I’m just over 20 hours in and, much like when I reached this point in Oblivion, I feel like I’m just getting started.  This is actually a great feeling to me, especially since I was just thinking that I’d love another good free-roaming RPG.  It’s actually the reason I bought Fable II.  It turned out that in addition to all the other things I disliked about that game, the wonky area transitions and long loading times in Fable II killed any sense of continuity in the world.  Fallout 3, then, should be absolutely ideal for me.

I’m pleased to say that in many ways it lives up to be exactly what I want.  Nearly everything I heard about the game is turning out to be just as presented, from the smaller-but-denser world (a welcome design decision) to the incredible range of roleplaying possibilities.  I found myself really enjoy the combat too, all the “just an Oblivion FPS” rhetoric aside.  The VATS targeting is a fantastic idea, the perfect way to get some turn-based gameplay into a very differently-styled game.

With everything working so well, I have to say there is one thing that isn’t going over very smoothly with me.  It centers on how they chose to present the main quest… and really, the issue may lie with the fact that there is a “main quest”.  I find myself asking, “Why is it here?”  I really don’t think it’s necessary, especially the way it’s being done.  If this one particular aspect were removed, I would probably feel more immersed in the world.  As it is, I have to go against my natural roleplaying urges in order to get the full experience.

The central plot is one of urgency, leaving your only home in chaos and being thrust into an unfamiliar wasteland to search for your father.  Its purpose is to give the feeling of being just on the cusp of important events, and to urge you to catch up or else.  This serves the purpose of letting the player know what to do and where to go to reach the game’s conclusion, but I find it counterintuitive to the game’s biggest accomplishments.  To follow it directly to its end is to ignore 90% of a world that hundreds of people have spent years crafting, and because I know that, I’m forced to put the Main Event on hold until I’ve had a chance to see the sights.  I feel further vindicated because my roommate beat the game after playing only about 12 hours to find that (zomg spoilarz) the game has a hard stop after the main quest has been finished.

When I sit down and think about it, there are only certain kinds of games where a “flashing-arrow-to-the-end” actually bothers me.  With Bioshock or Dead Space for example, I love having the ability to see exactly where to go to complete my current objective.  This allows me to, almost paradoxically, explore with complete freedom since I know that getting back on the right track is just a button press away.  Since these games are fundamentally linear experiences (especially when compared to Fallout 3), I don’t mind the game acknowledging that with its own version of a glowing trail on the floor.  If a game isn’t telling me it’s an open world, I don’t have any problem with it not being one.  Since Fallout 3 is, having a rigidly linear path to follow (especially as the main impetus to proceed) doesn’t work anymore.

Honestly, I don’t see why the story wouldn’t work as-is if the main quest were removed entirely.  For example, here was my experience of the very beginning of the game:  Immediately after leaving the vault I was drawn towards a big settlement just a few hundred meters away from Vault 101.  After going around meeting the folks in the town, I spoke to a local shop owner who had what turned out to be a very lengthy quest chain to do.  This one conversation ended up taking me all over the wasteland and actively rewarded me for exploring my surroundings.  Going about these tasks naturally lead me through other populated areas, and thus more people, who had more things to do.  And even further, (though I admit I may be the only person who feels this way) I didn’t need even that.  Wandering around out in the wastes just trying to survive would have been compelling enough.

As I’ve completed more and more quests, I’ve come to realize how I personally would have tried to shape the experience.  If the game had been built on meshing together all the stories and quests into a final event tailored to you, based on how you handled yourself, that would have been totally rad.  Yes, I have heard all the hooplah about the two hundred-whatever endings, but my guess is that it’ll be like a series of on/off switches dependant on whether you did objective X on quest Y and play out like a montage of Where Are They Now? character cameos.  Now of course, I won’t really know until I see it and this is only my guess.  I’m completely open to being very impressed.

The only thing that’s clear is that it’s looking like Pappy’s gonna have to wait a long time for me.

Fable II is an interesting beast.  Understated and cool, it comes across as a confident, wholly personal project from series creator Peter Molyneaux.  His creative style and vision is clear in every part of this game, given free reign to do precisely what he wants, wherever he wants it.  There have been several games this year proudly touted as the jewel of their lead designer’s eye, such as Too Human and Metal Gear Solid 4.  These have always been my favorite sorts of games to play because they are always, at the very least, worth playing through once.

Fable II is something altogether different from the first one, across the board a more polished and focused effort.  The world is bigger, the scale grander, and the pacing tighter.  Everything about the design and style of the game feels right, as though the ideas have been honed to a point through numerous iterations.  The result is a game that has a quiet, relaxed feel.  It’s neither overwrought with style, nor insufferable with pretension.  Many eyes have seen it before mine, and the game has clearly improved because of it.

My first impressions were not quite so favorable, however.  Technical issues were the first things I noticed after the introductory cutscene.  First off, the control feels amazingly stiff.  I liken it more to piloting a Segway than running around as an agile Hero.  Just moving around showcased the game’s oddest issue, that of a constant frame blur I think is intended to mask lower framerates.  In the high-contrast snowy village you explore during the first part of the game, just rotating the camera resulted in a streaky mess.  I also encountered numerous problems with the audio while performing for the random townsfolk; the game simply could not load the voice samples fast enough so the sound effects and eventually even the music cut out completely until I stopped.  These technical problems turned out to be something that I’m able to ignore after a while, but it created a noticeable negative undercurrent to my entire experience.

The game’s advertised hook is in how the world reacts to you and what you do in it.  Superficially, it sells its concept very well, with villagers talking about things you’ve done and bits of the world changing as a direct result of your deeds.  However, trying to see beyond these things reveals little.  Soon, you begin to see that people are easily influenced to do anything you want in minutes, and getting married to an NPC results in a relationship with less depth than a Tamagotchi.  Seeing my personal interactions accounting for very little, especially in gameplay terms, ended up making me feel the least attached to those I was meant to care for most.

For me, the make-or-break with this game was whether I was able to fully invest myself in the world and people I met, and ultimately, I couldn’t.  It’s hard to make believable people in videogames, I know.  As a longtime gamer I’ve learned to do many things to make me more likely to ignore unavoidable shortcomings, but this game seems to think it’s addressing some of them without actually doing so.  The result is that when something happened to my husband, my dog, or even me, I felt mostly unaffected.  This surprised me given the emotional investment I remember feeling by the end of the first game.

The tone of the game is partially to blame, being a switch between whimsical and destitute with barely a transition between them.  The darker themes (and my favorite parts) are explored almost entirely at the end of the game.  It’s a shame that this portion of the game is also the most hastily-assembled.  It’s in such a hurry to get you through the final sequence and into the endgame that for me, it almost played itself.  After the smoke clears, you’re left to finish any lingering quests along with a handful of new ones.  And yet, since I finished maxing out my strength and skill trees just before completing main quest, I don’t feel the need to do more than I have.  The world isn’t going to change anymore, and neither am I.  It’s a fantastic option for completionists, but I’m ready to move on.

Overall, the game is competently made and can be very immersive, but I found the tonal changes and lack of deep characterization to be a serious detriment to my enjoyment.  Thinking back, the first game had higher highs (and admittedly lower lows) that actually resulted in me caring about it more.  Fable’s identity and character were made by doing more with less, and the sequel feels like it’s doing enough with enough.  It’s hardly a bad game, but I’ll always remember the original more fondly.

Objection!

At this point, three cases into the third game in the series, I’m really trying to remember why I decided to invest in the whole series in the first place.  Before I finished the first one, I went out and bought the other three just so my momentum wouldn’t get interrupted.  Halfway through the second one, I found myself feeling like the series had become a chore, and now?  Now it seems that all the things I liked about the first one have somehow lost their impact after repeated uses.  The only thing left that could carry the experience, that being the story, is only really turning out to be a series of silly, juvenile encounters.  Why do I even bother?

The game has one incredibly redeeming feature for someone like me:  It’s almost impossible not to progress.  If you play it slowly and carefully, as I often do, you’ll constantly press forward and keep things moving.  The pace tends to be awfully slow, however — I can tell the writers and designers made it as pick-up-and-play as possible by constantly referring to things you’ve just seen, in case you had to leave at any point and come back a lot later.  There’s an intruiging, almost trance-like state I get into when a game is constantly moving along, doubly so for something that requires very little input from me.  It’s the same sort of thing that keeps Peggle interesting far longer than it should.  Forward momentum is a powerful draw to me, even when I don’t really care where I’m going.

I’ll probably end up finishing all four of them, just to say I have and to not leave another dangling plot thread in my brain.  I’m just wishing the charm and wit that brought me in could have taken me all the way to the end.  And hey, there’s always the series re-vamp Apollo Justice.  Maybe that’ll end up surprising me.

The first thing this demo did right was to load up in delicious 1080i.  To list everything it did right after that would be to list every moment I experienced until the demo ended.  This game is one of the most conceptually ambitious games I’ve ever played, and Dice appears to have done it exactly right.  Those who wish the game were in third person are missing the point of the perspective, and are ignoring everything that has been done to make that perspective work.  The game that we have here would not work any other way.

Being in first person while doing all of these amazing things creates a kind of visceral feel that I’ve never experienced before.  The look of the game to a third party observer is likely that of chaos, or nonsense.  I imagine most people would feel that way if they could see through someone else’s eyes but be unable to control it.  For me, I felt at one with the controls right away and thus the barrier between me and the character was dissolved.

It really makes me think about what a company like Valve has chosen to do with Gordon Freeman.  They claim by never taking your control away and never having him speak, the player is allowed to truly be him since he does nothing to break that belief.  I, however, feel even less like myself when I play a character with no personality.  A non-speaking protagonist doesn’t work, especially when you’re in control of him, because everyone you meet would either have to constantly point out that fact or have awkwardly-written dialogue in place of something you would say.  Immersion isn’t broken by having your character say something; it’s by having them say something stupid.  Strange that Valve, a company staffed with some of the finest writers in the industry, wouldn’t have the confidence that they could write dialogue that most people wouldn’t object to.

Needless to say, I was thrilled that Faith is allowed to speak in Mirror’s Edge, and I can’t wait until this game comes out to see the rest of what it has to offer.

I picked up Fable II last weekend, looking forward to sinking into a charming fantasy world.  I’d been eagerly anticipating it because I really enjoyed the first game.  Its sense of progression was immensely satisfying — just looking at my character reminded me of everywhere I’d been and how much I’d done (and since I was playing The Lost Chapters, that actually amounted to more than six hours of gameplay).  Very few games give me this kind of feeling, and I was eager feel it again.

To preface, here’s the sum total of what I knew about Fable II before picking it up:  You have a dog.  Sold.

At this point I’ve put just shy of ten hours into the game, and I’m finding it less enjoyable than expected.  My issues are with three specific aspects of the game:

The first is the insane level of “motion” blurring.  I don’t really want to call it motion blur, because what I’m talking about is in addition to the regular motion blur.  This kind of blur is like the low refresh rate of an old LCD monitor, or like the PSP’s original screen.  As the camera moves, the image leaves a slight smear, like it’s blurring the frames together.  I’ve seen games use this before (like in Resident Evil: Code Veronica X for the PS2) and it was used to give the impression of a smoother framerate.  I don’t think this should be necessary for games in this generation, and it’s probably not there for that reason, but it gives me the same effect.  For the record, I have a quality (though admittedly old) CRT HDTV, and I’m playing it in 1080i with component cables, and nothing else on the 360 (or anything else, for that matter) looks like this.

The second issue is controlling your character.  Moving him around feels like steering a bowling ball, or say, driving the cars in Grand Theft Auto IV.  After building up speed in one direction, it takes much longer to change direction than I expected, making the controls feel “heavy”.  Looking back, the first game had a similar feel, but your character felt much lighter.  It was bad enough that after playing for an hour, I was worried I wasn’t going to get used to steering myself through the entire game, careening around like I was riding in a go-cart.  Thankfully, I think I’ve finally gotten the hang of it.  I just don’t understand why I should have had to.

The last issue is with the melee combat.  I remember when Peter Molyneaux previewing the combat for the press, saying that its greatest feature was the one button combat.  I’ve heard people compare it to the style of Assassin’s Creed (whose simple system of “tap the button when your strike connects to follow up with a stronger hit” I loved) but I’d have to disagree with that comparison.  After leveling up your melee skill to get all your moves, I found the rhythm to be really messy.  In order to do your strongest strikes, or “flourishes”, you have to hold the melee button down, wait a short time for it to charge, push the thumbstick in the direction of a bad guy, and then release it to attack.  Trying to use a flourish when you’re in the middle of a mob of thugs can be maddening because you have to stop attacking, press X, hold it, point the stick, and then release to hit one guy.  I’ve found that the only way to make it work for me is to do nothing but flourishes or combos, but never mix the two.  I think they want me to use some variety, but it’s too annoying.

