The Gaming Goblin talks Fable: The Lost Chapters.
The famous Warty Goblin from Order of the Stick has his own view on Fable, both nicer and shorter than mine. Enjoy
Hello all, warty goblin here. First let me thank EvilElitist for offering me the use of this space, and the chance to talk about games, something I love to do. Now, down to business and the topic at hand. I picked up Fable: The Lost Chapters for PC back in the middle of October since it was selling for $20. Since this game is so old I’m going to unapologetically refer to elements that spoil the plot, such as it is. You have been warned.
The initial portions of the game feature your young character kicking around the traditional role-playing game starting location of Happy Hamlet, which is, by long standing tradition raided by bandits in one of the game’s more evocative and effective cutscenes. I’ve played a fair number of RPGs over the years, and getting raided by bandits is something to which I am in general rather inured, but this cutscene is well done enough to make me take the event seriously. You naturally survive, and get taken in by the Heroes Guild, which functions pretty much like King Arthur and co., except without a King and a less strict moral code. After the actually interesting opening scene and bit of gameplay however, the game hits the brakes full force. If training to be a world saving hero is this dull, I think I’ll go to plumbing school instead thanks. Yes tutorials are good, but I already had a bit of one before Happy Hamlet went all fiery, and four separate unavoidable lessons on a melee combat system that involves a grand total of three buttons is definite overkill. Watching my character grow up would be interesting if he had a personality at this stage, and if it wasn’t the harbinger of yet another tutorial. Amazingly these persist even after I graduated Hero School with a mandatory First Quest. At some point I began to think that the game did not think overly well of my intelligence.
So the first hour or two are decidedly meh, and annoyingly unskippable. This is really a poor design choice, since you make no decisions of anything like long-term consequence before graduating from the Hero’s Guild. Sure you can get one or two Good/Evil points as a child, but the overwhelming number of Good/Evil points you get over the course of the game will be from major quests, which often give you fifty or more. One or two just doesn’t make a compelling difference, and for a second playthrough I should be able to skip the tutorial, particularly given its length. In general I have to give the game credit though, since all the cutscenes and dialog can be skipped, a feature that is all too rare, and making copious use of this feature gets the tutorial down to a much more manageable hour or so.
After that things actually began to pick up. The role-playing elements (a phrase I shall use here and elsewhere to refer to the manner in which you level up stuff, distinct from actual role-playing by which I mean making dialog choices and such like) are interesting. I’ve always liked skill-use based systems in general, since it seems only right that you should become good at the things you do a lot of, but they make character diversification a real bitch late in the game when I want to advance my underdeveloped skills but need to rely on those in which I specialized to survive. Fable solves this elegantly enough by rewarding me with experience pools specific to magic, archery and melee based on my use of them, and also general experience redeemable for any skill increase. This is something of a mercy since I tend to play melee characters, and branching out to magic later on can be damn near impossible in a lot games. I have vivid memories of trying this in Oblivion, where I’d be trying to kill ogres with the magical equivalent of a single match, which I could cast about three times. Fable averts this thankfully. This also ties into the overall sense I get that they game isn’t trying to emulate the usual suspects of digital roleplaying inspiration such as, full length fantasy epics, table top roleplaying games and movies, but instead goes for fairy tales, since it encourages you to be something of a polymath, sort of an amalgamation of different folktale heroes. It’s a respectable system, and it ties into the combat nicely. The only complaint I had with it is that my character maxed out his melee skills but kept earning Strength experience which I was unable to use, which essentially penalized me for playing to my hero’s strengths at the end of the game.
The combat also improves. It starts off pretty lackluster to be honest, since you only fight a few weak enemies with boring weapons. But by the third or maybe sixth hour you’ve got more enemies that can actually do damage to you. They never managed to kill me thanks to the Resurrection Vials, which automatically heal you whenever I ran out of health. Resurrection Vials aren’t unlimited, and I had to either buy them in the shops or from scrounge around in the environment, but with only a minimum of attention, I was able to ensure my character never died. This does make the game ‘easy’ I guess, but the only really important difference between this system and saving then reloading my game all the time is that I don’t have to remember to use the Resurrection Vials, I don’t lose any progress, and there’s no loading screen. I am generally in favor of anything that reduces the amount of game time I spend staring at a loading screen. Thanks to the combat multiplier which increases how much experience I get and goes up whenever I do damage and drops whenever I take damage, I still wanted to avoid being hit. I like that system, its risk/reward without being sadistic about it. It also ties back into the fairytale feeling of the game. There’s never any doubt in a fairy tale that the hero kills the ogre or the dragon, it’s just a matter of how. By removing some of the worry about dying all the time, Fable lets you concentrate on the how, which is the fun part.
