Working Title 01.22.09: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger - Fable III

Posted by Jordan Williams on 01.22.2009

The game that promises everything still hasn't lived up to its namesake. But the second time around was leaps and bounds better than the first, but maybe the third time could be the charm?

Welcome to the #1 Column to have a police record, WORKING TITLE! That's right, folks. I fulfilled my obligation as a young black man and got arrested last week. It seems that Johnny Law frowns against getting in fights in public; he also frowns even more when alcohol is included. Either way, I wasn't able to write Working Title due to complications with the law system. At least I only managed with community service and not jail time. Maybe next time.

A week ago I was starting up my new series: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger. In which I used the namesake song to tell about how game sequels could be better made. My first victim subject with Left 4 Dead. Which was actually pretty well received outside of the douches in the comments section who find need to get all PC vs. Console on me. This week I'll be using another game that I have been frequently playing, a game that is actually pretty fresh on my mind and a lot of others gamers minds due to its recent DLC release. That game is...


Fable II


Now if there was ever a game to get the "How to do a sequel better" treatment, it was Fable. But Fable II couldn't definitely benefit a bit from this as well. So how do we take a game that actually delivered on most of it's promises (even the ones that they half-assed) and won a slew of awards and say what needs to be better in Fable III (and you know there's gonna be a Fable III)? Well. Let's fuckin' find out. I promise I won't get arrested this time either.


Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: Fable III

For those of you who need a refresher, this is how HBFS works:

Harder: This is going to talk about how the came could be more challenging, and if the game was already challenging enough, how they could make it even MORE challenging to the hardcore players out there. Less health? More damage to the player? It'll be covered here.

Better: Pretty much how it sounds. What are those flaws that could've been left out of the original and made BETTER in the sequel? Didn't like the fact that you had to find a save point and couldn't save whenever you wanted? What about the annoying button layout? We can fix that.

Faster: Now this one might not make sense, but Faster doesn't actually refer to the speed of the game. This will be referring to how fast the game gets supported as WELL as speed of play. Sure, the game might be slow in some points. But what is worse than a slow game? A game that's slow and it takes even LONGER for decent DLC or patches to come out for it

Stronger: The most important part, how do we make the game just stronger than the previous title? How do the three above factors fit into just making the game better as an overall package, in essence, making the game stronger?

Yeah, I pasted that directly from the other column. I'm so fucking lazy it's not even funny. Either way it still applies to this one. We'll be following these same guidelines to see what exactly we can do to Fable III to make it better overall.

Now Fable II for what it was a definitely improvement over what Fable I was. While many people see F1 was a den of empty promises a lot of gamers see F2 was the game that finally fulfilled a lot of those promises but ended up creating a few new problems that I'll get to later. And then for many, including myself, F2 is seen as the game F1 SHOULD'VE been. So let's improve this motherfucker.

Harder

If there was one thing I definitely thought was lacking in Fable II, it was difficulty. At least in Fable I if you happened to die in combat you actually got some sort of penalty for it outside of the loss of (gasp) experience. In Fable II all you get is a slow-mo ragdoll jump, a new 'scar' and a loss of experience on the map. That's it. This coupled with other things you could easily work your way out of just made the game too easy and these are things we can fix.

Real Family

So, you done went and did it. You got some crazy person in Albion knocked up and you had a (mysteriously black) kid. So what now? You're wife will magically let you know that the house sucks or she wants some loving and you kid really won't care if you're around or not. Have about we have family actually MEAN something. Lets say you kid actually grows up and decides he wants to follow your footsteps at some point. Maybe your wife can actually start cheating on you if you're away for too long? Imagine how fucked up that would be. You come home from a quest to check in on your family and you LITTERALLY find another man in your bed. Evil points if you kill the thieving bastard. This would make the family aspect of the game a bit truer and also a bit more difficult. You wouldn't be able to skate by on just shoving your family into the most expensive house possible and then dropping a 'gift' off in your spouses pants every once in awhile. You'd actually have to work at it like a 'real' marriage...creepy as that sounds.

Death

I touched on the idea of Death a little bit earlier, but I think there are still things can be a little bit differently. Let's say you're playing a game of Fable III and you are decently far along and you've managed to raise a family and have (or adopt, if that's how you roll) a kid. You meet your untimely demise in an ill fated decision to go after that Balverine.

