Fable at 20: a uniquely British video game with a complex legacy
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the...
It's free, it plays like Ultima 4 but modern (nice colors, animations, more than 26 possible actions :) ). I think I'm in love.
Thank you for posting this!
I think the biggest take away from Molyneux's work is regardless of how seriously he talked the games up, the games themselves never once took themselves too seriously. There was a level of playful whimsy that just didn't exist back then (and probably still doesn't today). You could tell he wanted to say more and do more, but was always limited by the technology available at the time. It felt like he was searching for something in the games he developed, and I was always happy to go searching with him.
He made some of the most interesting and original and fun games out there. What, he can’t puff up his chest once in awhile? If anything I want more games from him.
I had a high school friend who was lying all the time. His father had access to unheard of cpu prototypes and whatever else. We nicknamed him "C. The Mythomaniac" and called out his bullshit everyday.
He was a really great friend.
2) As with us and our friend, many gamers knew Molyneux for exactly who he is, and thus moderated their expectations accordingly.
> But as customer you should also not trust advertisement blindly
That’s and excuse for his lies. As a customer you should be able to trust adverticement, that’s why we have laws for adverticements. Blaming people who believe in a scam artists lies for having believed them is madness. The fact that he made games you like doesn’t excuse his blatant lies to investors and customers alike, and you really should listen to yourself and stop making excuses for him.
He also promised the winner of Curiosity 1% of all revenue from Godus, then retconned the deal to be 1% of profit after the game failed to become profitable.
I have yet to see a modern version that was half as interesting.
https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/08/peter-molyneux-is-bac...
He's a dreamer who won't shut up. Nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is bullshit hype.
To my mind games should encourage the interesting, fantastical and weird "What if you could..." elements, and that's what Molyneux/Bullfrog/Lionhead have introduced repeatedly over the years. Developers like him should be prolific and encouraged as I'd really hate to see the breadth of gaming reduced and more focus on safe derivatives of a few genres. I'd love to hear him shoot the breeze on games and what others have produced, but he could only ever do it under a false name as his own carries too much baggage.
I still remember the disappointment I felt 30 mins into Fable. Same story with bunch of other of his games.
https://www.pcgamesn.com/masters-of-albion/peter-molyneux-ne...
My comment was not about his games though. It was a a strong suggestion to ignroe all his bullshit and wait for the game.
Fable is great if you ignore all his antics. All his games are ground breaking in one way or another. Just don't listen to his bs.
This isn't a case of "we were too ambitious and had to cut things." This is a case of repeatedly promising outlandishly ambitious things in press appearances which were never on any internal development roadmaps.
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...
I guess all problems could be solved by just having him work on the game, and leaving PR to literally anyone else. Hell, the janitor would be a safer bet.
I love Peter Molyneux and he's built amazing things, but he is certainly a hype factory.
It came out when I was just branching out into the world without my family around, and seeing a game where my choices changed my appearance was kind blowing to me.
I still love this game, though the replayability was definitely overhyped. It's pretty much the same every time.
Just looked up Saints Row reboot again, it flopped so hard that they shutdown the studio behind it, making the game literal abandon-ware. Yikes.
I really hope they take the feeling of Fable (that what made me like it in the first place) and roll with it.
And if they make it great, It was Peter Molyneux fault...
The reboot has already passed the point of teaser trailers. The new studio is Playground Games best known for the Forza Horizon games. (The alternating "silly" open world titles between Forza Motorsport "serious" racing titles.) Given the success of Forza Horizon and their cadence at regularly delivering it, this Fable reboot probably won't kill the studio, but might push them back into the "only do Horizon games, please" box.
The Saints Row reboot had some writing on the wall that it might be the last one from the developer anyway, and it was reflected in the design. The Chicago-based Volition (for several decades under several publishers, and even through a messy divorce/remerger) was forced to move to Austin, TX to be closer physically to other teams under the same publisher (notably Gearbox). The reboot attempted to be a love letter to their new forced home, but a lot of "their creative heart wasn't exactly in it" was visible on too many levels, and it was easy enough to guess that when a publisher forces a move like that they may be looking for easy layoffs and eventual team mergers.
Not sure which part of it is a failure. Even the articles said > it was successful enough that Lionhead was bought by Microsoft in 2006, and its two sequels also sold well.
- Revolution Software (Broken Sword series)
- Fireproof Games (The Room series)
- Jagex (RuneScape)
- Core Design (Tomb Raider)
- Dovetail Games (Rail and Train Simulator*)
And one that probably few here have heard of: Lapioware - Diesel Railcar Simulator
Mentioning that one because it's a one man show. Made by a man who felt nostalgic for the diesel railcars & landscapes of 1960s Britain. So he ended up making one of the most realistic train sims.
