A love/hate letter to Molyneux

Dear Peter Molyneux & Lionhead,

Don't pay attention to this. It's a series of mostly disjointed thoughts that have popped in my head now and then while showering and doing the dishes, and this is my attempt at compiling them into a series of comprehensible paragraphs.

I'm going to get this out of the way before I start rambling: Fable was my favorite game in the original Xbox. I played that game until there was no more playing to be done. I likely stepped on every pixel my hero could step upon, and heard every single line of voice acting. I once spent an hour just standing around Bowerstone hoping to catch a hint from a villager regarding the location of the elusive Sandgoose, and more than a few times did I try to impersonate the voice of Jack of Blades just so I could use it in my fantasies of sounding like a creep in a crowd.

It's been about three months since Fable 3 was released, and again I've managed to play another one of your games for countless hours, hearing every dialogue, searching for every permutation of every possible outcome in the choices given to me. In short: I didn't play this in a rush to get to the end. I hold a personal grudge against gamers that rush through RPGs while skipping sidequests: they're part of the experience, and you will do yourself a disservice if your intent is to "get to the end". As Stephen King once said "if you want to know the end of a novel, just read the last pages. What counts is the journey". But I digress.

See, Peter, I can't help but think that you were a bit lazy in Fable 3. Please don't take this as negative criticism. I could spend hours talking about everything I loved about the game, and I can summarize it in one word: charm. The Fable series is charming, and it feels like a work of love. I can tell from the humor, the occasionally difficult choices to be made, and the artistic design. Standing on the beaches of Driftwood in the morning, seeing that sunny haze and the Spire in the horizon is one of the most beautiful scenes I've ever seen in a game. Listening to Russell Shaw's score occasionally makes me cry (and I did notice on a grave: "Russel Shaw: we hummed it, he wrote it"), or seeing a pair of twins modeled after the Carter brothers. It's all a work of love, but I feel like you've begun to rest on your laurels a bit.

I don't care about unkept promises, or overhype. As I said, love. You're excited about these wonderful ideas, and how they'll play out once programmed in the game. I would be too, if I had any talent of the sort. When Fable 2 came around, I found it to be superior to its predecessor in nearly every way. The dog as a hybrid companion/map? brilliant. The breadcrumb trail? Amazing. I never lost my way, nor did I feel like I was having my hand held by some invisible master. The expression wheel was intuitive and a blast, and as an ardent fan of the first game I was smiling throughout the sequel as I visited old known locations. Bowerstone had grown, beautiful Oakvale had been reduced to a swamp. Woods had new names, but kept their beauty and danger. It fell, in short, like a sequel was supposed to: bigger, better than the first. I had a minor complaint about the easy difficulty, but after reading your words in an interview comparing a game to a book, I understood. You wanted a game that would appeal to everyone, and accomplished it.

Then Fable 3 came around. I wasn't as excited for this I was for the first sequel. Perhaps because seeing the trailer for Fable 2 at E3 is still fresh in my memory, whereas the third was announced as a footnote during a speech at (I believe) the Tokyo Game Show. Still, I had an odd feeling that Fable 3 was being made more as a sidenote, a necessary sequel instead of a work that had sprung from a fresh set of ideas.

Did I like it? A lot. As I said above, I've played it to death. Did I love it? I can't say I did. All the innovations that were present in the first sequel were lacking in the last one. The dog was still around, wonderful as ever. The breadcrumb trail was back, albeit buggy. The expressions wheel? gone. I've yet to understand how the game determines what good or evil expression I'll be doing once I choose to interact with a character, and opening a Demon Door that requires you to perform different expressions when you don't know what you can do is, quite simply, odd.

Kudos on getting rid of menus through the hero sanctuary. I can't say I know of any game that has managed to obliterate menus as well. Several members of message boards had gripes about this, but it's a matter of preference. I choose to see the innovation behind it: you got rid of menus in an amazing way that manages to keep the gameplay flowing.

I can't think of other innovations present in Fable 3, though, compared to the ones that made the second groundbreaking. Combat, which was both simple and deep with its system of rhythmic button taps in Fable 2 has been dumbed down to, pardon the expression, button mashing. One of the staples of the franchise, the morph system, has been dramatically reduced. Remember how the community would upload pictures of their heroes on the forums, showcasing the various combinations of good, evil, cruelty? One could be green and fat, with an angelic halo. The next could be skinny and short, with footlong demonic horns and fiery eyes. I miss this in Fable 3. It was such an integral part of the mythology that I can't but feel disappointed in it taking a secondary role, only to be reminded of its existence by Theresa towards the end. I was wishing, at that point, that my demon wings had accompanied me throughout the game.  

I don't think you've "lost it". Far from it. I still think you're an evil, evil man, Peter. Some of the choices I was presented were difficult, not from a moral standpoint but from a gameplay one. I found myself having to "level up" several weapons by engaging in unspeakable acts with members of both genders. Then I was given a choice between building an orphanage or a brothel, and while I'm generally a very nice guy in my RPGs, the idea of a brothel where I could perform said, ahem, leveling up was too damned attractive to pass. You understand that being good in a game is relatively easy, and I guess that's why so many of the weapons in the game are augmented by performing evil deeds. And you know that the nastiest characters like Reaver are terribly fascinating to us and we'll go down the dark path if it means getting on their good side.

But your love for gaming innovation was apparently lacking in Fable 3, and that's what bothered me. I couldn't help but feel like a parent reading a string of As on his child's report card, followed by a C- and knowing that a bit more effort could have turned it into a B+. I still love you, but I'm a tad disappointed. I don't know what Lionhead is working on these days, but I keep my fingers crossed that the innovative man that you are, who is not afraid of promising the world, and who understands what makes gamers tick will return to what I experienced in Fable 2.

(End rambling)