OXCGN – XBox News Reviews and Views

What does lay ahead for gamers This-Gen and beyond . . . ?

by dkpatriarch:

©2008 David Hilton:

It was a huge leap when gaming went from two dimensions to three dimensions, but now the next big jump may be here: the fourth dimension. That dimension is time.

Yes, we’ve seen Oblivion-style weather and day-time/night-time changes, even in racing games like Project Gotham Racing 4. Yes we’ve seen time manipulation with action slow-motion in games like Max Payne, and time-reverse with games like Prince of Persia and Timeshift. And yes, games like Civilization have given rise to towns or cities that change in stages over time.  However, Fable 2 promises to bring an open-world free-roaming game where no GTA, Oblivion, or Assassin’s Creed has gone before using the fourth dimension.

The difference ?

The open world you are exploring and interacting with will not only provide the framework for your quests and gaming activity, but it will change as a consequence of those various choices and actions. The world in Fable 2 that you will roam will not only be the illusion of a living world full of NPCs (non playable characters) filling up space or going about repetitive assigned tasks, like other such games.  Lionhead Studios claims it will be a world where what you do changes the game both visually and in the behaviour of the NPCs that will see you differently depending on your actions.

In the first Fable you got clapped or booed by NPCs and if you became good or evil your character’s appearance changed. In games like Oblivion, weather changed and day turned to night and some things changed if you completed story branches or quests, but Fable 2’s promise is that the whole world you play in will be different to the world your friend plays, because you will have influenced the environment and characters differently. The change is unscripted. Not only that, if you play co-op then that friend could come into your world and affect it and change it too.

You can apparently grab any NPC and kill them, take them on your quest, or seduce them, regardless of sex. If you fail to provide money to buy food for your family (or families depending on how many you have in various towns) they will starve. And money needs to be earned…the hero business does not pay like it used to. If you are tired of your nagging spouse you can get a friend to jump in co-op and kill her/him and your child will be hauled away to an orphanage where you can still visit. For more details of the co-op dynamic look here.

As with most open-world games, you have a major storyline and then there are smaller quests. With Fable 2 you will have a huge number of mini-quests that will help you earn the money to influence the environment, like feeding your family to keep them healthy or buy a lot of property.

As Peter Molyneux comments:

“Big buildings like castles and cathedrals and churches have a whole different side of it. They tend to be more story-driven quests. Things like houses tend not to have many quests, although a few bigger houses do. Some of those are collecting quests, but the good thing is — what doesn’t make them tedious — is that, if for example a shop has a collecting quest. You know, go and find ten of these. You’re finding ten of those and you’re getting them back to the shop, so you get the success from that, but then you get the money from the sales of those ten things, so it all wraps up together. And that feeds into the bigger ambition — this is all outside the story by the way — the bigger ambition of you having the ability to buy almost everything in the whole world, and be the lord, ruler of the whole of Albion.”

If you do earn a lot of money then you can begin to buy out shops in a village and manage the place, helping it to become a wealthy growing town, or letting it crumble into an impoverished wreck. Another example given by Molyneux is of a trade camp that the player can either help or destroy: if you trade in the camp it would increase their profit, and result in the growth of a small town, but if you steal from the camp or destroy the camp it may disappear completely.

Senior Designer of Fable 2 at Lionhead Studios, Iain Wright:

“Fable II is all about choices. Choices you make as a child do have impact on the world and this continues all the way through the game. There may be multiple versions of a city; helping certain people could mean that they thrive and expand their homestead or business, but choosing to ignore their plea for help could mean the region will be overrun with bandits, making traveling through that region difficult. So the regions will change but so will your relationship with them.
Making a rash decision in ‘the now’ could prove costly as you travel through the same region years later and see what happened due to choices you made.”

If this ambitious focus on time, with vast changes dictated by your actions or inactions, is amazingly realised in the final released game, this represents a great evolutionary step not just for the fantasy genre but also for open-world free-roaming styled gaming in general.

Open-world games are also called sandbox games because theoretically you can do almost whatever you want when you want; they are no longer linear. But a game that not only allows you to go anywhere in the world to explore, and have the liberty to do almost anything you want, but to also have the sandbox change over time because of what you have been doing and where you have been going, is simply mind-boggling.

Peter Molyneux is now all too aware of the scrutiny that promising too much brings, and so his promise of an “emotion”-motivated game where consequences are truly reflected by amazingly sophisticated AI mechanics may this time live up to expectations. And that will make Fable 2 an incredible gaming achievement indeed.

©2008 David Hilton: