Fable || ThinkThank #4

That's not how I remember it...

In recent years, I've been experiencing my first real glimpses of a strange phenomenon. One of cultural cognitive dissonance, wherein a group takes a distinctly ahistorical stance in relation to something's value or quality, prepared to claim that not only is Thing Bad, Thing was actually always bad and everyone always knew it. In media, this most often takes the form of an ongoing fandom breakdown of some kind, one which sees no resolution, so its torch-bearers carry the petty complaints into the future. Now obfuscated by time, the conversation exists as a stalemated ouroboros of banal pop-culture.

Think, for instance, of the apparently endlessly enjoyable pastime of pretending that the Star Wars movies of the early 2000s 'Suck and have always sucked', despite those same complainers endlessly referencing them as a form of gospel. Despite, in many ways, thirsting for those elements which were borne exclusively in that era of "terrible" movies: The Jedi Temple, Jedi sects, most Force powers, Coruscant, Clone Troopers, battle droids etc. Now, I am aware that Haters living off of the residual pettiness that clings to their childhood fancies, like gulping bottom-feeders scouring for algae, is nothing new. But the part that is new for me, as an adult reaching the age where he remembers previous eras as an adult. My first decade of adulthood was spent surrounded in such immediate context that anything more than five years out of date was almost completely disregarded in my personal rhetoric. But now, I find myself faced with a new sensation.

I remember, distinctly, in adult terms, the franchise releases of Halo, Borderlands, Fable, Diablo, and countless others. I remember the enthusiasm for Transformers movies. I remember people really enjoying some things before they decided to retroactively ascribe negativity to the things they liked, falsifying the documents of their cultural past to pretend that they didn't lose their shit when the trailer for "Dark of the Moon" was coming. Look, I also know that our opinions change over time, so I'm not calling you a liar. But I remember when you watched nothing but Entourage for a year; I was there.

This is a lot of hand-wringing to get to my real point: I remember when Fable was really popular. It was an entry in the list of "Must-Have" games that seemingly all Xbox or PC video game players had, if only to possess a library current and "In" enough to keep-up-with-the-joneses. Go to a moderately above middle-class computer room or living room in the late aughts, and there was a shelf housing Halo, Borderlands, Fallout 3, Fable, Dante's Inferno or God of War, a Tomb Raider, a Call of Duty, maybe a Dynasty Warriors or Brutal Legend, a Need for Speed, GTA4, Viva Pinata, and maybe a stray Lets Dance or something along those lines.

When someone went to the game store, unsure of what they may want to buy, they'd be directed to one of those games, as they were just... the standards. This doesn't mean they were the Top 10 games or anything-- far from it, Dante's Inferno pretty quickly revealed itself to be a highly-marketed piece of near-shovelware-- but these were games that were designed to be imminently playable and approachable. You wanna play some games? Here they are, welcome to Games. When that unsure customer asked about an RPG they could get into, but maybe one that isn't too complicated, I assure you that Jason at EB Games said, "Dude it sounds like you should try Fable."

I'm not saying, "If you say you don't like Fable you're lying and wrong", but I am saying that your distaste now in 2024 is likely borne of ahistorical reflection as opposed to encapsulation of then-contemporary opinion. You may have never liked Fable, but SOMEONE isn't telling the whole truth when you consider sales figures, reviews, and discourse at the time. The numbers aren't balancing out, here. Fable is the pre-Disney Star Wars of video games; its the thing that people liked so much for what it managed to squeeze into their imaginations, that they didn't notice how much of their growing distaste was the result of Fable's failure to live up to what they felt it could have been.

Fable really does have hundreds of unique NPCs across its towns and villages and quest areas; its just that their systems are so visible, like twine strings on a marionette, that we can't let ourselves believe in them. Your character really does stretch, grow, scar, and shift in real-time, responding to a dizzying number of statistics; only, almost all gameplay leads to the same dramatic extremes, with no clear rewards for moderation. Just like how we are all on-board for the tragedy of Obi-Wan and Anakin's faltering brotherhood, we are ultimately dissatisfied because the brotherhood we see is so weak and limited in scope, that by the time we reach that dramatic high point, it feels artificial and unearned.

We are let down, and you can't be let down by the things you didn't like. Sadly, you can only be let down by those things or people for which you hold great affection, the severity of the coming let-down growing in tandem with that affection. More likely than not, you don't hate Fable; you are mad it didn't do what it said it would do. Or more likely, (This is where you'll have to insert your own sigh of resignation) what Peter Molyneux said it would do.

If you only Molyneux...

I will need to be careful in this next part, as any discussion of Molyneux tends to bring out dormant hater-ade faster than mentioning Daikatana. So let me...

[I have removed this section and placed it as a normal post, as it wound up a touch longer than intended, and it lacks the tone I'm aiming for in my ThinkThank series. Importantly, it doesn't really do much for the actually discussion of Fable, so I'm leaving it out. check it out here if you want!]

