What is it?
I have been
a bit of a critic of Microsoft in the past.
Okay! Okay!
To tell the truth, I’ve been a lot of a critic of Microsoft for years, and
I don’t expect that to change in the foreseeable future. However, there is
one particular area of software that Microsoft has nailed so completely
that I positively look forward to seeing their new releases (though I
don’t often buy them, cheapskate that I am). Games! In this area, they
really do seem to be able to release high quality, polished, almost
glitch-free, games.
I wish I
could say that Fable: The Lost Chapters broke this mould, so that I
could get back to my old complaints about Microsoft, but no, they and
Lionhead Productions (the developers) had to spoil my fun and release a
cracking good game.
So how come Microsoft got
it right?
Simple: the
right partners.
If you’ve
never heard of Lionhead Productions before, it is the current vehicle for
Peter Molyneux. He’s one of the elder gods of computer game design,
alongside such luminaries as Sid Meier and Richard Garriott (a.k.a. Lord
British). Molyneux co-founded Bullfrog in the late 1980s, developing such
revolutionary games as Populous (one of the very first ‘god
games’), Theme Park, and Magic Carpet before moving on to EA
Games and Lionhead Productions where he was instrumental in the design of
Dungeon Keeper and Black & White, not to mention the recent
sequel, Black & White 2.
Fable
itself was originally titled Project Ego, but was renamed and
released for the Xbox in the autumn of 2004, to a not-too-rapturous
reception. ‘It’s too short and easy,’ said the reviewers. Now that the
game has been ported to the PC, Lionhead have added more weapons, items,
customisations (head and facial hair styles and tattoos!) and quests –
some are side quests. Then there’s the addition of substantial quests
after the ‘final fight’ of the original game. The new version really does
justify the moniker, ‘The Lost Chapters.’
The big
feature selling point of Fable is the ‘ego’ part of the original
title. This game is about how your alignment and appearance changes in a
manner that depends upon your behaviour – this has consequences in the way
that people behave towards you. So if you behave like a saintly paladin,
you’ll tend to look more attractive to the opposite sex, you’ll get good
prices in the stores, and people will be happy to be around you. If you
act like the chaotic evil demigod that the Hero of this story has the
potential to become, then you’ll grow horns and a nasty demeanour.
Traders, and everyone else for that matter, won’t want to have anything to
do with you, and you can forget the opposite sex! ‘Who will you be?’
Is there a plot?
Can you
say, ‘life story?’
Well,
perhaps that is putting it a little strongly, as you won’t be playing this
game for four score years and ten, but the plot of Fable does cover
the adventures in the lands of Albion of ‘Hero’ from his callow youth to
his white-haired old age. Mind you, the only characters in the game that
do age are ‘Hero’, his sister and one of the other guild novices; there
are plenty of other characters who show up throughout the story without
ageing a single day.
The overall
story is one of a family with a hidden power and this is the key to the
bad guy finding the Sword of Aeons. There is betrayal (which is the reason
I haven’t mentioned the identity of any of the bad guys), prophecy and a
downright nasty villain intent on using everything and everyone to achieve
immortality. I’ll not go into the main thread in any more detail for the
sake of not spoiling it for you. Mind you, the plot isn’t exactly
revolutionary – it’s a reasonably clichéd heroic quest. No matter, it’s
fun all the same.
I do have
one major complaint about the plot, and I apologise if this is a big
spoiler. No matter how good or evil you are, the central plot remains the
same. If your behaviour is evil there are minor changes to those
characters that survive the story, but in the end it comes down to the
same final choice. Maybe this is the point Molyneux is trying to make,
that the story is somehow predestined, but in reality I suspect not. I
suspect it was more a question of time and space.
This could
be seen as a testament to the skill of the scriptwriters. It's also a
criticism of the scriptwriters.
They have
managed to write one game rather than several threads that depend upon
your behaviour. The result is that I feel they've missed a trick in that
the upshot of your behaviour is fringe benefits/impediments rather than
wholesale plot twists. Of course, that means that it was possible for them
to actually produce the game within a finite time scale. It takes a long
time to produce a game of this technical standard and with such glossy
production values without having to cover a rainbow of different story
arcs as well. And as it is, the game already comes on CDs and requires 3GB
of hard disk space.
How do you play?