Anyway, the net effect of all this is that combat becomes more fun, because it starts to be less about winning, which is a certainty, but rather about managing the enemies for the best possible victory, and the highest possible combat multiplier. This involves using knockback attacks, dodges, and other such things to avoid getting hit while pummeling the enemy as much as possible. Unfortunately the combat never really does anything more than that. The enemies changed, but I never got new animations or sword attacks or anything, despite achieving the pinnacle of human ability in stabbing things with swords. This hindered my feelings of being an epic badass since not only was I doing essentially the same thing at the end of the game as the beginning, but I was doing it in fundamentally the same way. Archery, if anything, is even less variable than melee combat, in which at least you get two different attacks. Instead in archery it’s mostly a matter of using the optimum amount of power per arrow and managing the annoying lock-on camera, which can be absolutely vital for some enemies like Nymphs, but always locks onto the wrong thing. In fact archery is directly responsible for most of my Evil points, since I would lock on to a traveler by mistake and so take his head off instead of the bandit right next to him. At least I could learn new spells on the magical side of things, but the magic system in Fable never really ‘clicked’ for me, probably due to controls. Still it avoided degenerating into an overcomplicated mess by the end of the game, unlike certain games named Neverwinter Nights 2 which I could name here, and remained fast and fun throughout, so I don’t have any really major complaints.
Social interaction is another story, or in this case paragraph. The options are really quite limited, I can do a couple polite things and a couple rude things, but there’s really not much a reason to do either. Some of them look funny, but that justifies using them once and they take up a hotkey I could use for health potions or something. Making people love/hate you really doesn’t have any purpose beyond changing their reactions to you, but this doesn’t affect anything else. At least Oblivion made the conversation a minigame and gave me store discounts for playing it well, and Mass Effect had such terrible things happen when I didn’t level the conversation skills I always kept them maxed out of a sense of guilt. Fable takes roughly the same attitude towards social interaction as it does combat, in that it’s pretty much impossible to fail. The problem is that Fable never gives you a reason to succeed, or even to a way to do so.
There are a lot of things you can do, get married, flirt, attract hordes of lust crazed townsfolk just by walking by, but there’s no reward for doing it, or even penalty for not doing so. It’s essentially role-playing light tacked on the side without appreciable consequence. Same with the morality system, the only noticeable consequences for playing a living saint or somebody who gets married because he likes to decapitate people in the comfort of his own home is one has a butterfly halo and one has horns. Freedom, to steal a phrase from Lord Vetinari of Diskworld fame, is being free to accept the consequences of one’s actions, but there are no consequences here, it’s giving me a piece of paper and the same reward if I draw a happy family, a concentration camp or nothing at all. At best the social interactions are sort of a giant fashion accessory for my character, get the people to love me and my orbiting flights of butterflies because it’s amusing, get them to hate the sight of my horned visage because I like to see them cower, not because there’s any actual benefit or real gameplay consequence for doing one or the other.
Now that said, I think in some ways that was sort of the point. As I touched on earlier, I get the feeling that Fable isn’t trying to be a normal RPG. It’s trying to be a fairy tale where you play the central hero. This is pretty evident from the stained glass cutscenes, the narration, and the slightly self aware nature of being a Hero in Albion. Of course the social interactions boil down to cosmetics, because that’s what they are in a fairytale. The hero of such stories always journey through lots of places and talks to lots of people, but that really isn’t the point of the story, it’s at best a chance for him to show how heroic he is. Since I could also play a villain, I had to be given a chance to appear villainous as well, but neither was the focus of the game.
There are a couple decisions that I make during the game though that should have some consequence outside of villagers shouting one thing or another at me. Specifically whether or not I let Whisper live and if I kill my sister or not. Whisper in particular, I mean what amounts to the apocalypse is going down and I didn’t kill her for money. Least she could do is send a card, or maybe show up and lend a hand, but no, nothing. This particularly rankled because I actually liked Whisper as a character and didn’t kill her because of that, I wanted to keep her around. Nor is it like having her show up at the final fight would have required that much extra work, toss Whisper in, make a few more enemies spawn, pretty easy. It was the same thing when I saved my sister. I turned down what amounts to ultimate power so I didn’t have to kill the last surviving member of my incredibly bandit-resistant family; I want some emotion, not a cutscene telling me that ‘she leaves anyways.’ One extra cutscene at the end of the game showing a happy reunion or something would have gone at least a short way towards making me feel that the choice really mattered, but I didn’t even get that. This is pretty inexcusable, even by my fairy tale interpretation of the game, I mean saving his family is sort of Hero 101, of course it should be a major point with plot consequences.
