Oh, Fable 2: Peter Molyneux is a Moronic Genius

The Game Room
1

I recently got to play Fable II, and y’know what? Wow. Just Wow. That’s not a good wow, neccessarily, and it isn’t even a bad wow. It’s just a wow.

Rarely have I ever seen a game with so much potential, wasted or otherwise. I mean, at the heart, there’s a really fun game here, and it just kills me that so little of it made into the final product.

Essentially, I think it’s time for someone to go find Peter Molyneux (the lead designer) and slap him silly until he gets his head on straight. The man has too much talent but must run around like an ADD 6-year old scarfing a mixture of crack and sugar bombs all day. I mean, the design is really good in a way, but is so obnoxiously stretched that it just kills me.

I mean stretched as in Lord of the Rings “bit of butter scraped over too much bread” stretched. There’s ample life for one game in Fable 2, but it’s pulled all over creation trying to do everything.

Simply put, I don’t think you can do a semi-comedic gameworld for exploration, AND a really miserably dark plotline filled with railroading and gross player abuse, AND a collection of annoying minigames which you have to do just to make some fricking money, AND a life simulator which really doesn’t make sense in the context of the rest of the gameworld.

This is just the problem I had. It’s too little over too much. Had they focused on one aspect or another, I think it could have worked beautifully, but Molyneux (as previous games to his credit suggest) has to try and shoehorn in everything, and often doesn’t do it very well.

As a short guide yo my conflicts: I could go with the semi-funny, cartoony gameworld and just go exploring and adventuring. It’s fun and actually quite cool. However, they arbitrarily limit your exploration such that it’s not very meaningful. You may well not bother because you aren’t going to go anywhere and really experience anything that exciting before the game tells you to. Likewise, the game suffers from jumping back and forth from a quiet undertone of humor to a really dark, miserable plotline.

I leap off a cliff into a beautiful swandive (doing exactly what taunting bandits suggest) and go into a cave to come up behind them. Except in the cave I find that the Hobbes are actually captured children turned into horrible monsters, and witness one of them murder his own father. And kill the kid-monster, while dad gives a horrified final speech as his injuries drag him into death. Then I go up to the surface and listen to the bandits have an amusing dialague. Then my next quest is to chase down a bandit so proud it’s hilarious.

And let’s not go into the villain, who seem to be Cobra Commander’s idiot bastard by way of Skeletor. His plans are incredibly ill-timed when they are not incredibly stupid, and any success he had is entirely coincidental. He’s also missing for most of the game, making him something of a non-figure. If it weren’t for the plot arbitrarily forcing you to do other crap, I could walk in and waste him in the first hour and then go on to other fun things.

But mostly, I am required to waste immense amounts of time waiting for investments to pay off or doing tedious minigames to get the money to do any damn thing, which you need to do in order to manage any other sidequests for gear and stuff.

Despite that, I think the game has so many good ideas. The dog is the best integrated game companion after Half-Life’s Alyx. The dog alone almost makes up for the game’s weaknesses. Still, the puppy can’t carry the whole game.

2

I don’t think he’s that talented. I keep hearing about how great he is, but it seems to me his games sell on his name, not on their own laurels. If he hadn’t done Populous, nobody would know who he was.

3

That’s probably true, but I can see some real hints of genius going on in his games. The basic core gameplay is very well done in his games… but the execution of the details he HAS to put in leave much to be desired.

I suppose it’s like a man who feels the need not merely to make a model car which is beautiful and cool and fun, but has to make it a complete working car with tiny carborateurs and shocks and interiors. And he doesn’t have the skill to put all that into a model the size of a toy car. It winds up being a miserable failure as a model, with the engine taking up most of the car, and the interior the wrong scale, and the whole thing with peices stuck on, and a few that should be in there left off because theere wasn’t room, and so on.

He has yet to learn that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

4

I don’t get what potential Fable II has, it is almost exactly Fable I repackaged with a different aesthetic. Half the missions are the same. Escape from prison, rescue peasants from Hobs, clear the nasty beastie plaguing the town, yadda yadda yadda.

What’s great about this game? It’s pretty, I’ll give it that, but essentially it’s just Fable 1 repackaged.

5

I just started playing, too. I do like the game, but your description is pretty apt. I have a hard time trying to decide if I have time to do side stuff, and I’m afraid I’m going to trigger some later main-sequence quest if I do go off on the side. There’s not a lot of in-game training/guidance early on, either. The map implementation is poor. But the graphics are nice. And the dog is pretty well done.

6

Peter Molyenoux would benefit hugely from a stint with Blizzard; a company that has the clout and self-publishing status of being able to tell people rushing it to back the fuck off.

All of Lionhead’s franchised games - Black & White, Fable, etc - would have tipped to greatness with an additional year of development. And the game business’ equivalent of an editor. Preferably armed with a superhuman amount of patience and a chainsaw.

7

You think?

I bought the first Fable and both Black & Whites, and really, really wanted to like them. I played 'em for a few hours… trying to see what was fun about them… and ultimately put them aside for games that I didn’t have to keep telling myself were fun because I was having too much fun playing them to stop and think about whether or not I was having fun.

8

I can assure that’s not the case. You have no control over the main quest even when you are on it.

A two-minute hate:

The game railroads you in the worst way possible. Some games let you do your own thing while cutscenes play (Half-Life). Some make you sit through a pretty cinematic (Final Fantasy). Some let you choose how the plot proceeds (Fallout).

Fable does the worst of all three styles together in one package. Major events will pop up after you supposedly accomplish things which railroad you, but make you sit through it, and while they don’t totally remove control locks it away so you can’t really do anything. It’s basically the game’s biggest sin: a giant middle finger to the player.