On starting
Fable, you're treated to a couple of the usual ‘indent’
videos, my
favourite being the Lionhead Productions one, which introduces the
exaggerated graphical style of the game right from the get-go. These lead
into a multi-layer menu system. The first layer is for profile management
– your save games live in your own home directory (under Documents and
Settings), so multiple-user systems (like mine) don't get save-game
clashes, and besides that, you can have multiple profiles within your game
too! The inner layer of menus, which I'll come back to later, is for the
in-game stuff, including save and load within a profile, and video, audio
and game options.
Fable
is played from the second person perspective, with an over-the-shoulder
camera view. As seems to be the norm now, the camera is controlled using
the mouse. This includes a small amount of zoom-in/zoom-out with the
scroll button, if you have one. Movement of the Hero is done with the
keyboard, with the normal configurable options. Beyond the basic four
keys, there are action keys (Tab, by default), spell activating keys (Left
Shift), and most dialogues can be skipped with a click, or Escape for
longer cut-scenes. All the cut-scenes are done with the normal rendering
engine, so your Hero always looks consistent – your armour and weaponry
and appearance show up in the cut-scenes too.
The rest of
the keyboard isn't exactly ignored either. The number keys are for the
quick action slots that are visible at the bottom of the screen most of
the time. These can contain spells, inventory items or actions, like
laughing, burping, heroic arm-pumps ... and much worse. The flirt action
makes Joey Tribiani (from Friends -- have you forgotten him so soon
already?) look like a genuine Casanova!
Your
inventory is managed from the in-game menus that are activated by pressing
Return at any time. This menu contains access to your skills, your quest
log, experience, inventory and the in-game options. Curiously, the save,
load and quit buttons are hidden under the options section. Lots of the
menu items have little vignette-style pictures or videos alongside them
that are used to demonstrate the item. This is a nice piece of eye candy,
and contributes nicely to the glossy production values of this title.
However, I found that they cause a certain amount of minor performance
issues.
After early
sections on childhood and hero guild training (tutorials on fighting,
archery, and spell casting), you get quests from the guild. Then you can
go out, do good, do evil, earn experience in physical, skill and magic
realms, then return to the guild for training and more quests. The central
plot drives the availability of quests. Some are connected with the
overall story arc; plenty are side quests that enable you to earn
experience and renown to enable entry to the more difficult quests. The
early quests revolve around tasks such as escort duty, or bandit hunting;
later ones involve breaking the siege of a village by bandits, or fighting
in the Arena.
Skill and
attribute development is based upon experience earned in the field, so if
you want to be a powerful warrior, you need to get into a lot of
hand-to-hand fights performing plenty of 'flourish' finishing moves. If
you want to be a sneaky thief, you need to sneak around stealing and
shooting at the bad guys from a distance; you could try concentrating on
trading too. Wannabe mages should concentrate on casting a lot of spells.
Completing quests also contributes to a 'general' pool of experience that
can be applied across all three specialisations – a kind of crosstraining
if you like. Experience points are spent buying health, strength, stealth,
speed, accuracy, and spell upgrades at the Hero's Guild.
Getting
around the world is achieved on foot, for the most part, so it is
inevitable that the game has a system of teleport devices strategically
placed around the countryside. In addition, providing nobody hits you
whilst you're doing this, you can press and hold the 'G' key to activate
your Guild badge (or seal), which also gives you access to the teleport
network.
Notable Features
I really
enjoyed the exaggerated graphic style of this game. The armour is big
(think Dallas and Dynasty on steroids), the weapons are big,
the guards are beefy, lantern-jawed hunks, and the bigger monsters are
really big! The environments are detailed and naturalistic – there's
weather and the passage of night and day. Buildings are generally slightly
curvy, almost over-inflated. Whereas the female characters are, with only
a couple of exceptions, quite the opposite.
A feature
of games that requires plenty of attention from game developers and
producers is the casting of voice actors. Without a cast that understands
what they’re doing, a game can be completely ruined. Thankfully, the cast
of Fable, though containing no remarkable names, as far as I can
tell, is excellent. The only exception to this is the voice of Hero. He
appears not to have one. This is a real shame as it could have been a
really interesting area of the alignment changing system to have had
Hero’s lines (that are implicit in the story) voiced. I think that vocal
filters could have added quite a radical feature to the original Project
Ego concept.
As with
good and bad voice acting, so it is with music. Poor choice of music and
sound effects has a jarring effect upon the atmosphere in a game, and can
really damage that vital feeling of immersion that the best games achieve.
With good music, such as in Fable, you often don’t hear the music
at all; you feel it in the way the game works.