To be honest, none of these are dealbreakers.  The game has a lot going for it, and I’m finding myself encouraged to continue because of those other things.  I’m just amazed that these things either didn’t exist or worked better for me in the first game.  The sequel is supposed to be where they iterate on everything they got right and improve on things they didn’t, right?  I guess I can’t have it all this time.

Now then, it’s back to being a bartender.  My husband wants to move to a new house!

Since my PC is currently unstable (and I’m very disappointed in you, young man) I’m going to have to pick up Fallout 3 for a console.  Strike that, for the Xbox 360.  As soon as someone at Sony gets the 1080i upscaling working universally for the PS3, I’ll come home.  Until then I’m very disappointed in you too, old man.  In the meantime, I thought give my European import copy of Fallout (which I’ve had for years) a spin.

I’ve played Fallout just once, about ten years ago when I found a double jewel case of the first and second games.  All I remember is that I killed a few rats and couldn’t figure out what the hell to do.  Going into it now, I promised myself I’d make an earnest effort to get as far into it as possible.  I’ve got to wait for my paycheck to pick up the third one, so now feels like a good time.

After just a couple hours, I’ve determined that this game is absolutely unforgiving.  Maybe I’ve just gotten too used to games saving checkpoints for me, but I’ve had to re-do large chunks of this game over and over again.  I’m amazed that they would throw you into random situations you can’t possibly survive right off the bat.  This is one aspect of older game design I definitely don’t miss.

For example, I had a random encounter with four giant scorpions five steps out of the vault at the beginning of the game.  At level one, I had absolutely no chance of defeating them and died.  Then, I walked into a town and saw that a guard asked me to lower my weapon.  By the time I was done reading what he said, the entire town had gone hostile to me and I was annihilated.  I tried again, having put my weapon away first, and walked up to a hospital I saw.  There was a doctor inside, and I’d just fought off some scorpions so I thought I’d have him examine me to see if I was poisoned.  He said I was fine and charged me ten bucks just for looking at me.  After some initial incredulity, I buckled and said I’d pay him.  That’s when I found out I was broke, and my punishment was to have his guards execute me.

This game doesn’t mess around.  It’s like playing Ultima VIII all over again.  And I remember liking that game.  Yeesh.

So, I really want to get through this game so I can fully Fallout 3, but it looks like I’m gonna have to wuss out and use a walkthrough the entire way.  Normally, I’m against doing that the first time, but…  ah, hell.  Maybe I should just admit that I suck now and roll out the GameFAQs.  I’ll think about it while I play some more Fable II.  At least that game loves me.  *sniffle*

Hey there, and welcome to the site.  I’m a guy whose day job and lifestyle has created a need for a lot of escapism.  My favorite has always been videogames.  I’ve been playing ever since I realized that my mum’s Commodore 64 had games.  Working up in the PC/console ladder ’till now, I’ve played hundreds across every possible genre.  Everyone always told me I’d grow out of it, but as I matured, so has the medium.  Well, mostly.

Recently, I’ve found myself completely sucked in to the gaming industry, moreso than I ever have before.  Two-thirds of the websites I check every morning are gaming-related, and so are two-thirds of the podcasts I’m subscribed to.  If anyone out there wonders how I can listen to half-a-dozen gaming podcasts in a week, all you have to do is look at the kind of job I have.  Nine hours a day, in a quiet office answering infrequent phone calls.  My ears yearn for sound, and nearly the entire network of 1Up Radio programs keeps them happy all week long.

To that end, I’ve often felt frustrated that listening to podcasts is such a one-way conversation.  And well, of course it is, but I feel like responding so frequently that it’s driven me to create this site.  Here I plan to include my own thoughts about games, as an entertainment venue and as an artform.  I love delving into game design and gameplay structure, so I think many of my writings will be focused in that direction.  I sometimes feel my views aren’t echoed in the popular media, so at least now there will be one place that says what I think! =)

And so, off I go with this nonsense.