I miss Lionhead.
I understand that's a controversial sentence to start with. Peter Molyneux has long been a snake oil salesman, and his latest pivot to crypto is just one of a million swindles he's pulled. And while he was still guilty of plenty of egregious shit at his 2000s development studio, Lionhead, there was a good run there where Molyneux and the team in Guildford knocked out some absurdly ambitious titles.
And while we're here to talk about Fable 3 (which, I promise, we will get to) I think the company's history can shed some light on the 2000s Liberal Mind.
Bear with me.
---------------------------
- The First Roar -
---------------------------
Lionhead Studios was established in 1997 after EA bought Bullfrog in the early 90s. Peter Molyneux, designer of Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper, was dissatisfied with corporate meddling in Bullfrog's affairs, and left to start a new studio. Bullfrog would close just four years later, in 2001. Development started on Black and White shortly after the studio's establishment and was also released in 2001. A direct descendant of Molyneux's Populous and the most literal definition of a God Game you can imagine, Black and White was an RTS about building influence for you, a new god. The way you did this was largely up to you, and (in what would become something of a hallmark for Lionhead) was remarkably free-reign for the time. Performing miracles, satisfying villager requests, keeping them fed and healthy, and completing sidequests would expand your influence through praise and reverence, leading to you being perceived as a benevolent god by your people. Conversely, should the mood take you, you can also pursue a darker path, waging war, crushing people, animals and buildings, expanding your rule through fear and hatred. This is where we see Molyneux's digital view of morality start to take shape - each action you take affects your moral standing, but (likely through technical necessity) context on your decision is never considered. If you steal food from your people to give it to someone more in need? That's bad, baby! Should have found it another way! Black and White would be followed by a sequel in 2005, which dropped much of the interesting godliness and focused instead on building and ordering your army - much like many other RTSes. The sequel was much less successful than the original and Black and White would not see another game.
Just three years later would come Fable. An action RPG for the original Xbox, Fable was also fascinated with morality, again promising the player could "be their own hero." An instant hit, it would go on to spawn two sequels, two spinoffs, a cancelled co-op free to play adventure, and most recently, a reboot from Playground Games. Fable stratified the organic moral choices from Black and White into more direct questions to the player, allowing you to pick a good, an evil or rarely, a "neutral" path. Again, context on choices was largely ignored and you're left with choices that can be boiled to "holier than though" action and "just murder someone for no reason" action. Still, this was 2004, and moral choices of any kind were pretty rare, so this was quite the novelty and Fable was a success. It is also the origin of the infamous "if you plant an acorn as a child it will grow to be a mighty oak tree over the course of the game" which was, of course, utter nonsense.
Releasing just a single month after Black and White 2, The Movies was a Theme Hospital type management sim focused on building a movie studio. The gimmick here was that you could actually direct those movies yourself, picking actors, costumes, themes, plot, etc. Again, remarkably amibitious, especially when those movies could be rendered out and saved to your hard drive - or directly uploaded to the game's own website, an entire year before Youtube was first live. Unfortuantely The Movies was again, perhaps too ambitious for its time, and it was not particularly well received. An expansion pack would be released in 2006, then the game was never heard from again.
---------------
- Fable II -
---------------
Fable II is truly beloved by many 360 owners. The best selling RPG for the console (outselling even Skyrim on the platform), II took the formula from Fable and chiselled it down to its purset qualities. Combat was simplified, assigning a type of combat (melee, ranged and magic) to a button each, and encouraging experimentation with combining them. The plot was a pretty straightforward telling of the hero's journey, but again involved moral choices akin to the first game's that impacted NPC perception of you. But perhaps Fable II's most well-remembered move was The Spire chapter. Before this chapter, the game was largely a carefree lark with a young protagonist, finding heros of legend and awakening true power - the standard stuff. The Spire shifts all that in a, frankly, unexpectedly horrifying fashion. The Spire is the big bad's plan to grant himself a wish, a Tower of Babel piercing the heavens that gets built over the course of the game. But you don't only see this happen from afar - the player character is taken there as forced labour, and you witness this work camp yourself. Over the course of the chapter, your character ages 7 years, maturing into grizzled adulthood, pivoting the tone of the game much darker. It's fair to say this move stuck with people, and it was clearly recognised within Lionhead as the standout moment of the game - because for Fable 3, they'd try and do the same thing, to an undeniably worse result.
