My favorite theme in story-based videogames has always been morality and decisions based on it, yet sadly there are so few games that have explored it in a mature way that also is tied directly to the way the game plays. The original Fable promised to do such a thing, yet even its creators (as seen in the recent Edge special) believed they didn't go far enough.
I've only played Fable for about eight hours and haven't had to make any difficult decisions so far, but things seem definitely Manichean enough. However, the upcoming Fable II promises to really change the way choices and morality in games, given such examples as becoming less popular by choosing to do the moraly "right" thing, while becoming more popular and stronger by doing an "evil" deed.
Having attended the Athens Digital Week expo for two days in a row, I was able of spending some time with a playable demo version of Fable II. While a noisy expo is hardly the best place to play a story-based role-playing game, I liked what I saw.
The interface, and especially the emotes through which you interact with NPC's in the world, is a lot more streamlined and intuitive than in the original, making things much easier. Voice-acting seemed very solid from what I could hear, and combat was smooth. The graphics are quite beautiful from an artistic point of view, yet for some unimaginable reason, visual quality was seriously lacking in all games shown at the expo. The result was that from a technical point of view, Fable II looked exactly like the first game, only with a little more polish and better animation. This baffled me, but I expect the finished game to look much better, even in my sorry old standard definition television.
TL;DR version:
The newest issue of Edge awarded Fable II a 9 out of 10 score, so that's definitely encouraging.
If they do indeed nail the whole good/evil thing this time, I can definitely see this game becoming one of my favorites in recent years.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment