My confession: I got about half way through the first Fable before I just lost interest and gave up. It does a lot that BioWare games of that period tried to do (and Molyneux himself experimented with interactive morality back in Black and White), but it didn’t grab me. I’m not sure if I was just too young to appreciate the British sensibility of the game or if there were other games I ended up playing at the time, but I just never felt the need to go back to it. So, when Fable 2 was announced, I figured that this would give me a chance to atone for the past and finish a Fable game without having to dip back into “last gen”.
With that out of the way, let’s just cut straight to the rhetoric: Fable 2 has some of the most interesting ethical choices in games today and blows everything BioWare has done right out of the water. Mass Effect tried to nuance ethics by forcing you to play a hero regardless of your ethical choices and Fable 2 does exactly the same thing – ultimately, you will kill Lucien whether you are good or evil. But Fable 2 handles the ethical choices by directly integrating them into the game play and the narrative of the game itself.
There are two points in Fable 2 where the game will jump far into the future, following the progression of your character from childhood to adulthood. After each time jump, the choices you’ve made will directly influence how the world evolves. As a child, if you decided to be “naughty” by losing arrest warrants, smashing up a warehouse, giving booze to a drunk, then Bowerstone Old Town will turn into an inner city ghetto run by criminals and flooded with drunks and prostitutes. Alternatively, if you try to be “nice” Old Town will go through a renaissance, looking as cleaned up and as nice as the rest of Bowerstone. You can have the same effect on West Cliff and the two Temples near Oakvale after you enter The Spire.
What’s interesting about having these chronological jumps is that you can actually see the long term consequences of your actions. Whereas the BioWare games hint at what might have happened at the end of the game, here you not only get to see what happens but play through what happens. And there’s the interesting bit of narrative interactivity. Because the entire landscape and demographics of an entire section of the game world is so drastically altered by your actions, you may come to regret your decision. The fact that the chronological jump happens twice in the game gives you the opportunity to at least change your mind the second time around. At the very least it makes the game much more fluid with its system ethics than the typical game where you have to be either good or bad and being able to see the results of your ethical choices makes those choices that much more meaningful.
Like Mass Effect, Fable 2 presents you with ethical set pieces where an entire sequence is based around an ethical choice. Whereas in Mass Effect these set pieces take place almost exclusively within the conversation system, Fable 2 integrates these choices into the game play itself. Drawing from the story of Job, in which Job’s faith to God is tested by God himself through progressively difficult and horrific trials, the player is forced to make harder and harder choices if they wish to roleplay as a “good” character. When you’re at The Spire, you have the choice to be an obedient soldier for Lucien and the Commandant or you can try to defy orders and do the right thing. In Mass Effect, this may have taken place within the conversation wheel and you may end up getting “good” or “evil” points based on the choices you make. Here, every time you choose to be “good” you are punished by having experience points and skills taken from you at a geometric rate. In other words, every time you don’t follow orders, you are given an in game penalty that directly affects your player progression and sets you back maybe several hours.
The choices in The Spire start off very simple and progressively become more difficult – including a reinterpretation of the classic Stanford Prison Experiment. Needless to say, the last sequence is the most interesting – the Commandant orders you to kill Bob, one of the friends you’ve made during your stay at The Spire, for being disobedient. If you refuse to kill Bob, the Commandant drains your experience and gives you another chance to kill Bob. This happens at least several times before the sequence ends. Why does this happen? The game is trying to pressure you into changing your mind by progressively taking away more and more of your experience points. It wants to see if you will panic, if have a breaking point where you will kill Bob because you don’t want to lose anymore of your hard earned experience points. The ultimate tragedy of this sequence is that if you last the gauntlet of experience loss and refuse to kill Bob up until the end, the Commandant gets tired of you and kills Bob himself. Your choice to spare Bob’s life is rendered meaningless and you’ve lost all your experience points. All you get for your trouble is a small number of “good points” that affect your alignment. Here I believe the game is trying to make you feel guilty for regretting your decision to spare Bob’s life. With most narratives, you expect a payoff for making a sacrifice and choosing the good choice – maybe Bob lives and is able to see his wife again. But the game robs you of even that payoff. You choose to be good simply because you want to stand by your conviction to be good – there is no in game reward, either in experience points or in the plot, for making the “right” choice. Because there’s no payoff, there must be a small part of you that wishes you just killed Bob in the first place and kept your experience – it’s a perfectly natural response, especially for a player who is familiar with how games and RPGs work. In fact, I’m sure that’s the response that Molyneux and the designers wanted you to have when you choose to be good throughout the entire Spire sequence. If you want to “feel good” for making the “good” choice, you are forced to come to the realization that sometimes being good means you won’t be rewarded. In fact, you may even be punished for your conviction.