--------------------------------------------------------------
- The Game We're Here To Talk About -
--------------------------------------------------------------
Fable 3 is about the child of Fable II's hero leading a rebellion and becoming a monarch, then ruling over Albion as a threat from an exotic foreign land encroaches. If you're reading that sentence and seeing immediate red flags, don't worry - you're not alone, and we'll get to it. But first, the central gimmick. The first half of Fable 3 plays out much the same way as Fable 2's - jolly along on an adventure, meet a bunch of people who'll help you out, make moral choices that don't really do much. Shoot things and stab things and spell things. The RPG mechanics are watered down, reducing levelling to a perk system - but they weren't that present in Fable 2 anyway, so it's not a massive loss. Once you've successfully led a rebellion, deposed your brother, and become the definitely democratically elected head of state, you're then faced with a number of Royal Decisions to make. These mostly consist of spending a bunch of the treasury to fulfill promises you made to the people who helped you, or breaking those promises to make cash money to build your defences for the coming threat. These decisions play out on the world itself, making changes to the landscape, the people, and their perception of you. At the end of the game, you spend all the money in the treasury, with the cash you managed to shore up going towards saving your citizens - the more you have, the more you save. If you're a benevolent ruler, then, your citizens will live a blessed life - then all die at the end of the year. If you're a tyrant, thery have a shit time for a year but all survive. Ooooh, choices!
I shouldn't have to say this, but this is neoliberalism at its most naked. While the game portrays itself as the story of a working class insurrection, this is immediately undercut by the insurrection being led by a royal. The insurrection has to be led by the royal, because the royal is a Medieval Jedi by birthright and so only they have the power to yadda yadda yadda. The leader of the working class in Bowerstone, Page, is a black woman, but you, the player, are the white saviour (there is no character customisation), and her work is ineffective until you come along. You venture over to Aurora, an analog for the middle east, and perform the same saviour narrative there. The Dwellers (wisely renamed from g*psys in Fable II) take you in at the game's kick-off, and sure enough, you're gonna save them too. Fable 3 is not the story of an insurrection. It is the dream of liberalism - everyone equally helping the privileged whites.
This shines through even more once you take the throne. The choices you make are comically opposed - will you open a school or enforce child labour? Will you retain a natural lake or drain it to mine for diamonds? - and naturally these are the only ways to make money within the framework of ruler, outside of a couple of day ending quests where you travel to a corner of the empire and steal an ancient treasure (Lionhead is British, by the way). But don't worry, gamers - you can donate your personal adventuring funds to the treasury to make up the cost. Unfortunately, the final cost of saving everyone is 6.5 million gold, far more than you could ever earn from adventuring alone. But don't worry again, gamers, for there is a solution to that problem too - the One True Profession, Landlordism.
Yes, Fable 3 is, underneath it all, a game spewing the virtues of being a landlord. The way to win the game is to buy every house, every business, and jack up the rent. Doing this will net you an income of nearly 200,000 gold every five minutes. It doesn't take long to save up the money you need to win with that kind of income - and hey, once you have, why bother dropping the prices? You need a 6 million pile to reach a silver key in your Sanctuary, after all.
I think this, combined with the flimsy moral choices, should have been an early warning sign for the kinds of swindles Molyneux would try and pursue in future. It's a pretty direct line from "landlords will save us all" to shilling NFTs in the liberal mind - because in the liberal mind, equity and morality are but tools to make more capital. Molyneux's g(r)ift of the gab - vast promises, overambitious development, condensing down to games that while impressive, were just games - would go on to produce Curiosity, a vampiric F2P game that promised to reward the person who reached the centre with a then unknown gift (at time of writing, the winner of that has still yet to receive their prize, that is, to be the "god" of Godus and receive some of its profits), and is now ostensibly producing Legacy, the NFT-utilising god game that has barely been mentioned since 2019.
Fable 3, then, is a fascinating curio - a relic of a once impressive studio, a pale imitation of its forebear, and an ill potent of what would follow.
3/5.
I understand that's a controversial sentence to start with. Peter Molyneux has long been a snake oil salesman, and his latest pivot to crypto is just one of a million swindles he's pulled. And while he was still guilty of plenty of egregious shit at his 2000s development studio, Lionhead, there was a good run there where Molyneux and the team in Guildford knocked out some absurdly ambitious titles.
And while we're here to talk about Fable 3 (which, I promise, we will get to) I think the company's history can shed some light on the 2000s Liberal Mind.
Bear with me.
---------------------------
- The First Roar -
---------------------------
Lionhead Studios was established in 1997 after EA bought Bullfrog in the early 90s. Peter Molyneux, designer of Theme Park and Dungeon Keeper, was dissatisfied with corporate meddling in Bullfrog's affairs, and left to start a new studio. Bullfrog would close just four years later, in 2001. Development started on Black and White shortly after the studio's establishment and was also released in 2001. A direct descendant of Molyneux's Populous and the most literal definition of a God Game you can imagine, Black and White was an RTS about building influence for you, a new god. The way you did this was largely up to you, and (in what would become something of a hallmark for Lionhead) was remarkably free-reign for the time. Performing miracles, satisfying villager requests, keeping them fed and healthy, and completing sidequests would expand your influence through praise and reverence, leading to you being perceived as a benevolent god by your people. Conversely, should the mood take you, you can also pursue a darker path, waging war, crushing people, animals and buildings, expanding your rule through fear and hatred. This is where we see Molyneux's digital view of morality start to take shape - each action you take affects your moral standing, but (likely through technical necessity) context on your decision is never considered. If you steal food from your people to give it to someone more in need? That's bad, baby! Should have found it another way! Black and White would be followed by a sequel in 2005, which dropped much of the interesting godliness and focused instead on building and ordering your army - much like many other RTSes. The sequel was much less successful than the original and Black and White would not see another game.
