It's Hero Time

It’s a Small World After All

Online takes a different approach. Rather than anything menu-based, the land is dotted with orbs. If you’re connected to Xbox Live, these orbs will display images of anyone on your Friends list or in your vicinity who is currently playing as well. Run up and select the appropriate orb, and you can invite them over. You can even select it in the middle of a fight, and all of a sudden you’ve got reinforcements. Stuck on a puzzle, and spy someone on a nearby orb further along? Wander over to it and ask them how the hell they got past this ingenious arrangement of levers, springs, and hobbe-skulls. Mystery solved!

It’s not just a social call either. “When you’re in my world, you’re still earning experience points and gold, which you can export back,” explains Molyneux. “I get pissed off at co-op–ing in someone else’s game when I don’t think I’m getting anything [for my time]. I’m actually losing something.” And it needn’t even be an equal split. By calling someone into your game, you’re effectively hiring them, and you can set terms via a slider interface. For example, you may agree that they get all the gold while you keep all the experience. Such splits can be of use when — for example — one of the characters has completed the main quest and is mainly interested in expanding commercial concerns back home, while the other is just working their way through for the first time and needs the raw power.

This sort of co-op has a specific function in a game like Fable. Meeting and talking to friends about their decisions — “I can’t believe you killed them! You freak!” — was a key part of the original’s appeal. However, just chatting about it is hugely different from actually stepping into a world that’s been shaped by a different set of decisions than yours. For example, an early choice in the prologue involves either helping the local police or disrupting their efforts. Choose the latter, and that area of town falls into a proverbial den of iniquity — all Grand Theft Feudal. Help out the local law, and the town’s a prosperous merchant district. Walking into a friend’s world and realizing how things could have been different could make it some kind of weird gaming parallel to It’s A Wonderful Life. Or It’s A Horrible Life, if you’ve chosen to go a darker route.

Unintended Consequences

All of which means that it’s worth considering who to invite into the world. Since you hired them, you get blamed for your henchmen’s misdemeanors. The exception, which keeps people from causing incredible harm, is that the host maintains control of the game’s “safety” — that is, what keeps people from attacking non-combatants. So no one’s going to slaughter a local village in your world unless you’ve expressly allowed it.

However, the populace will act toward visitors according to their own reputations rather than your own. So, for example, if your friend is hideously deformed, they’ll be gawking. If they’re hot, they’ll be lustful. And if they’re famous...well, this is interesting in how it ends up subverting one of the key elements of Fable II. As you grow throughout the game, people begin responding to you accordingly. From being ignored on the streets, it ends with your very presence gathering crowds of admirers. People either want to be you or be with you. However, if you drag in an even more resplendent friend, “It just pisses you off,” Molyneux notes. “They’re all interested in him, not you.” Suddenly being the pretty girl’s ugly best friend is the sort of novel social drama that Fable II co-op seems poised to unleash.

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