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Fable 2: Mini Games vs. Storytelling
By Corvus | October 28, 2008
Today I think I’ll complain about Fable 2 a bit. As I stated yesterday–I am really enjoying the game, but I think they did a number of things that sell their vision a bit short at best and work directly against their core design at worst.
One of the very first things you’re encouraged to do in the game, post childhood, is interact with some admirers by using Fable 2’s emote system. Certain emotes can be sustained and have a greater impact, positive or negative, on your audience. To pull these off you hold down the emote button on the controller and play a little mini game consisting of an arc with a shrinking color bar–which starts out red, turns yellow, and then green as it gets smaller–and a moving white dot. Release the controller when the white dot is over the color bar and you manage to pull off the extended emote. Hold it until the bar is green and you come off as particularly impressive.
Okay. The mini game here is a bit silly. But then, so are the emotes you’re performing–heroic pose, fart, belch, victory arm pump, growl, dance–all are humorous little emotes that have various effects on the storyworld’s citizenry. I’m not terribly keen on pulling the focus out to a UI element, but I can live with it-particularly when the rest of the game’s storytelling elements are so engagingly presented.
Albion (the storyworld of Fable 2) has a simple economy. Individual regions can suffer economic setbacks or booms, and your own spending behavior has an effect on this. Additionally, you can buy shops and residences and do a little price setting–either raising prices and rents a certain percentage over the region’s average, or dropping them below it. Which behavior you decide on effects your own morality, something I suspect will factor in later in the game. Additionally, just like buying goods from vendors, your in-game choices affect the buying price for all real estate. If the owners like you–you get a discount. If they’re afraid of you–discount. If they just happen to die right before you make an offer on their property–huge discount. I guess the government–or previous owner’s estate, perhaps–would rather offload the property at a discount rather than let the overall economy falter from an inactive property. So while you wander the world, your spending and investment habits are changing the economy of a given region, which will likely change the way people react to you.
That’s my general impression, anyway. I haven’t really sat down and dug into the economic realities of the system yet, as I’ve been too busy exploring the world, charming people, running errands, and picking up odd jobs. It’s these odd jobs that I’m now going to complain about.
Upon my first visit to Bowerstone, the largest city in Albion, I found myself with some time on my hands as I waited for someone who was late to an appointment. There was a blacksmith nearby and they were looking for some help. Figuring it wouldn’t hurt to pick up some extra gold, I volunteered my services and found myself playing a mini-game that works a lot like the emote mini games. Same arc, same shrinking color bar, same moving white dot. Only, blacksmithing was more difficult, as the color bar shrinks faster and isn’t always centered in the arc. The other job-related mini games, wood chopping and bartending, work in much the same way, although they are progressively easier to do well as the exact mechanics of the color bars change, growing instead of shrinking, etc.
So this same basic mini game UI element represents a range of activities from interacting with NPCs, to blacksmithing, to chopping wood, to pouring a pint. I find this bland sameness to reduce the rich depth of the rest of the game and, clearly, I am a bit disappointed in it. The variety of in-game activity is reduced in depth to a mere animation backdrop for a shallow game that reside in the UI. Ultimately, however, that’s not the truly unsettling disconnect of the job-related mini games. No, the actual problem lies in the way the mini games are scored.
Let’s take an in-depth look at the blacksmithing mini game to see what I mean. It takes several strokes of the hammer, or several accurate tries of the mini game, to make a blade. [1] For each blade you successfully make, you get some gold. The higher your ranking as a blacksmith [2], the more gold you get. If you successfully complete two blades in a row, you get a 2x multiplier for the next blade. Successfully complete three blades in a row, you get a 3x multiplier for the next blade. Four blades, 4x, and so on. I assume that this continues–the longer a chain, of successful blades made in a row, the higher the per-blade payout. I can only personally verify that it works up to 8x because my attention usually begins to wander, and as my mind slips, so do my fingers, and I lose the chain. The bonuses for wood chopping and bartending work similarly, but don’t increase the payout on a per-task basis. Wood chopping, for example, gives you a bonus increase at 10 successful chopped pieces of wood.
This payout system is clearly designed to allow the player to grind at a simple task and receive huge payouts so they can run off and buy gear, potions, shops, gifts, etc. But the “reality” of the system is that prices go up as you produce more product, not down, and I don’t know of any marketable good that works this way. The goods available through Albion’s vendors certainly don’t–the more of an item available at a vendor, the greater the likelihood at least one of the items will be marked down, often significantly. So this mini game mechanic clearly has absolutely no connection to the economic elements of the game system. And that is a serious narrative problem for me. Why go to such great lengths to create a working economic system and then completely ignore it with these mini games?