There are a
number of nonessential activities you can do in Fable. Most of them
feature (in easy versions) in the main quests, but are then left as
optional extras for you to pursue further should the desire take you. Most
of the taverns, for example, have some kind of pub game to play: a memory
game, a shove-ha’penny game, and so on. You can even spend as much time as
you like fishing for goodies in the rivers, ponds and streams of Albion.
Some of said goodies are actually well worth fishing for, though there is
only one quest that actually requires any fishing, and that’s not a
difficult example at that. In addition, any big fish you catch, you can
submit to the fishing competition near Bowerstone, for extra credit and
renown.
If you play
Fable as a ‘good’ guy (or at least, not a ‘bad’ guy), you might
like to try courting the various female non-player characters. I believe
you can try courting male NPCs too, though I didn’t try it. So you can
give gifts, flirt, try to look attractive and manly, and eventually you
might get married. And if you don’t, there’s always the brothel where the
lights always go out before anyone takes any clothes off.
Your
alignment and behaviour are not the only influences upon your appearance.
The ‘lightness’ or ‘darkness’ of your choice of armour also has an impact,
as does your choice of hairstyle (from shaven pate to flowing locks) and
facial hair (from cleanshaven to wavy white beard). You can also get
yourself tattooed in all sorts of attractive and unattractive patterns,
for a fee of course.
I’ve
already mentioned that your alignment affects the way traders react
towards you; well, this also has an impact upon whether you might be able
to make trading work for you. Hero’s ability to carry heavy loads is
indisputable, so you could, with relative ease, set yourself up as a
trader, taking goods from one part of Albion to another. Things like gems,
beer barrels and foodstuffs can all be bought and sold at a variety of
locations, and as the prices vary from place to place, you could put in
some effort mapping where the goods are cheap, and transport them to
places where they’re expensive. Most traders even have a ‘Want’ list of
items they’re willing to pay over the odds for. This is yet another
optional pursuit I didn’t get involved in, but there’s no reason why you
shouldn’t use this as a mechanism for earning money, renown and skill
experience points.
Finally, an
unusual feature of questing Fable is the ‘boast’ feature, and the
trophies you gain from completing quests. When you take a new quest from
the Hero’s Guild, you can also choose to gamble extra renown and monetary
reward on your ability to complete the quest with a boast attached. This
is a completely optional part of the game, by the way, but it can be fun
to claim you’ll be able to complete a potentially violent quest ‘without a
scratch,’ or without using weapons or magic.
At the
other end of the questing process, you earn monetary rewards from the
Guild, and renown points. As your renown increases, different quests
become available, and you’ll be able to get access to more places in
Albion. In addition to the standard renown points available from a quest,
you also receive a trophy at the end of most quests (for example, the
decapitated head of the King of the Hobbes, or a trader’s feather) which
you can show off to civilians. If your showing off is successful, i.e. if
plenty of people see your trophy when you display it, then you win extra
renown points.
Alongside
your alignment, appearance and renown, one of the main ways you can track
your reputation as a hero with the populace is by the comments of people
as you pass by. These start with derogatory comments like ‘Chicken
chaser,’ and can evolve to a genuinely respectful attitude or abject
terror, depending upon your alignment and appearance. Unfortunately,
murdering civilians doesn’t get you the respect you might expect from
being such a powerful … erm … individual.
Oddities
Saving
games is always an area of controversy, especially with games ported from
a console to the PC, and I'm afraid Fable has its own new twist on
the same old problem. Despite having auto-saves and unlimited save slots –
always a good sign – the game suffers from an unfortunate distinction
between 'Hero Save' and 'World Save.’ If you choose to save during the
normal course of the game, you go to the menu, hit Options and World Save,
and next time you return, the game will be where you left it. All well and
good! But, if you are in a 'quest area,’ i.e. you've arrived at the
location that's the start for a quest, and until you've finished that
quest (be it escorting a trader to another settlement, or fighting your
way through the Arena quest that can last a couple of hours), you can only
do a ‘Hero Save’
– which will put
you back at the start of the quest again upon your return. I found that
this effectively meant that if I started a quest, I had to
complete the quest before I could stop playing. Quite what the logic for
this annoying distinction is was never made clear.
