Fable II will give you fame. You’ll give it morality.

The moment has come.

We’re about to go hands-on with Fable II. Designer Peter Molyneux passes us the controller. The game starts, and we’re thrown into a city; Dickens with a fantasy twist. The street-urchin child who’ll eventually grow into a hero stands alongside his older sister, Rose, gazing dreamily at a castle. Peter interrupts, stopping the game, speaking to Lionhead producer Will Braham: “Can we have a smooth transition from the first camera, back around the head rather than a cut?” He restarts the game. We carry on. A few minutes later, he halts it again. “Light on the bread-trail a little lighter.” We continue, our nuggets of play interrupted by Molyneux’s dictated notes for future correction.

And so goes our first hour with Fable II. It’s far from the usual hands-on. Which is somewhat appropriate — Fable II is far from a usual game, and it’s at an unusual place in its development cycle. It’s not a period during which a developer would often give access to us press types. The game is fundamentally there, but the complexities of a role-playing game take attention and polish. Lionhead’s currently getting completely random people to play the game with Molyneux watching and the studio taking notes. They’re going to be doing this for months, and we’re here for only an afternoon: It seemed only polite to volunteer to help.

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We wonder what happens with all the notes. “They go to the team. They make the changes,” says Molyneux. “Before that happens, America needs to do ‘Triage,’ which means they approve all the changes. Maybe half the things I say will get into the game.”

You begin to suspect it’s a good idea that they’re cut down. Even as it is, Fable II is a game that’s tried to include everything. Rhythm-based combat. Role-playing statistics and magic. Sims-esque social interactions. Co-op, both online and offline. An enormous open world you’re free to explore. The sort of property-purchasing that the Grand Theft Auto series ejected after San Andreas, along with all manner of jobs you can do to earn the cash to purchase that property. And a strong contender for the greatest videogame dog of all time, just because — hey — with the experience in simulating creatures from Black & White, they may as well have gaming’s greatest dog.

But when it starts, it starts simply. The aforementioned Dickensian City is set 500 years after the close of the first game, with you as an artful dodger-type trying to make his way in the world. You run around, getting a sense of the land. “I wanted you to start with no power and no abilities,” says Molyneux, “to see what it felt like to be powerless at the start.” The point being, within a half-hour the prologue is over, you’re a grown man, and you’re about to forge your destiny by blade, magic, and blunderbuss. From streetchild...to hero? The definition of the word “hero” is what Fable II is all about.

Soul-Testing

Thematically picking up where the first game left off, almost all the quests have a moral element. A fetch quest to bring a man his booze is enlivened by the option to give it to one of the drunkard’s concerned friends, just to stop the man from falling back into the alcoholism he’s tottering over. Your one reservation with these initial choices is...well, you have no reservations. This is good. That is bad. You know which is which, and there’s no reason not to follow your natural inclination. And it’s easy to pick good — as more than 80 percent of people did in the original Fable, reports Molyneux. However, that’s one area Fable II is going to push, its creator claims.

“At the start of the game, the decisions are really easy — really soft,” he says.

It doesn’t remain so.

“One of the objectives we have for Fable II is to ask, ‘How good are you really?’” He describes some examples of later quests, whose actual details would be audacious plot spoilers but nevertheless demonstrate the intent. It’s easy to refuse an offer when you don’t gain something from it.

“True goodness and nobility is about sacrifice,” Molyneux explains.
“It’s not about saving this person or that person. It’s about how much you’re willing to sacrifice...which I hope people will think about after playing Fable II.”

The moral choices even tie into the final part of the game to be revealed: the previously announced drop-in/drop-out “couch co-op.” As you’d expect, Fable II will have an innovative online co-op mode, too. The key to both is the transparency that pays props to ’80s arcade classics like Gauntlet. “One of the things I hate about co-op is that I’m in the middle of playing a game, and I have to start a different game,” says Molyneux. To that end, pressing Start on the second controller drops you in as a similar character at any point in the game. This character can run around, use any abilities, whatever. Lionhead experimented with a split-screen mode but found that it tended to make the characters feel distant from one another.

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.

Plenty of Time for Heroism

Of course, there’s more to this game than social dynamics. Like its predecessor, Fable II’s main arc won’t be a 30-hour epic. At the moment, Molyneux reckons the game will be in the region of 11 or 12 hours, if you follow the critical path. However, with co-op, it’s going to be painfully obvious to your friend that you’ve steamrolled through the game without regards to any side quests. That’s why Molyneux describes co-op as the single most impactful change to the game.

“You get no gold at all for doing quests,” he tells us. “So if you want to rush through the game from start to finish, it’ll take you 11 to 12 hours. But you’ll be a penniless — if famous — hero. You won’t have bought a house. Your family — if you have one — will live in a hovel hut.”

And when you go and play with a friend who got involved in the many in-game jobs — bartending, blacksmith, assassin — it’s going to be a tad embarrassing when they’re showing you around their many palatial estates, and then you limp back to your hole in the ground with your wart-covered spouse to eat a nice meal of raw potatoes. Meanwhile, your persistent friend is being hailed for his achievements. “If you get a level-5 blacksmith, you can become the most famous blacksmith,” explains Molyneux. “And if you start owning huge amounts of the world, your titles start changing — you can be the leader of the Gypsy town, the Mayor of Bowerstone, eventually become the Emperor of all of Albion.”

All of it returns to the key idea of all the Fable games: the idea of what a hero actually is.

“That really matters to me,” says Molyneux. “what it feels like to be a hero. We spent a lot more time on it [in Fable II] to make you feel like that. At the end of the day, that’s what playing a game should make you feel like. It shouldn’t make you feel stupid. A lot of times games make me feel more stupid than successful.” From an adoring family to the baying of the crowds, it’s all about that. Celebrity is the modern obsession of the 21st century, but having the hoi polloi’s head turning en masse is the nearest most of us will ever get to experiencing it. “The first time anyone asks you for an autograph in the game, you feel fantastic,” describes Molyneux. “‘I really am the hero. I really am making a difference.’” •