I recently rented and played Fable II, and I’ll be upfront – I was dissapointed.
The sad thing is that all the problems seem to be in the polish of the game rather than any basic game flaw. Let me try to explain…
From the very first screen the game feels as if it’s interrupting itself. The opening music is nice, but the moment one presses the start button, a voice says “so the story begins.” The sound comes on suddenly and seems like it’s been cut out of a longer sentence, leading the player to believe there was a glitch and he missed something. Why in the world would you want the very first player experience to be startling and unsettling?
The second most glaring problem are stuttering menus. There’s no reason for that, it seems to me, technically. Especially since the menu isn’t overlayed on the game. Especially in an RPG where a menu is perused so often having any lag is an absolutely killer experience.
The more story driven problems have to do more with immersion. Simple things like it’s almost impossible to tell your dog what a good boy he is while actually facing him. Most of the time I ended up crouching and looking at empty ground while my dog ended up sniffing my behind, while getting really excited I was praising it.
The same awkwardness happens in conversations. Conversations seems hardly the word for it, because there seems to be no way for my character to actually say anything. I feel like a retarded mute child in a world of grownups telling me what to do. And when I do get to interact in a conversation it’s through what look like the most exagerated thumbs up or thumbs down, accompanied by a generic “mhmm!” or “nuh-uh.” When my character’s aide talks to me about great responsiblity that comes with my new powers, and my only choice is to wave my thumb around like an idiot, I question my raison d’etre so to speak.
Finally, by increasing breadth I feel like the game sacrificed depth. It’s what I always say about MMORPGs: the more freedom you have in your actions, the less your actions matter. And that is a purely technical limitation. If a player’s actions truly mattered, they would change the game world. But that would mean a ludicrous amount of content creation beyond the scope of modern game making. So by giving me so many choices, Fable 2 made the results of those choices less varied. This is most startling in the dialog of a mission where I was to seduce a young lady. After about 5 different moves, I have heard everything she has in her vocabulary to say, several times over. That would be fine, if I only had to make one romantic gesture. But to get her “love” for me high enough I had to repeat it – and she had to repeat herself. It’s as if the game wants me to expose its limitations for it.
In the end Fable II felt like the Sims in terms of character interaction, and a rather primitive point and click adventure game in terms of its RPGness. The fighting system is fun, but it seems too easy, at least at first. The story is extremely generic. And all the depth is really breadth, with no depth whatsoever.
Perhaps I have not played to the parts of the games where the gems lie. Perhaps I am being too harsh. But a game that does not entice from the beginning failed already – I don’t have time in my schedule to give it 20 hours of chances waiting for something more exciting to happen.