Remember when the idea of choice in videogames sounded impossibly liberating? It’s been a while since that heady concept really conjured up excitement. A succession of disappointing titles that offered little more than stop-start moments in the midst of the usual mechanics struck the first blow; the adoption of this method of ‘choice’ in titles as distinct as Mass Effect and Overlord seemed to set a standard that, for all its competence, never felt anything more than standard; the freedom that Elite had hinted could become videogames’ future evolved into little more than binary variants and narrow narratives.

Fable, of course, promised that for every choice there would be a consequence – but ultimately only delivered the same divorced decisions. So you might be forgiven for a little skepticism about Fable II. But it’s a sunny day, we’re in Guildford playing the game, and prepared for anything except what happens next. The game’s creative director begins an impression of Eric Cartman: “Will you do this good thing and get this prize, or will you do this bad thing and get this prize?” Dene Carter is, of course, talking about choices. And he’s reaching a fine pitch of indignation: “Because that’s what games do to represent morality! Good lord, I’m so glad that things really are that simple and nothing like religions have been built around such concepts.” It’s by no means a rehearsed response, but you suspect it’s something that’s been chundering around in the man’s head for an unhealthy length of time.

It’s clear why. If there’s one overriding impression that Lionhead’s studio and staff leave you with, it’s that they really don’t think they did a good enough job on Fable. Any trepidation about criticising their baby is swept aside by the team itself quite violently sticking the boot in first. Perhaps the biggest problem came to light recently: apparently, although approximately 30 per cent of players began the game following an evil path, by the conclusion between 90 and 95 per cent of players were good.

It was simply too easy to slip into being virtuous by default – both a conceptual and design problem – exacerbated by the way Fable would essentially stop at certain junctures and present the player with an unsubtle moral choice. “We did an awful lot wrong with Fable,” admits Carter. “We utterly failed at storytelling, the characterisation and script was poor, and the plotting was mystical to say the least, though maybe that was in the grand old tradition of JRPGs where you don’t know what the hell’s going on half the time.”



“Fable was too hard and fast, too binary,” says studio head Peter Molyneux. “Kill this or save this or give this, and I wanted to make Fable II far more subtle than that – what I hope when you play is you don’t think: ‘Oh, I’m in one of those moral dilemmas now, and now I’m not’. I hope you just play it – the ideal is for a player to just be dealing with situations without thinking about how they’re acting.” This is most obvious in the childhood section, which after our playthrough turns out to contain many ‘trivial’ decisions we didn’t realise were being made. It provokes one of those Molyneux moments: “My dream is really to make a game where people can be what they want to be and they don’t feel shackled by us as designers – that they have to be this sort of person, or do this in this kind of situation.”