You're dead. There's no 'experience' loss. There's no "reload from the last time you fast traveled" fuck that. You're dead. Say goodbye to your Hero.

Instead, your 'extra life' is your kid. You kid has followed in your footsteps which means he retains all of his parents previous abilities and experience. The game world could change a little bit to show to difference in time (remember when you aged in the original Fable for every level you gained?) but otherwise it would be the same Hero. Maybe a different gender and it might look a tad different but I think it would stress the idea of family and life and dead that Molyneaux was trying to get across. You might be really attached to your original Hero and would obviously be a bit angry if they happened to die in some boss fight. But then again having your offspring rise up to avenge their fallen parent would just make the end story of Fable so much sweeter.


Yeah, you just aren't going to survive this.

And before you freak out, this doesn't mean that I mean ALL types of death will result in you needing to go out and have some babies. The Hero is a Hero for a reason and can take a lot of damage, but I think over time these 'deaths' should take a toll. Being beat up by a punch of Hobbes obviously isn't the best way for a Hero to go out, but getting bitchslapped by a Rock Troll just might be enough to ensure that your Hero just might not survive his injuries. This would not only make Death a lot harder to achieve, but since you have to try so hard to die (or suck really bad) it would give it much more weight.

Anti-Hero

One thing I always thought was a bit lacking in both Fables was the main antagonist. Jack of Blades was alright but Lucien was just a fucking joke. They were both painfully evil and assholish in their own way but you almost NEVER encountered them until the final act in which the final showdown was almost always underwhelming (I am not going Jack of Blades Dragon into this, by the way). I think the game needs protagonists that can irk you the while time and you finally get to deal with them at the end. In a world full of Heroes you'd think that some of them might just not get a long. This is where competeting Heroes would fit in. Take too long to do a certain Quest and you might find out your rival Hero (who also shares that iconic Hero bloodline) has beat you to it. Maybe this Hero got to this city before you and HIS statue is all over the place and all of the citizens praise him instead of you. It would be a nice way to show that although you both are on the side of good (a loosely used term) that there is still some competing in here. And who knows, maybe those characters with a bit of an evil side will get a chance to get rid of that bastard once and for all?

Better

Now 'Better' is pretty self explanatory, we just want to make Fable III better than Fable II. You'd think that would be a pretty hard task given that the single player was actually pretty decent, but once you hit the Co-Op you know exactly what the hell can be fixed and changed.

True Co-Op

When I first heard there was going to be Co-Op in Fable II my little co-op loving heart jumped for joy. Then when I actually SAW how Co-op was implemented I fucking cried. What the hell was that sad excuse for Co-Op they gave us? Not only could I not use my own customized Hero, I was bound to the host hero by a distance of a few feet. I couldn't make any of my own decisions or go where I liked and really nothing I did during this Co-Op had any affect on MY personal game, just the host's game. To say that this was a disappointing Co-Op experience would be definitely underwhelming. We were promised Co-Op, not tag along same screen shit. I was expecting to be able to merge both of our universes into some amalgam of the two and be able to completely play in someone else's world without having to be joined at the hip. If there was a complete Quest they needed help with one could go to the other side of Albion to tackle one part of it while the other stayed behind to deal with the other half.

That is what the co-op should've been like, an actual cooperative experience rather than single player with a tag along. Fable III should really rethink it's strange on Co-Op because what could've been the biggest draw to the game ended up being one of the biggest flaws and disappointments.

Transportation

You know what? Fast Travel is cheap. There, I said it. I really dislike Fast Travel options in games where it doesn't make much sense. Games like Oblivion and Fallout 3 where the in-game work is FUCKING GIGANTIC, I can dig that. No one wants to run that while way, but in games like Fable 2 where Fast Travel is just a convenience rather than a need I think they could be a bit more creative. The game has now spanned the Dragon Age AND the Renaissance of Guns and Ballistics, yet there isn't a single damn horse in sight? No buggy? No nothing?

Not only would owning some kind of mount be a pretty sweet for travel purposes, could you imagine how awesome mounted combat would be? Instead of having to slog through that area of bandits you could just ride in on a horse and start the beheadings off right...or maybe the Bandits could make a ride through a town they are contesting with rifles and guns blaring and take no prisoners and ride off into the sunset as you hop on your own mighty steed to hunt them down.