If the game wants to encourage players to make an “honest” living in this way–the mini games should be more varied, more fun to play, and better integrated into the game itself. They should have modest financial payouts, but high social payouts. Other vendors may like you better because you’re industrious. The guards may be more willing to overlook your public antics because you’re an upstanding citizen. The more serious citizens may like you better, and the frivolous citizens may like you less. Regardless, from a narrative standpoint–something should have been done to better integrate the mini games into the storyworld.
But what about if we look at them strictly as a game mechanic? How do they hold up? Well, the mini games introduce that MMO staple, The Grind, into the game. The rest of the reward systems are a direct result of individual actions. For example, if you use melee weapons in combat, you earn experience points that can only be applied to your physical attributes–including improved weapon handling abilities such as blocks, flourishes and chain attacks. Use these new abilities in combat and you gain experience point bonuses. It’s an organic seeming system that rewards you for fighting with an expressive style. And while you can grind by exiting and entering levels over and over, the system is designed to reward individual moments, not enormous blocks of boring slaughter. So in this sense, the repetitive and uniform gameplay of the mini game stands out as anomalous even when viewed from a strict game design standpoint.
Obviously, while I love the game overall, I find the mini games to be dull and strongly feel they detract from both the narrative and the gameplay. That being said, I have a master cleaver to save up for and I’m too nice a landlord to raise my rents. Guess I’d better go do some button-mashing bartending and make sure the citizens of Oakfield aren’t going thirsty.
[1] No, you don’t start with horseshoes. Despite the fact that Albion is littered with gypsy wagons, there don’t appear to be any actual horses in existence. [return]
[2] You gain ranks by earning increasingly large amounts of gold while blacksmithing. I forced myself to earn the maximum ranking, 5 stars, before retiring my hammer. [return]
Tagged:fable 2, storytelling, video games. | 8 Comments »
October 28th, 2008 at 10:54 am
I believe I read in-game somewhere that the economy of the local town improves if you perform jobs, so although the Grind does not produce a direct social effect, it does result in an indirect economic reward.
October 28th, 2008 at 10:58 am
That said, the primary reason people will do these “prole” jobs is to generate capital to move up into the property-owning bourgeoisie, at which point you can romp all over the place and generate gold off the hard work of others.
Myself, I took the Pub Games route and gambled my way into the bourgeois. My first gambler took advantage of the Fortune’s Tower exploit, but after the patch disabled the exploit I managed to get lucky with another, honest, character.
I think the next hero I play in Fable II will start of the honest way, and simply work/rob his way to prosperity.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:09 am
That still begs the question how flooding the market with a commodity is meant to improve the economy. Seems to me that when harvest season came around and all the metal had been used for swords, it would either mean a lot of work to unmake the swords, or a shortage of metal for mending tools.
October 28th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
I like to joke that fantasy RPG economies use poorly crafted swords as their base unit of currency. As for Fable 2, it makes the mistake of tying everything to raw currency, when actually it should really be about profit per unit resource invested (whether that be capital, raw materials, or production time). And yes, plows should be worth a mint come harvest time if the region’s metal supply is all hammered into swords.
November 2nd, 2008 at 2:21 pm
I had assumed that the price increase was due to your becoming a more skilled blacksmith and therefore producing better swords. You hit them faster and more precisely and if you miss, you ruin the sword, therefore dropping the price.
In similar fashion, you get paid better for higher chains of beer because the more you pull, the faster you get. Serving quickly and pulling full pints keeps customers happy, so you’re worth more. That being said, I’d be very reluctant to drink in any bar that charged 300 gold for a pint
November 2nd, 2008 at 2:35 pm
That’s a pretty impressive learning/cost-per-sword curve, if that’s the case.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Ugh the grind. That is enough to make me cringe. There’s nothing worse than leveling up a profession, in any MMO, and being bored out of your skull by doing so.
March 13th, 2009 at 10:12 am
“So this mini game mechanic clearly has absolutely no connection to the economic elements of the game system”.
Dear friend, “Shortage” means anything to u. This is the medieval ages, so the market in not in equilibrium. Let´s say the demand is unlimited, so if the offer goes up, also the price and the general estate of the economy.
PS: Also remember that is a video-game