  Combat is also essential, in order to upgrade your character’s abilities.  If you somehow manage to earn the necessary renown points without doing battle, you’ll find your character wholly unprepared to face Lucien and his army.

Each time you kill an enemy, they will release experience points in the form of color coded bubbles.  The experience points can then be allocated to upgrade your respective abilities.  Earning experience and upgrading abilities works very similar to the essence system in the Ninja Gaiden games.  Red essence bubbles are for magic abilities and correspond to the B button on the Xbox controller.  Yellow bubbles are earned while using ranged weapon attacks and correspond to the Y button.  Blue bubbles are earned when using the melee weapon attacks that correspond to the X button.  You earn different colors of experience, based on the kinds of attacks that you use most often but you also earn green colored ‘general’ experience with every kill and those points can be allocated to any combination of melee, ranged and magic abilities.

My favorite part of the game is easily the combat and my biggest complaint in that regard is that I wish there was more of it.  Using the magic to dispatch enemies is instantly satisfying.  Melee and ranged weapons need practice and a few upgrades before they become as effective and fun.  Taking the evil track, it was really easy to achieve both by going on a good old fashioned rampage at the first village that I came across.  Once you set off the guards, you can kill one after another and they will keep coming until you pay a fine or accept a “community service” quest.  I spent an hour just blasting and slashing my way through nearly 20 of them, before I finally relented on community service.

As you dispatch more and more enemies, you earn more and more devastating attacks.  Unfortunately, the quantity and difficulty of the enemies does not seem to keep pace with the growing power of your character.  By the end of the game, Sparrow is like an amalgam of Ryu Hyabusa, Conan the Barbarian and Darth Vader.  You can literally smash through your enemies like a mace through hot butter.  Because of this disparity, the combat is regrettably a lot less significant in the second half of the game.

The last really memorable battle comes at about the half-way point.  In order to earn enough renown to be able travel to Lucien’s castle, you have to fight your way through eight rounds of combat in an arena known as the Crucible.  Unlike the generally static difficulty of combat in the game, each round in the crucible is progressively more difficult than the last.  There are even achievements and unlockable items to be had, if you finish each round within a certain time limit.  If you don’t complete 8 perfect rounds the first time out, don’t worry.  Once you’ve beaten it, you can return to the Crucible for a rematch as many times as you’d like.

After beating the Crucible, I realized that I had been focusing on combat experience to the detriment of all the finer things the Fable II life has to offer.  I spent over an hour in the blacksmith shop, pounding out swords in the blacksmith job mini-game.  Blacksmithing earned me enough money to buy some property and start a family.  I married the town alchemist and installed him in a freshly appointed 1 bedroom off the town square.  He returned the favor by knocking me up.  Condoms are available in the game and you have the option of protected or unprotected sex with various non player characters.  If you have unprotected sex with a character that you’ve married in the game, a child will instantly appear via a time lapse cut scene.

You interact with your family the way you do with everyone else in the game.  There is no dialog per se but the right bumper button brings up a two tiered wheel of expressions ranging from flirty to scary.  Different folks take different strokes.  My Alchemist hubby was partial to gifts of travel-ready beef jerky and heroic poses. A combination of these expressions and the occasional blown kiss would endear he and my child to the point where I could expect valuable potions as gifts, every time I returned to the homestead.

I invested the rest of my gold to buy the blacksmith and alchemy shops in every town that I came to.  Adding a 100% markup on prices at the shops that I owned earned me the scorn of villagers and a high corruption rating but I was soon earning an income of over 8000 gold every fives minutes.  The income carries over even when you’re not playing the game.  After logging back in, you’ll be credited for the elapsed time since you last played.  I soon earned over 1 million gold this way.

Unfortunately, just like with the combat abilities, as I increased my purchasing power, scarcity became less of a challenge and the economic portion of the game became proportionally less interesting.  There were a couple of side quests later in the game that required 100,000 gold for entry.  Other than those, there wasn’t much to do with my wealth except to go through the monotony of buying up every shop and property in the world.

The main quest is broken into four parts, the hero must gather a party of three NPCs; one hero for each of the main abilities.  First, you must set off and recruit Hammer, the Hero of Strength.  Hammer is a brutish monk who is initially held to a pledge of nonviolence.  Unfortunately, that means the first part of her mission is confined to escort and protection, until a point near the end when her principle is tested and she embraces combat in pursuit of revenge.  In the second recruiting mission, you have to rescue Garth, the Hero of Will (magic) from Lucien’s fortress.  Garth was once Lucien’s chief sorcerer or something like that.  He was betrayed by Lucien and imprisioned for many years.  When you finally bust him out he’s itching for payback and readily joins your quest.  Finally, you have to get a swashbuckling dandy pistolier named Reaver, the Hero of Skill, to join your band.  Reaver has a real Lando Calrissian streak and is not to be trusted completely.  But he eventually joins you out of a sense of self preservation.