The second major test of your conviction to being “good” comes at the end of the Reaver/Dark Seal quest. You learn that Reaver has spent the last few centuries sacrificing the lives of innocents in order to maintain his own youth and he has sent you as his latest sacrifice. However, this time an innocent woman has accidently ended up at the same sacrificial altar as well and you are forced to choose whether to sacrifice yourself or to sacrifice the woman. There are two aspects of this sequence that makes this choice interesting. First, the effects of the sacrifice are permanent. If you choose to be good and sacrifice yourself, your character is permanently scarred for the remainder of the game (which has the annoying side effect of having all the NPCs in the game – including your spouse and child – run away from you whenever you walk next to them). Second, and more interesting from my perspective, the choice you make isn’t immediate. Unlike other games, you don’t simply make a choice and watch the consequences of your choice play out. Here, if you choose to sacrifice the innocent woman, she pleads and begs for her life and you have the chance to reverse your decision and sacrifice yourself. In fact, the whole sequence is timed so that you will agonize over the decision. What I like about this sequence is that it uses game design to try to make you feel guilty if you make the “evil” choice and sacrifice the woman as you make the choice rather than wait until after you make the choice. The fact that the game gives you a chance to reconsider forces you to live in the moment of the choice, realizing exactly what you are doing when you are choosing to sacrifice the woman. Of course, the fact that making the good choice permanently scars your own character makes the “good” choice difficult as well. Either way, the game makes it difficult to choose one over the other. What’s doubly frustrating is that you aren’t given the chance to reject the premise of the choice – you need Reaver’s co-operation, so you can’t just abandon the quest and bring Reaver to justice for sacrificing so many innocent people throughout the years.
The final test comes at the end of the game after you defeat Lucien. Theresa tells you that The Spire will be able to grant you one wish. You can choose between Sacrifice, where you wish that everyone who was killed by Lucien in order to construct the Spire was brought back to life; Love, where you wish that your sister, spouse, child and (most importantly!) your dog is brought back to life; or Wealth, where you wish for a larger amount of gold. Now, I think it’s fair to say that the Wealth choice is the false choice. Since money is so easy to make in the game, even if you don’t use the Pub Games glitch, the only reason why you might choose this option is to get the achievement and if you are dead set on roleplaying a purely “evil” character. So the real choice is between Sacrifice and Love, and yet again this is an extremely difficult choice. As a “good” character, the expectation is that you will be a martyr and sacrifice the people you love for the greater good of humanity... like another figure in Christianity. But throughout the game, you steadily grow attached to the companionship of your faithful dog (and maybe even your family), so that your instincts are to choose to bring back the people that you love and that personally love you.
If the true moral of the game is that blind devotion to being “good” is a fallacy, that life is more nuanced that the moral binary of good and evil, then Molyneux made it work with this final choice. For me, I agonized over the choice for a moment before choosing Love over Sacrifice. I want to save the world, but I wanted to save my sister and my dog that much more. The path that Job took based purely on his faith in God was extremely difficult and I think Molyneux has shown that most people, despite their good intentions, could never make the same sacrifices. Ultimately, this is what makes the game more interesting than the system of binary choices presented in BioWare games (and, at least at first glance, in Fallout 3). This game questions the nature of morality itself, considering the possibility that being purely good may be as destructive as being purely evil.
While I definitely wanted to focus on how ethics is constructed in the game, there are just a few unrelated points I wanted to touch on. First, the game draws upon the Dungeons & Dragons system of ethics. That is, there are two axes for codifying morality in the game – Good vs Evil and Purity vs Corruption. In D&D terms, it’s the same as the Good/Evil, Chaotic/Lawful system. That means that you could be a perfectly Good character that is also completely Corrupt or an Evil character who is also Pure. By having two axes of morality rather than the basic binary of Good and Evil, the game wants to nuance morality much more than it usually is in games of this kind. Both axes will ultimately affect how NPCs in the world will react to you and whether or not they like you, but both are influenced by very separate actions. Good/Evil is influenced by the big choices you make in the game – for example, whether you save people captured by slavers or whether you enslave people yourself. Purity/Corruption is influenced by the smaller, inconsequential choices you make in the game. If you own a house and increase the rent by 100%, you will be more corrupt. If you discount the rent by 100%, you will be more pure. Similarly, if you eat meat, you will be more corrupt because an animal had to die for your food but if you eat tofu, you will be more pure because you are getting the same health benefits without killing an animal. That’s right! Being a vegan in Fable 2 has a tangible affect on your character! It may not have a great bearing on how the game plays out in the end, but it’s just a more interesting way to think about morality.
Second, the game has taken into account a lot of the choices you can make in the game. If you are a bigamist and get married to more than one person (yes, the game lets you pursue a gay/lesbian relationship if you so choose), at some point in the game you will be blackmailed. If you don’t pay the blackmailer, he’ll tell all your spouses about your infidelity and wreck your relationship with all of them. While the price the blackmailer asks for is relatively low, making paying him off the easy choice, it’s just neat that the designers took bigamy into account and tries to penalize you for keeping more than one family.
Third, I just wanted to talk about the final flashback in the game after Lucien shoots you. There is another pseudo-flashback that you can get if you buy the Brightwood Tower where you have to fight “Chesty the Chest” as a child which is also pretty surreal (and British, honestly), but that’s not the one I want to touch on. Here, you are brought back to the farm you and your sister grew up in before your parents were killed and you were orphaned. The final flashback is just an interesting gameplay sequence because it brings you back to the beginning of the game, reminding you of why you are a hero in the first place – Lucien killed your sister. By making you to spend time with her as a child, you are reminded of the tragedy without actually showing your sister being killed again. It’s made that much more depressing because your sister follows you around in the flashback, encouraging you as you go around having fun. As the flashback ends, the dream becomes nightmare and the farm becomes a twisted, burning landscape as screams punctuate the soundtrack, bringing you back to the reality that your entire family is dead. It’s just a fascinating sequence that brings you back to the beginning of the game without relying on a cinematic. Indeed, it’s a sequence that only makes sense in gameplay, because it depends so much on your interaction with your sister. And most important of all, this takes place right before you have to choose between Sacrifice and Love, making that choice that much more difficult. Even if you forget your spouse and your dog, you’ve just spent time with your sister – the person who helped raise you when your parents were killed and the person who you vowed to avenge when you grew up to become a hero. Given the chance to save her, after spending all the time with her, wouldn’t you? Even if you condemn thousands of others to their deaths? It primes you for the tough choice you’ll have to make at the end of the game.
Fourth, there’s the ending itself. There is no real boss battle in the game. It builds to a confrontation with Lucien, but you never actually fight him. All you do is press a button to activate a magical item that drains him of his power. You don’t even get a chance to hear his motivation for trying to take over the world (brought on in part by the murder of his wife and daughter) because as he begins to explain himself, Reaver gets tired of hearing him talk and shoots him to death. As someone at the 1up Boards brought up, this is a game where the climax isn’t in a boss battle but in the final narrative and ethical choice you have to make. Even Lucien’s death is anti-climatic, even if it is somewhat humorous. It’s just interesting to see that games have come to a point where you don’t need to end a game on a pointless fight against a large boss (Bioshock, I’m looking at YOU!). Instead, games can end on a story note and that's okay!
Fifth, I want to talk about the Orb system. This is perhaps the first Massive Multiplayer Online Singleplayer game and I hope that other designers look at this feature and rip it off. It’s not only nice to see that other people are playing the game at the same time as you, turning a solitary experience into a shared communal experience, but the fact that you can communicate and talk to these people pushes the communal experience to the next level. If you’re stuck at a point in the game and you see an Orb, you might ask them for help... or, you may just want to chat with random strangers about anything else that comes to mind. It’s just a great feature that makes the singleplayer experience more interesting than the typical RPG.
Finally, I’ll end with the dog, the breadcrumb system and the combat. The dog is a great companion character that makes the solitary experience that much more palatable. And because it’s a dog, they didn’t have to worry about trying to design a character that could interact with the player – they just had to model how a real dog would react and have him run around interact with you based simply on a dog’s emotions. If the dog is scared, he’ll whimper. If he’s hurt, he’ll limp at you. If he finds treasure, he’ll run towards it excitedly. It’s a smart way to create a companion character that is more than just a pack mule or a boring NPC.
The breadcrumb system was also a nice touch because it tells you exactly where you need to go. Some people hate being told where to go and what to do, but I don’t want to have to learn Albion in order to enjoy the game and the breadcrumb system is perfect for players like me.
As for the combat, the one button combat is a great way to make the game accessible to casual players and advanced players alike. It’s easy enough for people who just want to play through the game and not worry about killing things but deep enough for the people who want a full combat experience.
In the end, Fable 2 has pushed ethical interactivity to a whole new level, complicating the whole Good vs Evil binary that has defined games up until now. Hopefully the next BioWare and Obsidian Entertainment games will be able to draw on Fable 2 and continue to evolve storytelling in games. At the very least, it's the one of the first games to draw from the Bible (and the Book of Job specifically) in an interesting way. There aren't random crosses or devils and angels, it just draws from one of the most well known stories from the Old Testament and leaves you to connect the dots.
Edit: Just a final note - the fact that you can only have one save forces you to stick with your decisions during your playthrough. Unlike other games, you won't have the chance to go back and change your mind after the game has saved. It's an interesting, if not frustrating, way to make the choices you make more important to you.