And So Our Story Begins

With that out of the way, it's time to talk about Fable. For those who haven't played, its a third-person role-playing adventure in the fantasy world of Albion, a sort of England+ with a somewhat grounded high-fantasy magical ruleset. Magic and monsters are around, but they haven't turned the world unrecognizable to our non-magical reality. Its a pastoral world of villagers, pubs, and farms, alongside trolls, dungeons, the world's most distinctive feature, Heroes. For whatever reason, in the Fable-verse, 'Heroes' are a distinct subset of humanity, possessing greater skill, will, and strength.

Despite the love I have for the series, this has always been an odd spot. I think they intention was for "Heroes" to be akin to something like Force-sensitives in Star Wars, in that they are a sort of 'touched' people, possessing sensitivity to magical abilities. But in Fable, they are already determined to be Heroic, and also their effective career has been placed  before them: scour the land for folks in need of your services, support and pillage to your heart's content, all in service of being remembered. They even have a Heroes Guild for teaching and officially licensing Heroes; like a Mercenary Jedi Academy and DMV combined.

Nice village, it'd be a shame if something happened to it...

I struggled, even at the time when I was first introduced to Fable, to understand why a normal villager could not rise to the occasion and become a Hero, as the requirements in-practice were the slaying of monsters and supporting of others in combat. Its true that most Heroes also possessed some magical abilities, but the variability of those abilities and that the discretion of which spells or abilities to use was left to the Heroes themselves suggests that only those previous two points were what counted. So what was to stop a regular person from working really hard being strong? And then when 'bloodlines' started getting described, it started to feel a bit... eugenicist?

Whatever, at the end of the day, the whole Heroes Guild thing is actually a fine way of creating a framework for exciting player-characters. Given that Heroes come from a genetically superior breeding stock, have magical affinity by birth, and are destined to at least be interesting people with careers worth following, its pretty easy to do away with the whole 'humble-origins', 'quiet village' thing, right?

Its an old trope, but it checks out

In Fable, players take the role of a young boy living out a peaceful existence in the town of Oakvale. After a pleasantly manageable day filled with short tasks to earn enough gold coins to buy your younger sister a birthday present, your village is razed by bandits. Your father is killed in the attack, (if I remember correctly) your mother is kidnapped, and your sister is blinded and left to die. You, however, are whisked away by a mage named Maze, who knows the power of your bloodline. He isn't the most compassionate of rescuers, which does a decent job of showing the player how Heroes in this world can do good things and still not be achingly "good". The mage informs the player of their choice, essentially to be a complete LOSER or become a Hero, so obviously the character chooses to persevere and study at the Guild. I'll spare you the rest of the play-by-play, as this series is intended more to highlight a specific feature or element which taught me something and explore it, so I will move on.

Upon reflection, Maze was a dick.

What do you do?

I like to think of Fable as roleplaying, simplified. If you arrive wanting or expecting a vast, intricate character sheet which quantitatively describes your unique Hero, you'll be sorely disappointed. There are certainly stats of which to keep track, along with reputation and morality, but Fable's roleplaying is of the more imaginative variety. There are no dialogue choices and players have limited story agency. Instead, their various stats and standings are dictated by the actions the character, often times binary, 'did they' or 'did they not' choices, which add up over time to form your character's individual profile. This may not sound particularly robust so far as roleplaying decision-making goes, but it leaves room for something neat. Because the player doesn't speak, but is implied to do so off-screen, and villagers tend to cheer and shout in generic ways about your adventures or your standing in the world, its much easier for the player to read into these moments what they will.

Balverines were definitely the big "elite" enemies in the game's first half

A huddle of villagers praised me for my defeat of the dreaded "Twinblade", which consists mostly of cheering and a passing mention. Instead I choose to imagine that they asked me more specific questions like, "Why did you let him live? How did you manage to sneak into his camp? Did you really find your sister there?" While I am out adventuring, I find myself frequently imagining the ways that the townsfolk would describe my adventures, and even how my character would describe their own experience. I even begin to believe, sometimes, that all events are somewhat allegorical, and specific details of my quests are all to be taken with a grain of salt. As someone with an overactive (perhaps hyperactive) imagination, this appeals to me greatly. My hero may have the exact same origins each time, but much of his off-screen time is fleshed out in my imagination, with no in-game information to refute the waving of my canon tapestry.

Twinblade, the Hero turned Bandit King

Leave out for a moment your like or dislike for Fable's particular application of NPC villagers' social mechanics-- the mere fact that mundane, everyday things like making friends, choosing one's diet, finding a home, and knocking back a few pints over a game of coin golf are included in this sort of High-Fantasy setting is refreshing. Yes, many high fantasy role playing settings show you other people doing those things, but the player is always held at arm's length, feeling like someone who exists outside of the game's world. The theatre is effective; despite the frankly limited NPC AI, it really seems that there is a world of folks going about their days, relatively indifferent to the acts of others. It doesn't feel like a world made for the player, it feels like a world.