The hero missions give the main quest a real epic quality.  The party characters are shallow archetypes but compelling enough to keep things interesting.  Unfortunately, by the time you’ve got everyone together and you’re ready for the showdown, you’ve realized that all the fun was in getting to this point.  The last battle is short, anticlimactic and in most ways a let down.  The abilities of your party members don’t really seem to help take down the boss and their presence only serves to show you the different spells and weapons that you should be using.

The battle with Lucien and it’s aftermath illustrate most of Fable II’s shortcomings.  As the hero, you’ll find yourself at the end of a predetermined path.  You may have thought that you were controlling your own destiny but all the choices that you’ve made up until this point will be rendered mute.  At this point, there is a sort of interactive dream sequence that lasts about ten minutes.

The dream sequence is sort of an epilogue where Sparrow is taken back in time and to an alternate reality and meant to enjoy a few happy moments before the darkness of the game’s conclusion creeps up again.  The epilogue is a favorite moment for me, because it poses the question, “what if we never found the music box?”  Our heros could have lived out a happy and peaceful existence with their sister.  Of course, that wouldn’t have made for a very exciting or adventurous fable.  By the time that the epilogue is closing, you’ll find yourself running down the farmhouse road into the mist, following the sound of the music box to Fable II’s conclusion.

Lionshead set out to create a game with a dynamic world that reacts to a player’s choices and actions.  In most respects, they succeeded.  Almost every action in Fable II involves a choice along a 2-axis paradigm; good vs. evil on one axis and pure vs. corrupt on the other.  As the hero, the results of your choices and actions drastically change your appearance and, in some cases, the appearance of the environment.  However, despite the choices that you make, your character’s abilities only get stronger and the options related to the plot don’t really change.

In order to finish Fable II’s main quest, your character will have to hack through a thousand ghosts and goblins.  Whether you’re a pious Lionheart or a bloodthirsty Fear Monger, the aproach that you take to each quest will be exactly the same.  There are no violent or nonviolent options for approaching quests and enemies.  Magic spells and weapons are identical for good and evil characters.  Despite the bill of being a dynamic experience, any differences, for the most part, are skin deep.

Perhaps Lionshead set out to make a game that hinged mainly on the variable appearance of the character and the environment.  A lot of role playing games have branching story lines.  Maybe Molyneux and company thought that they could set Fable II apart by focusing on character over plot.  I tend to believe that the limited nature of Fable II’s story is probably the result of the rush to meet an unrealistic deadline.

Public statements from Lionshead indicate that the development of Fable II’s online multiplayer mode was so behind schedule that it had to be removed from the game disk.  Engineers continued to work on the online cooperative portion of the game up until Fable II’s release on October 24, when they issued a “Day 0″ patch via Xbox Live to put the feature back in the game.

If nothing else in Fable II feels like a rush job, the multiplayer functions definitely do.  Players in the 2-player online and offline coop modes share a single camera view.  This makes both players feel like they are “rubber banded” together and adds a restrictive and frustrating element to a game world that otherwise feels wide open.  I can’t believe that Lionshead intended to make the camera this way.  Even if they intended it, they should have scrapped it once they realized how bad it would play.  For the offline “couch” coop it might have made sense to try a single camera, in order to avoid a split screen.  Ultimately, Lionshead’s decision to publish the online coop mode with a single camera was probably driven by some technical obstacles that could have been overcome, given more time for development.

I can’t overstate how frustrating the online mode can be, especially compared to the relative freedom of movement in regular mode.  Frustrations aside, I never-the-less played well over half of my 20 hour playthrough online with a friend.  Coop play has a real MMO feel to it and the combat with a coop partner feels a lot like the old arcade console of Gauntlet (in a good way).  The only things missing are knomes kicking you in the balls and stealing your gold.

Peter Molyneux and the team at Lionshead set out with great ambition to bring us a bold new experience in Fable II.  In the end, they delivered a beautiful interactive world and a great new way to develop and customize a character.  Fable II fails to fully execute an online coop mode.  Combat is fun but fails to keep up with player and character abilities.  The story and plot are linear and uneffected by the players actions.  The sad thing is, if Lionshead had taken a more realistic release schedule, most of these shortcomings could probably have been improved upon or eliminated.