I’m almost out of debt. Well, not me, exactly; my virtual character in Fable 2. The poor guy, or gal, doesn’t even exist yet (the game doesn’t come out until October 21) but he or she already owes more money than the average American college graduate.
While taking a gander at the debt I’ve accumulated, designer Peter Molyneux can’t help but chortle.
At this point, I’m a firm half-believer this is the architected player experience of the Fable 2 Pub Games . As the first of its kind in the console world, a pre-release meta-game connected to a triple-A blockbuster by way of money and special items, brings an entirely new way of looking at the medium in the form of undetermined consequences for careless player interaction across separate, but related, titles. Even now, my thoughts get the best of me; wandering off attempting to discover the possible ways in which my experience will be different from a player who , instead, chose not to gamble his virtual money away.
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Don’t let the whimsical music fool you.
In this exquisitely constructed experiment, we gamers are the mice running in the typical Clorox bleach-ified maze with a triangular chuck of cheese lying….somewhere. We can smell it, even see it through the cracks in the cobbled-together walls, but the cheese will never be ours. The odds are simply not in our favor. Molyneux’s the scientist, neither mad nor sane, feverishly scribbling notes on legal paper murmuring “interesting” under his breath. His thoughts and intentions are of the righteous and forward kind. Many will benefit from his work here.
Is it really impossible to come out on top in these casino-styled games? Apparently it’s not. Some claim playing the high probability low probability odds to your advantage can yield substantial monetary rewards, but it didn’t work for me. Others have utilized a glitch in one of the games to earn themselves millions, even billions of gold. Molyneux apparently knew about the little crack in the wall and said there will be repercussions for their actions, reinforcing his “it’s all about player choice in Fable 2” mantra.
Regardless of the outcome, it’s refreshing to think in this world of infinite lives and “Game Over” not really meaning game over, that our actions carry some kind of weight, even if we have no idea how much or to what degree.
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The world of Fable 2 is molded by player choice.