The fact that you can wear an incredibly high-performance outfit which gives you stat bonuses and passive buffs, enabling your martial prowess, only to have everyone in town make fun of you for looking stupid as you walk through the streets is a nice reminder for the player that the world exists, and the player's character is only a part of that world. You can actually imagine retirement in this world as well, as you have a decent picture of what "normal" life looks like in Albion.

And a side note of personal interest to me, I appreciate that clothing in Fable is largely believable. This isn't unqualified praise, as there's still plenty of, in my eyes, *extremely* stupid looking clothes and armor, but it largely doesn't take a wild stretch of the imagination to envision these people putting the available clothes on. It drives me absolutely nuts when clothing in video games and movies is impossible to imagine being actually worn, as it implies that, in this world, the practicality of taking a piss or walking without sounding like a tumble drier full of saucepans is eliminated. Thankfully, villagers are almost entirely immune from looking like they are wearing costumes in their own world. This is yet another place where the grounding of the world helps me believe in the world laid before me. 

Its amazing how many things I can accept as normal before stupid, impractical clothing too. Killer hornets the size of house cats? No biggie. Flame pouring out of someone's hands? Fair enough. Someone wearing fifteen belt-buckles and bladed greaves while strolling through town? Get the fuck outta here.

What am I thankful for?

Much of my game-design praise will fall on the franchise's second entry (not sure when, but look forward to that in the near-ish future) but the first Fable game was its own form of stellar, in my opinion. Above all, the most important concept that I learned from Fable was the value of player ownership (as opposed to agency), even if that feeling is largely smoke and mirrors, or in the case of Fable, imagination. Even though the whole game is linear in storytelling, its remarkable how much the story feels "Yours" with a few flicks of the wrist. Choosing to kill or not kill the early boss Twinblade is of relative inconsequence, but the frequent callbacks to your choice can remind the player of the kind of Hero they are trying to be.

Anecdotally, I remember my first playthrough as a kid, and I remember lovingly crafting a character who was as "Good" as possible, but who wore scary, dark clothing and had hair bleached by moonlight. For whatever reason, I imagined that kind of brooding bleeding heart to be incredibly cool, and eventually I made my character even become vegetarian; little did I know at the time that I had just created a classic, straight-edge metalhead (Side note after finding the image of the armor set I wore: I love how I went on that statement about clothes, only to have these fuckin pauldrons on my guy. Look at me, just as faulty in memory as anyone).

ooo I was an edgy little twelve year old.

Ultimately, all games are about how you are made to feel. Even without the trappings of stories or narrative, twitch-reflex shooter games make the player feel powerful, or smart, or clever, or experience some level of catharsis. Games simulate sensation and induce the mind to-- at least for a moment-- indulge in your feelings. Fable is a strange RPG in that it doesn't have a gripping story for the ages like Chrono Trigger or Bioshock; nor does it possess such deep character creation or expression that the player can entertain themselves with character design alone, ala Baldur's Gate 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2 (yes, I consider RDR2 an RPG and I will defend that position another time). But Fable rests in a category largely on its own. A category of RPGs which allow the player to imagine the full scope of a character's arc, through a-- funnily enough-- fable-like structure. These games forgo specificity in favor of mood, sensation, attitude, and message.

Fable is a very "feelings" based game, in a way that is so earnest as to be largely uncool at our present moment in time (although I am happy to see that there is a slow return of earnestness/reverence in pop culture and culture at large). Fable is very much not aloof, disinterested, and most shockingly I think, irreverent. Despite Fable's inclusion of a Fart emote, the ability to kick chickens, and a preoccupation with subverting tropes as it utilizes them, its a series which takes its main narrative and overarching story with surprising seriousness.

There is a grandiose weight to all things described in-universe as stories or part of a legend, while the absurdity and glib humor is reserved for the mundane moments, largely in-town. Gravestones are often funny, villagers discuss the strangeness of an economy that runs on heroes, and bandits idly complain about their jobs like office temps. Much like our real world, important and severe issues surround us, from the deteriorating climate, ongoing wars and civil strife, failing economies; and yet, our children also rip farts so loud they shake the coffee table, requiring that one MUST tell their spouse when they get home because it was somehow earth-shatteringly funny. The world is both absurd and significant. For myself, that straddling is important.

In some sense, it is not possible to take the world too seriously, as nothing is more serious and incomprehensible as existence itself. At the same time, human experience is littered with too many absurd, comedic, and inconsequential moments which rattle the foundations of the grand seriousness of Life. Fable succeeds, in my view, in providing players with a world which provides all of the seriousness and absurdity that the player needs to believe in the world in which they inhabit. Fable helps you tell yourself a story, for all that may be worth to you.