So as if I did not have enough half-finished, sort of started games on my plate–KoTOR II, Paper Mario: TTYD, FF I and II, Golden Sun, Metroid Prime, and Halo 2– I picked up Fable this weekend. My mother-in-law had a stack of coupons for EB Games for $5 off any used game $24.99 or higher and just my luck their copy of Fable was $24.99. While I was there I also picked up an Edge card for another $5 which gets me 10% off all used game purchases so it looks like I’ll add to my unfinished stack in a big way–Jade Empire, Tales of Symphonia, Star Wars: Republic Commando, Minish Cap, and Metroid Prime 2.
Anyway, I am about 45 minutes into Fable working through the apprenticeship having finished sword fighting and archery, while still trying to be the fastest runner at the guild. My initial impressions of the game are positive with the graphics taking on a warm ethereal glow that seems to bathe everything adding to a soft dreamlike state. The character models are high;y expressive and the voice acting is solid though sometimes I feel like I am at a renaissance fair with the oddly affected British accents. So far the only serious complaint that I have is the absence of a button to re-center the camera can be a tad irksome particularly when performing tasks such as running and fighting which really require the camera to stay over the shoulder of the character.
The real question is, “Am I having fun?” Well, 45 minutes is not a whole lot of time to make that determination but so I am. One thing that my wife commented on while watching me play is that whenever there is a moral choice in games, like KoTOR, a unfailingly and instinctively take the good path and she is right on target since in both KoTORs I played by managing my light-side points striving to make my character portrait look like some sort of saint beatified on Dantooine. In Fable, the moral dilemmas so far have been minor, one child taunted me to smash the crates I was charged with watching and I could have been complicit in a married man’s side-dalliances. I each case I unthinkingly chose the route of a squeaky-clean-Beaver-Cleaver-goody-two-shoes, which is interesting because games like these, ones that present moral choices and consequences, are often intended for emergent game play behavior and to allow players to try out actions different than what they take in the real world.
So what does my style of game play mean? Am I not good enough in meat space that I need to work on it during game play or am I, as my wife puts it, an insufferable dogoodnik that I cannot fathom playing another way. Well, maybe. The thing of it is that I feel more comfortable making “good” choices when I can but if I am presented only choices of varying degrees of depravity than I am more likely to choose the worst of the lot. Take Grand Theft Auto as an example, I am utterly disinterested in advancing the plot what-so-ever preferring to spend an hour or more causing destruction and panic by running over pedestrians and perching up on a rooftop firing indiscriminately on the populace. If anything this shows that if presented with a choice I’ll tend towards “good” decisions but I am a personality that pursues decision paths to their extremes.
Oddly, the game play style does not neatly equate to my positions in the real world where I am more centrist in my positions preferring to find a balance of hue, tone, and color rather than being saturated by a single one. So does these mean that my game play reveals a deep seated need for clarification and simplification of my place in the world? That is certainly something to think about.
