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Fable: Where's the story??

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Let me begin with this entry from dictionary.com:

"Fable: the plot of an epic, a dramatic poem, or a play."

Did you catch that? Anybody? Anybody?

It said a "plot." A plot! When we hear the word fable we usually picture an emphasis on storytelling and characters. I saw no such emphasis in this game. The story was a clear afterthought and main characters seldom appeared.

Newsflash for game developers: You don't need to be Tim Schafer to create an interesting story! Fable doesn't even attempt.

(Spoiler's ahead)

The first bit of Fable is actually very nice. We get a great storybook cutscene and neat interaction throughout Oakvale. The sacking of the town is engaging and the story seems to progress nicely until you're spirited away to the Heroes Guild. That's where the plot kicks the bucket.

First we are introduced with the pathetic excuse for an NPC known as Whisper. From the first moment she opens her mouth we realize that Whisper's overall purpose in the game is to tutor the player in combat. And that's fine in the case of the Guildmaster who spends the entire game standing in one spot. But Whisper actually poses off as someone who's established a relationship with the main character. How? All she ever does is join a few quests where she attempts (in very futile ways) to beat you. And when the peak of their interaction reaches a decision that involves life and death, why should I care?? Either way, why should I give a crap about what happens to her?

In Planescape: Torment, there's a point when the Nameless One can make the decision of rescuing Morte or leaving him behind in the Piller of Skulls. Either decision the player makes seems valid because both characters have established a relationship of love and hate. They've argued, they've betrayed one another and they've relied on each other.

Whisper tells you that she's gonna kick yo white bony ass in a few quests and the game makes it seem like letting her live/die is a big deal. Any further story development is destroyed when Whisper never shows up again if you LET her live, making the entire kill or let live event the more pointless.

And what about the main character's family? When does he ever express sadness or worry about losing them? Then again, a character whose expressions mainly consist of "wait," "follow," and farting, probably has about as much emotion as a potato. But let's say that the main character is the player's avatar and thus is capable of developing too many unique character traits for game developers to cover with dialogue.

How's this an excuse for big NPCs like the guy's sister and his mom, who take up about 10 seconds of screentime and express minimum character development? So we have this tale where our hero has spent god knows how long presuming that his family is dead. Then, finally, he reunites with his long lost sister and--

nothing happens!!! Nothing. We get a tiny cutscene and an explanation via panning of a mural.

How fucking engaging!

Towards the end, she conviently appears for the player to make a good or bad decision. IF it just so magically happens that anyone of us somehow cares about this "character," the result of letting her live is about as empty as it was with Whisper. She leaves, never to appear again.

Other moments include you returning to the home village and seeing the girl that had lost her teddy bear from the begging of the game. She waves to the main character and says, "oh hi, it's me Emily from way back when," and leaves. Just leaves, never to be seen, and I'm once more faced with the question of why the hell she appears in the first place??

What's the bloody point? Peter Molyneux expressed how "cutscenes are last generation." No wonder! The cutscenes in Fable were an utter waste of production time and costs, unbelievably dull and awfully writen. The mural cutscenes with the narrative voice-over (ala Beauty and the Best) are nice, but they also beg the question:

If the overall plot was an afterthought, an excuse for the gameplay, then why were those mural cutscenes attempting for the player to feel involved in an epic story? They kept posing off as something grand and epic, but there's no plot!

My biggest disappointment with Fable was not that it didn't let me grow trees or give me some stupid singing sword of expensiveness, but that it reeked of a plot that had been pulled out of someone's ass.

It seems these days we either get story driven games with crappy gameplay (Dreamfall) or games with descent gameplay but shitty story (Fable).

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Otogi! Loved that game.

Actually, in a way, with all the talk about Molyneux and Fable 2, I thought that commentary on Fable 1 was pretty valid.

I never really thought about the plot stuff really, except every single character seemed to have been streamlined so that it really didn't matter what choices you made in regards to them. I really wanted to have a throw down with Whisper's brother later in the game due to oe of the choices made earlier, and was disappointed when nothing arose.

Any rumours about Fable 2, if the devs are going to take the same 'sit on the fence' aproach to the moral choices?

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The problem with moral choices is the problem with the story.

Morality in real world is partily governed by punishment. Games like Fable don't have much punishment as they pretty much let you become godlike. So the only factor morality depends upon is how well the characters are crafted. Additionally, any given choice given through plot must in turn change the plot. Okay, so not killing the hero's sister in Fable made you go through an additional quest. Not a very deep change as far as plot goes, though, and doesn't really play on the idea of morality.

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How about this from my Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English:

a traditional short story that teaches a moral lesson, especially a story about animals: the fable of the fox and the crow

The world 'fable' does not make most people picture an intricate storyline with deep characters. It's a story concerning morals. The word is a very good fit for the game's name. I have never played it, so I can't comment on your critique.

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Yes, and fable also means "a story about supernatural heroes and extraordinary events," which I suppose is a criteria that the game would fulfill.

However, my complaint was not so much that the game's title doesn't fullfill the content, but that there's a lack of plot, not just an intricate plot.

As for the " a traditional short story that teaches a moral lesson, especially a story about animals" I can say that it definitely didn't fullfill this part. Morality in the game is largely absent. You're given choices to do bad and good deeds but they're mostly there to change the appearance of your character (ex. so he can grow horns).

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Your review sounds kinda the same as the impression of the game I got from the trailers, previews and what-have-you, which is why I never bought it. Western RPG developers these days seem to really like the idea of character customization. (Notice the same emphasis on this in all the previews of Mass Effect.)

This is just anecdotal, but I feel like most people who play RPGs are in it for the story/characters more than for maximizing saving throws and working towards a moral alignment. Am I wrong? Personally, I'd rather have a bit of linearity in my title if it means that the story and characters are reasonably written rather than just there.

Curse you John Romero! It's ok to have cut-scenes sometimes, but no one wants them anymore!

Obviously, I'm ranting now about games I haven't even played...but you get the idea!

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I'm confused as to the point of this post. Fable's story isn't any worse than most mainstream games... why single it out? Molyneux, for all his huffing and puffing, has never put an emphasis on story (Black and White? Populous? etc.) and with Fable from what I'd read before I played it I was expecting a traditional, cliche-ridden fantasy story (which is what I got).

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Yes, it's no worse than most game's stories. But considering that this was an RPG (which tend to have more emphasis on stories than other action titles) and that this was a popular one at that (like KOTOR), I was expecting a bit more. A lot more, actually.

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i had problems with the story in places, although some of it was fine.

I think the main thing i hated about it was that you couldn't really change anything.

Whisper can live or die, but either way nothing is different. Her brother still hates you either way, the evil way you get more money though, so it's purely the cleverest thing to do. In that respect it doesn't follow on very well if you have played Kotor.

However, I really enjoyed playing through fable, very much so. The story wasn't the attraction really.

it's not a very good piece of writing really, but i ranted more about it here a few years ago:

http://idlethumbs.net/display.php?id=63

Disappointingly, the storyline is emphatically not affected by your actions in the way we were promised. Oh the missions change ever so slightly—help the bandits, or join them?—the way you progress changes, sure even the dialogue can be changed slightly but until your absolute last action in the game the story line remains pretty much identical. At one point you are given the opportunity to kill what seems like a pivotal character. Don't kill them and you never see them again and their relatives will be pissed off at you. Kill them, and you'll never see them again and their relatives will be pissed off at you AND you get given your own weight in gold.

I also wrote this, which sums up how i feel about the story vs. the game

Design flaws do not necessarily produce a flawed game and Fable is a case in point. It doesn't have the story-centric freedom that we were promised, but it does allow for non-linearity in the game as a whole. If you were to play the story from end to end in a straight line, you could complete it in a few hours, but you would also be missing a hell of a lot of the expertly crafted quality. With all manner of side quests and distractions available to the player, there is much more to this game than the one main attraction.

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