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Fable 2: Those Magic Moments
By Corvus | November 6, 2008
I break most social sims by behaving like a gamer. I figure out the optimal behavior to achieve the goal I want and then behave in exactly that manner until I have reached my goal, or broken the simulation. It’s quite the opposite behavior of what you’d expect from a storyteller who tests as a social explorer in the Bartle Test, but there it is–I’m an enigma.
The end result of this exploitative behavior while playing Fable 2 is invariably that the populace becomes fanatically devoted to me, making it difficult to wade through the crowds of admirers, or runs shrieking to the opposite ends of the region, making it difficult to lure them to the Temple of Shadows for sacrificing. Given the number of comments I’ve heard from people that the Fable 2 alignment system isn’t terribly complex leads me to believe I’m not alone in this. I suspect many of us approach the social mechanic like it’s a game to be exploited in order to benefit our play. Unfortunately, this approach is much like fixing a pocket watch with a five pound sledgehammer.
Fable 2 has some surprising complexity hiding within the very simple social dynamic. NPCs do not just react to how good or bad you are, but how frightening or funny, and greedy or selfless you are as well. Unlike the 1st game, you can create an evil character that is adored by the population–providing you’re willing to do a lot of dancing, whistling, and flirting every time you find yourself in a city. Furthermore, some citizens are more serious themselves, meaning they won’t respond well to farting or belching. Other citizens are brave and stand their ground when you roar and growl at them. My purely-evil hero has been forced to kill many a thug in Old Bowerstone because they’ve kicked my dog and not backed down when threatened.
But most impressive, isn’t how individual NPCs react to my hero when she targets them with an emote. No, the social system reveals its complexity in how the NPCs react when I target other NPCs with my emotes. For example:
My first dastardly hero was quite the attention monger and spent a lot of time flirting, farting, and posing heroically. Having… er.. lost his first wife, he was on the prowl for a second. He found a likely candidate and struck up a conversation. She quickly fell in love with him, but so did a nearby traveling merchant named Justin. Intrigued, the hero changed the target of his affections and asked Justin to marry him, leading him to the gypsy camp, where he figured Justin would find less bigotry. The hero’s deceased wife hadn’t minded his flirtatious nature, so while in the camp, after the wedding ceremony with Justin, he targeted a few of the gypsy lasses and emoted his way into their hearts.
Justin. Freaked. Out. He shrieked at the women to leave me alone. He pleaded with me to stop. He ran back to the wagon sobbing.
Eventually, Justin made it clear he wasn’t happy being left in the wagon all the time, so I bought him a house in Bowerstone market. I paid him a visit after some time and he was no longer the cute young man I’d married. He’d let himself go and had given up selling clothes to focus on selling potions. After spending some time visiting with him, I went to leave. “Married life sure isn’t what I thought it would be,” he said as I headed for the door. Shortly after, we took a walk to a nearby cellar and I found myself a widower twice over.
My squeaky-good hero was also an incorrigible flirt. She wasn’t interested in marrying, but loved the attention she got when she visited a city. She’d play her lute for anyone who gathered around and ruffled more than a few feathers when husbands found her flirting with their wives. “What are you doing,” they’d cry, “that’s my wife!” Out of respect, she’d quickly find someone else to flirt with until the jealous spouse wandered away. Often times, however, she’d find that both husband and wife were quite taken with her and share her attention between them.
What we’re seeing here is different NPC responses to the same situation. Not only does the hero have a piety/decadence ratio, so do the NPCs. Of course, the NPCs are “serious” not “frightening,” but the end result is a wider spectrum of dynamic NPC behavior than I’ve seen in any game before Fable 2. I hope that on my third complete playthrough–my so-called “gray path” where I don’t try and force any particular reaction out of the populace, but make decisions based on my own mood at the time–I see even more of this sort of complexity among the social mechanic of the game.
I’m not saying that the system is perfect. It’s very simple and therefore is quite exploitable and often times leads to jarring experiences where NPC reactions seem out of line with the events around them. But it also leads to oddly inexplicable moments that are a source of idle amusement. Like the Oakfield NPC, who drunkenly wandered out of the pub, and into the street, with a chair. I watched him stagger about with it for a while, until he set it down in the middle of the road and took a seat. This did not appear to be a purely scripted behavior, but a collision (or collusion, perhaps?) of smaller AI routines that just happened to take place while I was watching.
Before I open up this topic to your thoughts and experiences, I want to share one last social moment that caught me by surprise. My good hero was entertaining a crowd of NPCs by the clock tower in Bowerstone Market when a young voice called out for an autograph. Excited at her first opportunity to hand out an autograph–she spun around and saw a child had joined the group of admirers. She targeted him, quickly brought up the gift emote, selected an autograph card, and gave it to the child. Suddenly, from the other side of the crowd, a man roared, “What are you doing giving presents to my son?!” I jerked back in surprise and felt momentarily ashamed. My hero hadn’t meant the child any harm and certainly had nothing untoward in mind, but her childlike desire to please, her need for praise, had been misconstrued by a serious minded man who felt protective of his child.
And that is the sort of moment made possible by the social mechanics of Fable 2. I don’t know about you, but it makes me eager to play Fable 3.
Tagged:emote mechanics, fable 2, npc behavior, social mechanics. | 4 Comments »
November 6th, 2008 at 10:28 am
It makes me eager to play Fable 2! I’m contemplating robbing a bank to supplement my bank account.
November 6th, 2008 at 10:48 am
This is such a wonderful write-up. To be honest, I have been thoroughly disappointed with Fable II’s ending that I’ve spent many days reading what people have done differently; this hope that reading all these varying perspectives would shed some light on what I’ve done -wrong-.
And I get it now. I just wasn’t immersed in it enough. I played the game with a mission in mind: to finish the game as quick as possible. Doing so has caused me to ignore a lot of the subtle nuances that Molyneux and his team have brilliantly placed in the land of Albion. Nuances that, if I wasn’t in such a hurry, would have easily endeared me to the game.
So with that, I look forward to replaying the game once more, hopefully doing it -right- the second time around.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:14 am
@Travis Megill For even saying so, you’ve increased your negative reactions among the populace.
@GDSTN I’m a bit put off by the ending as well. Both sections of it. I’ll be posting on it next week after my second play through is complete.
November 6th, 2008 at 7:35 pm
This is a wonderful set of stories, Corvus. It’s amazing just how varied the NPC behaviour can be in Fable II; it’s the real strength of the game, I think. I find myself being more and more irritated by the main quest and concentrating purely on sidequests and interacting with villagers. Oh, and being a property magnate. Soon all of Albion shall be mine!