This is particularly unfortunate because in general I found the story to be reasonably effective. Let me be clear, Mass Effect this isn’t, but I actually paid attention to the main plot, which is more than I can say of a lot of games. As is the case with the rest of the game, the main story is clearly patterned on fairy tales instead of more ‘hardcore’ examples of the fantastic genre. This gives it a nice, approachable and unintimidating air which I find sorely lacking in other roleplaying games. Thus the chronicle of discovering why my family was attacked by bandits all those years ago was simple, but still engaging, particularly since I was playing as a good character, although I’d imagine it would be weakened somewhat by playing a character who couldn’t care less about why dear ol’ Dad underwent invasive chest surgery with an axe. I never stopped thinking of the game in terms of my character’s motivation instead of his becoming mine, something which I consider the hallmark of a really successful game story, but I found the motivations given to be compelling enough to want to continue anyways. Put another way, I never felt that the available options were out of place for the setting or character I was playing. Part of this is because I went in knowing that the choice system was very black and white, and part of it was that the world in general operated on those principles in a consistent way, I never felt that an option for which I was given Good points was Evil or vice versa.
This being a role-playing game, I would remiss if I did not take a moment to talk about the world which my character inhabits. Albion is a pretty normal feeling fantasy world with a geography that’s a dead ringer for England and Northern Europe in general, to the point where at one point I went “OK, now I’m going to Norway.” There’s undead, miscellaneous monsters needing a good sword massage, and the usual variety of outsized insects and never-ending hordes of bandits that one expects in such titles, but not really anything anybody who’s played an RPG before will be surprised by. All in all the world doesn’t seem to take itself particularly seriously, it’s full of clichéd names like Darkwood, Wychwood, and so on, something which the game almost seems to wink at with people’s constant acknowledgement of how dangerous these locations are, often while they are walking through them. The people are also a bit cartoony in appearance, as are most of the monsters. Normally I prefer my games to be fairly realistic in appearance, but this didn’t bother me, since again the game came off more fairytale than hard fantasy and this look promoted the overall feel. Plus the world at least bothered to look nice, with some solid if dated lighting effects, and lots of color where appropriate.
Unlike some current generation games, things are not always brown, grey, black or some combination thereof. It’s not the most memorable virtual world I’ve spent time in by any means, but it is also far from the worst. The sound and voice-acting in particular are also very solid, which goes a very long way towards making the game believable and engaging. I’m not one of those people who get their +3 Underwear of Support in a knot over the deficiencies of Oblivion’s voice acting, but I still definitely appreciate it when the voicework doesn’t suck, and Fable’s is actually good. It’s not good enough to make the game world super engaging on its own, but it is good enough to make spending time there enjoyable.
There’s also a decent variety of quests available, although I never made any effort to play them all so have no idea how many really are on offer. The mechanic for taking quests is really poorly handled in my opinion, since you have to teleport back to the Hero’s Guild to accept one. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be able to accept them in the field without having to sit through two loading screens before I could go save the farmers. In fact most of the side quests that I did do fell more into the category of annoyance than interesting gameplay or narrative. Take the mission where I had to relieve the siege of a forest town by bandits. After a truly interminable yet thankfully skippable cutscene, I ended up having to keep a bandit prisoner from escaping. If he made it back through to the bandit camp I lost, and if he died I lost. Annoyingly enough he would take melee damage like any other enemy, unlike most people I wasn’t supposed to kill, which made keeping the bandits away from him a real pain. The other problem is that you are not allowed to lose side quests, once you take them you either pass them or ignore them, but if you fail you have to reload the game. This sort of defeats the purpose of side quests, something which are by long standing tradition and more or less definition an optional side line to the main quest. These aren’t so much side quests as optional main quests.