The more I talk about this the more it just seems to me that this is something that should REALLY be in the next game...if not in a future DLC release. We can dream though, we can dream.

Faster

So we've talked about making Fable III Harder and Better. Now we look at Faster, this doesn't increase the speed of the game but rather how the game plays and how it could penetrate the main market. These are changes that could be made to the game to ensure that it becomes a hit faster than it becomes an afterthought.



Guilds

The Great Heroes Guild of the first Fable game went down in flames, and the second one was the staging area of your little band of misfits. I think that around the time the third game comes along you should be able to get a group of like minded individuals could get together and form a guild of their own. Fable II already supports leader boards but maybe those would actually be interesting if there were Guilds that tallied up all of its members Renown into a Guild Renown so you could prove who was the baddest Guild in all of Albion's Multiverse.

Perhaps even a slight PVP element could be involved for future generations of the game. Although that might just make Fable III a little bit too MMORPGish, it would still give it a lot more to do in a game where you were promised that you could do EVERYTHING.

Online Shops

Making money in Fable II was easy as hell. All you had to do was buy a few houses and you could just watch the money pile in. I think a way to extend even upon that would be for you to be able to sell all of the crap you don't want or need to other members online. Not only could your Guild be the best one in the land, you could have a good (or bad) rep for actually selling decent items. Of course this could be easily exploited or hacked, but name something in any game that wouldn't fall to that same fate. If all else fails you could at least sell off the stuff you don't need for a better price than you would get at the shitty in-game stores. I'm sure some poor sap on XBL would buy it...after all; some people have actually PAID for worse on Xbox Live.


You laugh now. But someone would buy it.

Stronger

This is just how you could make the game better as a whole. How to make the game stronger in every aspect to ensure that it just does fucking awesome. It could be changing the way the game is played or just adding in features that people would like to see. But in Fable's case it boils down just to one simple thing...


STFU Molyneaux

I can not stress this enough. If Holy Moly would just shut the hell up then we would've never had a deep hole like Fable 1 and we wouldn't be so hyped for Fable 2. Moly has the bad habit of saying so much about a game before it comes out that he ends up hyping it to near impossible levels before anyone ever gets a chance to play it. What happens after that is that the game doesn't live up to it's Christ-like expectations and it gets all sorts of bad press in regards to it.

Do you think Fable 1 would've been look at in the light it was looked at if Moly didn't hype it up into the stratosphere? Do you think people would've been so hyped about that damn dog and co-op if Moly had it made that the focal point of every single keynote interview in regards to Fable 2?

I'm not saying a little hype is a bad thing, but a lot of hype is horrible. It is responsible for some of the worst games this generation due to hype taking a hold over the game actually trying to deliver a promise instead of just...you know...being fun.

So that's that, the one thing that Fable III could do to be stronger is to just put a muzzle of Molyneaux, it'll be a lot harder for him to put his foot in his mouth that way.

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Working Feedback


Damn you Jordan...
You are making me feel guilty for not having L4D. I think it may be time to start whoring myself out on street corners.
~Travis

As you should.


Left 4 Dead is awesome. Jordan actually got me an achievement by jumping in against my band of badasses. Drag a survivor for 100 feet with a smoker. It was fun, though, we will have to do it again.~Toddo

You just WAIT until I get World at War, motherfucker. I suck at CoD but damn it I'll learn to be good just so I can take my sweet revenge. You AND your Band of Badasses.

Console vs. PC whiney shit

Oh lord. Look, all of my points were pretty general of the game on BOTH consoles it was released on. I'm not a big fan of PC gaming so obviously my views are skewered more towards the console crowd. But I made sure to stick to things that could be fixed in either version of the game. Although I will admit that Valve does show it's favoritism to the PC crowd but I think that's only because for PC they own all of their distributing rights. On XBL they have to pass anything they want to add or change through Microsoft with sort of gums up the gears.

You have no right to demand or make a comment about L4D if you aren't playing on a PC... FTW!!!!~LRM

And you can just lick the sweatiest part of my body.


And with that, until next time my name is Jordan Williams...and I DIDN'T DROP THE SOAP!