My next
‘oddity’
is not really an
oddity of the game, but of the ESRB rating. The ESRB rated Fable as
M, for Mature, and for ages 17+, with the comment of “Blood, Sexual
Themes, Strong Language, Violence.” I suppose that, if you’ve been brought
up on a game diet of Pandora’s Box, Solitaire and
Microsoft Flight Simulator, this rating is reasonable. However, it
seemed to me to be no more violent than most RPGs I’ve seen. Under certain
circumstances there is some blood – there is fighting after all. But the
language is not particularly strong, especially when compared with that
paragon of adventure games, The Longest Journey. There is, however,
a brothel, you can get married (in my case, to the Mayoress of Bowerstone!),
but I found nothing more explicit than a pair of union jack underpants.
I must
admit the ESRB people do puzzle me at times. But then, an organisation
that rates the content of games based upon information (questionnaires and
videos are hardly a reliable method for reviewing a game) from the
developers/publishers rather than play testing by neutral parties has got
to be a bit weird.
The only
black marks against the game itself are the level of difficulty and the
frequency of loading screens. First, the level of difficulty: providing
you keep well stocked with health, mana and regeneration potions, all of
which are easy to come by, you really cannot fail, providing you can
complete the few quests that are timed.
Regarding
the loading screens, well it’s a result of each of the playable locations
being quite small and self-contained. You can run the long way across even
the largest location within 30-40 seconds, and some as little as 10
seconds. This has the benefit that locations can contain a lot of action
in a limited space, but loading screens are very frequent, no matter that
they don’t stay up for long. This may, of course, be due to the origins of
this game on the Xbox, which has a less powerful processor and less memory
than your modern desktop PC. Still, this is something that should have
been addressed in the port. On a personal note, having just reviewed 80
Days where the loading screens took forever, but the locations were
huge, going to Fable was rather a radical change!
This final
oddity is more of a variation in the interpretation of what belongs in an
RPG. There is no use of poison, illness or traps in Fable. You
can’t poison anyone and you can’t be poisoned, so no attack has an effect
beyond the initial hit. Apparently you can achieve a lock-picking skill at
high levels of the stealth skill, though I never managed it, so locked
items always remained locked until I found the key. However, I found the
lack of swinging blade traps, trapdoors and needle traps surprising to say
the least. And one other missing concept is that of wear and tear on your
equipment. No matter how many times you hit a stone wall with your fancy
obsidian sword, it won’t be cracked, scratched or smashed. Now that’s some
downright geologically infeasible volcanic glass! These are some of the
areas where Fable could so easily have been made a bit more
challenging.
Conclusions
I played
through Fable: the Lost Chapters twice from end to end – I always
play a game completely before reviewing it, but this one had to be done
twice! I did it once as a good guy and once as bad as I could manage, and
there were still a lot of quests I didn’t complete and pub games I didn’t
play. I ended one with a slightly wobbly virtual halo, and the other with
horns and glowing red eyes! So I will be playing the whole game again,
looking for a balanced alignment, or trying more of the side quests and
customisations. Perhaps I could have a go at some of the boasts.
Will Fable
please the
‘Denizens
of the Dark Side’
at
GameBoomers, or the Adventurers who choose to spurn the
‘Dark Side’?
As far as the purists of either domain are concerned, no, probably not, as
the game is what might be called RPG-lite. So RPG players will not find it
difficult to complete the game, and there the development of Hero's
attributes and skills is quite simplistic, with the exception of his
alignment which is much more interesting and explicit that in
‘normal’
RPGs.
And Adventurers? Well the game is just wrong. There are no mazes, no
slider puzzles, no alien languages or number systems to decipher, no
exotic plant-life to manipulate. Mind you, there is a psychotic madman
trying to play God, so maybe there is some hope.
In the final analysis, however, Fable: the Lost Chapters is a lot of fun
to play! This is the key reason behind giving this game such a high grade.
The character development is intriguing, the story arc, despite the
'pre-destination' question, is satisfying, and the design and technical
aspects are exemplary! Finally, there's extensive replay value here too,
so if Lionhead were to produce the further chronicles of Hero, or some
other character in the same world (with more alignment-affected story
threads), I would be at the front of the queue for a 4 DVD game.
Grade: A
What do you need to play
it?
Requirements
·
Microsoft®
Windows® XP
·
PC with 1.4
GHz equivalent or higher processor
·
256 MB of
system RAM
·
3 GB
available hard disk space
·
32x speed
or faster CD-ROM drive
·
64 MB
shader capable video card required
·
Sound card,
speakers or headphones required for audio
·
Microsoft
Mouse or compatible pointing device
(I used Win
XP, AMD XP 2400+, 512 MB RAM, and ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 128 AGP)
2-2006
design copyright ©
2006
GameBoomers
Group