Arguably this is another conscious design choice to promote the feeling of playing a fairy tale hero. Take Lancelot for a quick example, he does all kinds of stuff, yet his story also has a definite overall arc to it, which you could communicate effectively and leave a lot of the side stuff out. Once Lancelot gets cracking on some side job though I can’t remember him ever not seeing it through to completion, with the possible exception of the Grail Quest, depending how one defines ‘completion.’ If this is what the game is going for, I have to say it fails. I don’t feel heroic for trying a side quest three times before succeeding, I feel like I’m a hamster going around inside a wheel, and every time I complete a revolution I have to watch a loading screen again. This is not fun, it is in fact sort of the polar opposite of fun, and is also ironic, in a that the game doesn’t make me reload for things like dying I can’t proceed until Bob Bandit sees the inside of a courtroom. It’s just a crappy mechanic, and resulted in me basically ignoring the official Guild sidequests.
There’s also a large number of what, for want of a better term, I’ll call unofficial side quests, such as finding mushrooms to bring a child out of a coma, or pulling a sword out of a stone. These are there to add some sort of fun texture to the game world, but don’t actually add much content, since you have to stumble on them, and performing them can be a real bitch. The mushroom quest is the sort that causes normal people to either give up, or else consult the internet for the locations of all the damn things, and I generally consider it a failure of design every time I have to consult the wisdom of Gamefaqs. The sword quest just takes absurdly high stats, but at least it isn’t that hard to figure out. On the upside once removed from the stone the sword turned out to be a really nice weapon and my choice for most of the rest of the game. The demon doors are similar, if you do something specific in front of one of them, they’ll let you through and you get some loot, some of which is pretty nice, and some of is…not so much. I found them an interesting distraction, but I am not obsessive enough to go through and get them all, or even most of them.
Shopping in Fable also deserves special comment for both being very transparent and a complete pain in the ass. The interface is clearly console in origin, which I’ll tolerate, but it displays an impressive amount of information, particularly for weapons and armor which show a detailed comparison of the item I’m thinking of buying, and the one of that type I currently have equipped. This allows me to check out that ebony longsword and see how it compares to my iron katana in terms of cost, speed, and damage. This is the sort of feature more games should adopt. I’m all for allowing the player to stand on their own, but this does not extend to memorizing every single stat of every item in their possession, or committing to memory whatever progression of bronze is worse than iron is worse than steel is worse than mithril is worse than phlebontinum that this particular game uses.
On the other hand the designers decided that time spent trekking from merchant to merchant counted as more gameplay, and consequently most of the equipment sets end up spread out between three or four people without rhyme or reason. Having the tailor sell clothes is fine, having the blacksmith sell weapons is OK, but why the hell doesn’t he offer all of them? Yes the goods discrepancies and price differences allow you to make money by buying and selling between merchants, but I pity the poor soul desperate enough to do that. Even if this interested me, it’s poor reason to have to traverse three land masses and twice as many venders and still not be able to turn up a plate helmet, even though I managed to buy every other piece of plate armor one place or another. Just make every item available at the Guild Shop for extra cost, or let me bargain hunt around with less reliable venders, it accomplishes the same thing with far less pointless running to and fro, as well as hither and yon. As it is, it’s just in there to make me spend more time playing the game for no good reason. Also it has nothing to do with the overall tone of the game. I really don’t remember Robin Hood having to sail to France to find a better bow, and when was the last time Lancelot held up saving the princess to circumnavigate the North Atlantic in search of a helmet?
So in conclusion, I quite enjoyed Fable for all my bitching. The fundamental gameplay has its faults, but was still pretty fun, and the story actually provided a reasonable incentive to keep playing. Plus it honestly seems to be trying to do something unique, which deserves some credit off the bat. A lot of RPGs try to capture the experience of reading a book, watching a movie or playing D&D with the guys, all of which are complex experiences. Fable does something simpler, it tries to be a game about listening to a fairy tale, and it uses simpler gameplay to evoke this, most of the time effectively. It’s pretty linear, since fairy tales are that way, and it puts me in command of whether the bandits are shot or stabbed, not whether or not I kill them, again like listening to a fairy tale where I’m more or less free to imagine the action the way I want, but the overall course of events is pretty much dictated to me. The social and morality systems are disappointing in their inconsequentiality, but I enjoyed the game anyways. To make this absolutely clear, Fable isn’t the sort of game you remember for years to come, it’s what I call comfort gaming, the game you play when you’re sick and your dog just died. You don’t have the energy to think a lot, and Fable lets you have fun without needing to have insane reflexes or know the damage ranges on half a dozen spells. It just lets you play and have fun, decapitating bandits with arrows and then kicking their heads around, something which seldom gets old. If nothing else it’s selling for cheap right now, and I definitely got $20 of fun out of it, and probably wouldn’t feel ripped off if I had paid full price.
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