Fable & Choice

So we had another awesome day of Game Design II today. It was a day in which we were encouraged to bring in games that would demonstrate points we were trying to achieve.

One of the cooler of the games we looked at was Fable, from the original XBox. We looked at it for its usage of dialogue and choice. In Fable, almost every decision you make affects the game somehow. Whether it is choosing whether or not to keep an affair a secret, or whether or not to burn a village, you get a lot of freedom to do what you want.

And more importantly, the game is set up to reflect the consequences of your actions. If you tell the wife that her husband is having an affair, the husband will get angry at you. If you commit evil actions like burning villages and killing citizens, you will gradually become a darker-looking more evil character. And the ending of the game also depends on choices you make.

For the purposes of our class, we just looked at the opening level of the game, in which the young boy is running around trying to do good deeds to collect money. But man, there is a lot of opportunities to do mean stuff as well in that town. I couldn't count how many times the player got yelled at my the town guard for being a bad kid. It was pretty cool to see a system set up that could deal with consequences though, it really helped to make the town and game come alive.

We also looked at some other games like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (KotOR) for their use of dialogue as well. KotOR was shown as a good example of dialogue usage, but I feel like the multiple choice menu system breaks up the action a lot. It'd be nice to see a game that could make a more fluid system for choice and dialogue.

Mass Effect, the newest game out from BioWare (who made KotOR), is supposed to have a very good choice and dialogue mechanic. When I get my X-Box 360 in about a month Mass Effect will be at the top of my list of games to get, so I'll be able to see for myself.

- Scott