We expect a lot from the world and our rising expectations have become an astronomically problematic issue. And right now, I feel like using Peter Molyneux as a scapegoat for my frustrations in this arena – so I will.
Who is Peter Molyneux you ask? Well, for those of you who don’t know, he’s the Creative Director of Microsoft Game Studios: Europe as well as the founder of both Bullfrog Productions and Lionhead Studios - which makes him responsible for the creation, success and failures of the Fable Series. Yes, that’s right; I said creation, success and failure of the series.
Fable was pretty awesome to be honest. It had its problems, but I found it before I found Bioware. So this was the first time I really LOVED a game because of the character development and morality choices. (And let’s face it, OP or not, magic is cool.) I have no idea how many playthroughs I managed before I had to go back to having a real life, but there were many. My friends actually held an intervention (my first, KOTOR led to the second) to try and make me see that the number of hours I had spent on my newfound obsession was getting in the way of my life. So after I finished my evil play through, which took me a while (I have a hero complex so I never was very good at doing bad things in virtual world) I stopped playing for a while.
When Fable 2 was announced I thought I might pass out from sheer elation. One of my favorite games gets a sequel. Of course the fact that Fable sold 3 million copies should have given me some indication that this was in the works, because in the end game studios are little different than movie studios or music labels – the general consensus seems to be if it sells, milk it for all it’s worth. Many, many dead horses have been kicked in the game development world.
I could describe this all too brief period of pre-release ecstasy in detail but instead let’s just skip to the part where I say my bliss faded and my bubble burst upon actually receiving my copy of Fable 2. It took me all of 10 minutes in game to realize that while this may be the chronological sequel to Fable, it was by no means the spiritual successor. Disappointment reigned. Now, some people (3.5 million copies sold) somehow like this game. And I guess if they want to settle for second rate voice work/editing, incredibly lazy PLAYABLE CHARACTER models (my character is a woman - not a body builder, not a giant, not a man dressed as a woman or some combination therein!), and glitch after bug after glitch then that’s their choice and I’ll leave them to it. How they get past the NPCs is beyond me….could they get any more annoying? They can actually get in the way of playing the game – you literally can’t move sometimes because the swarm of adoring idiots descends…whoever decided that these developments were good ideas deserves to be strung up. Naked. In winter.
I did manage to finish the game once - mostly because the story was pretty good. But every subsequent attempt at replaying it ends poorly – in the sense that I don’t ever get past the tutorial . I have forgotten more about this game than I remember. I sometimes have nightmares that briefly threaten to bring back the details of the experience and they leave me feeling paranoid and hypervigilant for days afterward. A friend tells me these are signs of PTSD. I can’t count that possibility out.
In any case, I did not like Fable 2. Though I’m beginning to believe that my disconnect with those other 3.5 million buyers comes from my unrealistic expectations; expectations of the game that were so high there was never any real possibility of them being met. Technology has not yet caught up to my imagination and Fable had set the bar, in my opinion, very high. But I refuse to take all of the blame for my great expectations – it’s mostly Mr. Molyneux’s fault. I trusted him. If only he hadn’t gone on and on about how great his game was and hinted at all of the innovative interfaces and game play, the ability to choose your gender and change the world in concrete ways, maybe I would have been a bit less inflated with the heady fog of expectation….alas regrets count for very little.
The point I’m trying (perhaps poorly) to make is that the consequences of inflated expectations are all too often failure and disappointment. I had (with Molyneux’s assistance), built Fable 2 into a paragon of video game development. I expected an innovative, immersive, interactive, choice driven game and instead got thrust into a world full of people I didn’t care to save, playing a character I didn’t want to be, having to replay whole swaths of game because the engine didn’t want to work. Let’s just say my expectations for Fable 3 weren’t great (so much so that I just finally bought it used a few days ago even though it was released last October – that conversation is best left for another post though). Also I no longer put any stock in anything Peter Molyneux has to say.
Lower your expectations folks.
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