A small spoiler:

[spoiler]Lord Lucien sends… one bandit with a gun to bother a monk in order to force his daughter to serve him. Now, this is not smart. Lucien also sent the biggest moron on the planet. The daughter refuses, so the bandit-dude shoots daddy, thereby completely losing his leverage over the girl. Since this is a world where most poeple can take a few bullets, this was stupid. He thens threatens the girl with his little pistol.

Said girl is a 7-foot tall, 400 pound mountai of pure chiselled beef. She’s a WOMAN, dammit. Or maybe a Valkyrie. She, of course, mashes him in one hit, not that evil mercenary got a shot off anyway. Yeah, that was a genius plan, eh? Oh, and her dad dies, so of course she is now dedicated to kicking Lucien’s butt.

Now, your character is easily capable of getting there first and wasting the bandit, but you are suddenly limited to about 1/5 normal speed, literally walking as ifthrough molasses (it’s kind funny to see). So, you’re just not allowed to move fast enough to get there and do anything. Everyone else moves normally. Seriously, it’s hilarious. But at the same time, it’s miserable, and the worst form of railroading.[/spoiler]

9

I doubt it. From observation over the years I think he’d spin his wheels indefinitely in that kind of environment. He needs someone to focus him.

10

I agree, and want to add one more little problem I have with the game.

Peter Molyneux made a big deal about how many people decided to play good characters in the first Fable, and how he’d now make it more difficult to do so. Well, he didn’t really make it more difficult, because any price you pay for being good doesn’t affect gameplay in any significant way, he just made it less fun. Thanks, now playing a good character is nearly as unrewording to me, as playing a bad character is.

Plus, you know how people joke about how you should just shoot the villain while he’s talking/gloating/revealing all the details of his plan? Well, that’s basically how Fable II ends, and it’s really unclimatic to just shoot the damn, smirking bastard who killed your sister, your family, a multitude of other more or less innocent people, and who was about to wish the world out of existence to be replaced by his personal (anti-)utopian vision of how things should work. I think he was supposed to also be a bit of a tragic character, what with his family dying senslessly, but I felt sorry for him for all of five seconds before he presented his solution to the situation.

Did anyone tell the developers that “realism” is not the reason people play video games, and at the core actually the opposite is true?

I’m just so irritated that there were so many good ideas wasted here.

11

I disagree. I like games to be at least somewhat realistic. I like the idea of several parameters on reality being changed but otherwise it being the same. Like if the games had foregone the realism of hitting where you aim, you wouldn’t be able to have a shooter.

12

That’s not what we talk about when we say that, we’re mostly talking about tropes. We’re talking about the stuff everyone jokes about (“just shoot the bastard” in this case), but in reality can only be averted and work well in a select few cases, they’re useful tools, albeit ones that don’t work in practice (hence “unrealistic”). Even the grittiest, most morally ambiguous, down to Earth film is going to have these elements or fall flat, hell, even the fact that people don’t pepper their speech with fillers (“uuuh… like… ermmm”) is one such thing. As Elbow pointed out, they exist as tools for a reason, if executed poorly throwing them out the window willy-nilly just for the sake of “realism” is a bad move and can ruin what could have been a Crowning Moment of Awesome or similar moment.

Anyway, I think what Molyneux needs is a leash (and as a former and currently sporadic member of Lionhead’s official community, I can say in good faith this is what a great deal of the dedicated fans think). The problem is he was the founder of Lionhead (and as such, a top executive), its public face, AND its lead designer. These do NOT work well together, for one he doesn’t have many Executives pulling his strings, while this does cut down on that pesky executive meddling that can ruin projects… well… he gets big ideas before even asking his programming team if something is feasible (sheesh, the laundry list of things that were promised and had to be cut for the original Fable alone would make any random presidential candidate’s campaign promises look well upheld). The public face thing is even worse, he doesn’t have to answer to executives and his marketing team (or alternatively, should but doesn’t anyway), then he goes on and blabs about trees that age in real time and spread by themselves and grow into forests* and… well, then he has to try and put all that in. He has good ideas, but what he really needs is someone (a producer, an affiliate company, anything) that can tie him down and say “woah there, buddy, slow down, one thing at a time.” If I had to describe the guy in the most succinct manner I’d call him “Will Wrights over-enthusiastic cousin.”

  • Fer chrissakes the “briefly mentioned but not officially in active production” project Dimitri has already promised that you’ll BE ABLE TO RECREATE YOUR ENTIRE LIFE IN EXCRUCIATING DETAIL. Seriously, how the fuck do you even keep a promise like that?
13

Jragon Fair point. My wife played Fable II but I had no interest in it because it didn’t seem different enough from Fable I to be interesting.

14

I quite liked Fable II, but the RPG elements are very superficial. You can wake up as a skinny good mage and go to bed a hulking evil warrior without much difficulty. My extremely evil hulking evil currupt giant turned even into a petite good girl without much trouble!

The consequences on places are implimented well, even if the consequences on your character are not.

However, there is one thing I will never forgive Fable II for; a game-ending glitche in Bloodstone. Had to start a new character, literally could not get further in the main quest, and I didn’t do anything unusual to prompt the glitch. How on earth did this slip past testers?!

15

Put emphasis on the word “excruciating”?

16

Don’t forget Syndicate and Theme Park.

17

Actually, I haave a lot of problems with both of those. Not bad, either one, but it was kinda like the originals were just slapped off the cuff with no polish to speak of. I like old games, but to this day I cannot play Syndicate. It’s an uncontrollable, unplayable mess with no guidance. I can understand why poeple would love the underlying brilliance, but…

Yeah, it’s basically the same problems.