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On Fable 2 and Economic Design.
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Fable 2- the game (almost) everybody wants to shove in their disk drive at some point before the end of the year. A game with supposedly limitless (hi there, Molyneux) possibility. According to big Pete himself, it will take almost 100 million gold to purchase the entire land of Albion. That would be very fine and dandy, provided you actually earned money conventionally.
The problem here stems with the fairly bad design philosophy of separating quests and the story from gold. You don't get gold for going out, questing, helping people, and saving the world. Oh no. That doesn't count as a real job! Instead, you have to "work", while earning nothing for quests. Working (I'm guessing) will consist of either menial, tedious mini-quests for small amounts of gold, or tiny minigames to annoy the living crap out of us. The problem here is two-fold. Most people will skip over most of the sidequests that they deem stupid or worthless in the first place. Now that there is no money incentive, there is nothing drawing the player in to explore, expand and complete the game in its entirety. Of course, there are always people like me who will try to do every quest just to do them; but even die-hard adventurers are bound to get annoyed eventually.
The second problem is time and age. One of the most annoying things to me about Fable was the aging factor. You play for two hours, and you go from being a 20 year old to some random 30 year old. Just exploring/questing/crafting and doing all of the off-the-beaten-path work in the game for around 6 hours will make you some pathetic geezer by the time the story ends, and it just feels pretty awkward at that time. I would imagine (read: hope and pray) that the game is longer than the original, since it was fairly short for a good ARPG, to be honest. Who wants to work and work to be able to afford real estate only to be some old coot with magic powers? That isn't very rewarding at all.
Much better then, to play the horribly designed Pub Games or the other recently announced web apps that will allow you to unlock more cash and items. When you have such a sophisticated system, the probability of overlap and redundancy becomes much higher. That's a future that has become realized for Lionhead, as people continually farm millions of gold from their glitchy arcade offering. An offering they have yet to fix, and have threatened penalties for abusing (that's the subject for another post). So will the player spend some time playing these little things, racking up gold and transfering it over, instead of actually immersing themselves in the universe, getting jobs, etc. ? Undoubtedly. The benefits greatly outweigh the risks (even if the glitches are fixed). Even if the player risks alienating themselves from the game.
Earning gold in a game should never be a complete grind. There are always things to do that augment your gathering process, stealing, theiving, murder, *usually* questing; but the earning of gold in Fable II has been trivialized by needless overcomplications from Lionhead. The pub games were interesting, if worthless; but they should have stopped there. People aren't going to be playing the Fable 2 to get gold, they're going to have to get gold through other methods just to play the game itself. And that's the complete opposite of the mentality they should take.
There is also the problem of tying the morality system into the way the player interacts with the economy. Personally, I'll probably loot and kill every owner of every house in every town I see. That just tends to be what I do; but do I want my character to be evil? No. Do I *care* enough to actually make a "tough choice" regarding righteousness, as Peter Molyneux would have me do? Absolutely not. I don't care how compelling playing through as intended seems to be, I'm not going to let that get in the way of me enjoying the mechanics I'm buying the game for.
So as it stands from my perspective, the game is probably going to be a rather uncohesive mess, but an incredibly fun one. I will still pick it up and hopefully enjoy it; and hopefully this entire blog post is proven wrong. I just got bored and let speculation get the best of me. Thanks for bearing with me. A Too Human review should be coming soon.
Labels: fable 2, lionhead studios, Xbox360
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I disagree, for the simple reason that the reason I'm so excited about Fable is the choice to do something different. You seem to suggest that there is a black and white stance you must take between playing for the gain of money, and the playing for immersion. I think if Fable is anything like it's designed to be, it will give the player the choice as to what percentage of the game should be earning, and what percentage should be exploring. It's that aspect that gives the game (I hope) a certain amount of refreshing realism. Also, how do you not link morality with economy, when both are integral to the structure of the game? An RPG where all aspects of the game are intertwined is the holy grail of RPGs.
It isn't the Holy Grail when most players wouldn't give a damn about what the fellows up at Lionhead have set up inside the game itself, though. Which is my entire point. They've chosen to unravel the link between quests and money, but keep the rest of the world connected. It creates a fissure that drives a wedge through the expectations of the player, who would rather not have to do what are essentially two menial digital jobs just to experience a main feature of the game.
Well then maybe the 'menial jobs' are actually a main feature of the game, and should be treated as such.