Sunday, September 19, 2004

Bashing Fable

Man, it seems like the new sport these days is to complain about how much Fable sucks.

Gabe, the new dad over at Penny Arcade, really tore it a new one. Granted, if Tycho was complaining about Fable, I'd probably take it to heart a bit more. Having Gabe complain about RPG's is like me complaining about the selection at a vegetarian buffet.

Granted, Gabe is slowly getting interested in RPG's, but his history with the genre goes back all the way to Final Fantasy X and his new-found love affair with the Nippon Ichi turn-based tactical RPG games (Disgaea, La Pucelle and Phantom Brave).

Thankfully cooler heads have prevailed. Point in case is Absath over at Ctrl-Alt-Del. He does agree with some of the points Gabe has brought up in his rant, but on the whole Absath seems to 'get' Fable, whereas Gabe doesn't.

"Gabe says that he doesn't feel that Fable's "open ended gameplay works in the context of a single player game". He goes on to point out that the fact that you can build up your character, own shops, get married, becoming famous, etc are worthless because you're playing in a computer run world, with no online content, and not with other people.

My question is this: is that not the case with practically 80% of video games nowadays (and 100% of them as we were growing up, because online didn't even exist)? Have we been so spoiled by MMORPG's and such that single player games are no longer enough to entertain us? I mean, for me, playing a game, getting the best equipment, getting the high score... that's fun for me. I don't feel a need to show it off to other people in order to get entertainment out of it. I don't need to brag about the armor I just got. It's fun for me, playing in the game, playing in that world."


And for the record, I was about ready to throw my controller through the screen on this mission in Fable last night. Stupid kid. Oh, and I am still loving Fable myself. Except for that kid. Stupid kid.

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