It's a beautiful game with a great environmental quality to it, much like classic World of Warcraft and Skyrim. Simply roaming around, taking in the visuals, the music, and the ambience was an enjoyable experience in itself, without even doing the quests or progressing the story.
Whenever I read about it now, it's just a bunch of people complaining about how overhyped it was and how their own expectations prevented them from enjoying the game. Sad!
I ask my partner to order books for me or to check what other entries are in a series because it is basically impossible to look up something like this without being jumped with summaries, ratings, opinions and similar that rob one of an unbiased experience.
I'll always remember the 2017 "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" movie. I watched it at the movies with zero expectations and thoroughly enjoyed it and thought it was great. Much later I read some article or something on it and apparently people agreed it was terrible. I don't think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much if I had heard about it beforehand.
A notable moment: he'd unlocked a Demon Door and was enthusiastically laying out how the game's real estate system worked, and his plans for the idyllic winter lodge he'd just found, when he walked his character inside and... well, I won't spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say, someone on the design team had a very good handle on what they were doing. It's always stuck out to me as an excellent example of how deeply game designers understand their systems, how those systems influence gamer behavior and expectations, and how to play on those expectations for emotional impact.
It's harder now, because so much of the genre seems to have frozen. The graphics are many times more realistic, and animation blending has come a long way. But ultimately making changes is now so much more expensive, that significant novelty is difficult to find in games that also push what could be done, the way it was back when the first two Fable games could try to push ahead in all direction at once
The problem is the market for a deep, deep rpg with skills based on time spent using them is probably pretty small. Because it's people like me who don't actually have the time needed to play them due to life nonsense.
I desperately want the mechanics of Morrowind, but with modern graphics. The original is almost unplayable because of how crappy the graphics are.
OpenMW exists: https://openmw.org/
I appreciate when games are confident enough to play these sorts of tricks with players. I'm also reminded of the Pitioss Ruins in Final Fantasy XV, a secret dungeon that also messes with player expectations and emotions by using your understanding of the game's mechanics against you, while also using the environment as a monumental storytelling device (in this case, your journey through the ruins serving as a metaphor for the game world's lore).
An amazing game with raunchy wit, moving story, and great fantasy world building. The music still rattles through my brain and I still occasionally say, "Do you chase chickens, Chicken Chaser?".
I really enjoyed the games, but especially Fable and Fable TLC (which was an extended chapter at the end which changes the ending and takes you to a talked about continent that the base game did not).
I liked Fable, and while Black and White committed the sin of being two RTS games without multiplayer it remained really interesting and just a fun experience. But the game that really had me was The Movies. Its story mode was fun, but the movie maker within the game was really something different for a young teenager’s imagination. That is a game I’d really want to see rebuilt with modern tooling and hardware.
I can still hear the excellent soundtrack in my head.
(It would count any CD burning software being installed as meaning it was pirated, it also couldn't work properly on Windows 2000, and almost always detected as pirated on ANY NT kernel, most of the cracks didn't work either, since again you had to actually beat level 1 to find out if it thought you were a pirate, and a lot of crack teams didn't test that far)
I was 15 at the time at the peak of Xbox vs Playstation vs Gamecube message board arguments on forums like NeoGAF.
And Molyneux's bullshit wasn't making it easy for us online Xbox crusaders. He made crazy claims like how it was an open world game with an advanced social system where you build relationships with people and can plant a seed and watch the tree grow if you were to wait next to it for many ingame hours. The lead up and hype made it part of gaming forum discourse for years!
Finally, Fable comes out and it's this short, easy, linear, arcadey, simplistic game. The super complicated reputation system was just a basic "you got +10 good/bad points" alignment system. "People remember your actions" just meant `if player.didThingX then cheer()`.
After all that, it was a weekend rental at best. I think I beat it in 8 hours. It was so disappointing.
After having not thought of Fable in 20 years, it's kinda funny to see it covered without the "gravity" of the waves it made in the Great Online Message Board Console Faction Wars. Not that the context was worth preserving nor that nobody should be allowed to enjoy it. It's funny because it was such a big deal to many of us forum crusaders.
But I guess that's part of getting old.
The hype was basically "Morrowind but better in every single way" - better combat, deeper lore, complex character interactions, and more advanced graphics.
I got it day 1, and within about 2 days I gave up on it and sold it back. It was so much less than advertised I was immensely disappointed. I'm sure there was something good there if you went in with no expectations, but its easily the biggest gaming letdown I've experienced.
I want to thank my father for giving in and purchasing Fable for me when it hit the shelves. Fable II was my favourite, a fantastic game.
>It was a bit like if Monty Python were to reimagine the world of Robin Hood.
That’s a pretty funny progression, from quests and arbitrage between traders in Fable 1, to a bigger focus on being a landlord than earlier in fable 2, then just straight up being a king in fable 3. Industralism progressing in the background of the three as well to full on childworker factories in fable 3 with Reaver if i recall correctly being the tycoon.