Just three years later would come Fable. An action RPG for the original Xbox, Fable was also fascinated with morality, again promising the player could "be their own hero." An instant hit, it would go on to spawn two sequels, two spinoffs, a cancelled co-op free to play adventure, and most recently, a reboot from Playground Games. Fable stratified the organic moral choices from Black and White into more direct questions to the player, allowing you to pick a good, an evil or rarely, a "neutral" path. Again, context on choices was largely ignored and you're left with choices that can be boiled to "holier than though" action and "just murder someone for no reason" action. Still, this was 2004, and moral choices of any kind were pretty rare, so this was quite the novelty and Fable was a success. It is also the origin of the infamous "if you plant an acorn as a child it will grow to be a mighty oak tree over the course of the game" which was, of course, utter nonsense.
Releasing just a single month after Black and White 2, The Movies was a Theme Hospital type management sim focused on building a movie studio. The gimmick here was that you could actually direct those movies yourself, picking actors, costumes, themes, plot, etc. Again, remarkably amibitious, especially when those movies could be rendered out and saved to your hard drive - or directly uploaded to the game's own website, an entire year before Youtube was first live. Unfortuantely The Movies was again, perhaps too ambitious for its time, and it was not particularly well received. An expansion pack would be released in 2006, then the game was never heard from again.
---------------
- Fable II -
---------------
Fable II is truly beloved by many 360 owners. The best selling RPG for the console (outselling even Skyrim on the platform), II took the formula from Fable and chiselled it down to its purset qualities. Combat was simplified, assigning a type of combat (melee, ranged and magic) to a button each, and encouraging experimentation with combining them. The plot was a pretty straightforward telling of the hero's journey, but again involved moral choices akin to the first game's that impacted NPC perception of you. But perhaps Fable II's most well-remembered move was The Spire chapter. Before this chapter, the game was largely a carefree lark with a young protagonist, finding heros of legend and awakening true power - the standard stuff. The Spire shifts all that in a, frankly, unexpectedly horrifying fashion. The Spire is the big bad's plan to grant himself a wish, a Tower of Babel piercing the heavens that gets built over the course of the game. But you don't only see this happen from afar - the player character is taken there as forced labour, and you witness this work camp yourself. Over the course of the chapter, your character ages 7 years, maturing into grizzled adulthood, pivoting the tone of the game much darker. It's fair to say this move stuck with people, and it was clearly recognised within Lionhead as the standout moment of the game - because for Fable 3, they'd try and do the same thing, to an undeniably worse result.
--------------------------------------------------------------
- The Game We're Here To Talk About -
--------------------------------------------------------------
Fable 3 is about the child of Fable II's hero leading a rebellion and becoming a monarch, then ruling over Albion as a threat from an exotic foreign land encroaches. If you're reading that sentence and seeing immediate red flags, don't worry - you're not alone, and we'll get to it. But first, the central gimmick. The first half of Fable 3 plays out much the same way as Fable 2's - jolly along on an adventure, meet a bunch of people who'll help you out, make moral choices that don't really do much. Shoot things and stab things and spell things. The RPG mechanics are watered down, reducing levelling to a perk system - but they weren't that present in Fable 2 anyway, so it's not a massive loss. Once you've successfully led a rebellion, deposed your brother, and become the definitely democratically elected head of state, you're then faced with a number of Royal Decisions to make. These mostly consist of spending a bunch of the treasury to fulfill promises you made to the people who helped you, or breaking those promises to make cash money to build your defences for the coming threat. These decisions play out on the world itself, making changes to the landscape, the people, and their perception of you. At the end of the game, you spend all the money in the treasury, with the cash you managed to shore up going towards saving your citizens - the more you have, the more you save. If you're a benevolent ruler, then, your citizens will live a blessed life - then all die at the end of the year. If you're a tyrant, thery have a shit time for a year but all survive. Ooooh, choices!
I shouldn't have to say this, but this is neoliberalism at its most naked. While the game portrays itself as the story of a working class insurrection, this is immediately undercut by the insurrection being led by a royal. The insurrection has to be led by the royal, because the royal is a Medieval Jedi by birthright and so only they have the power to yadda yadda yadda. The leader of the working class in Bowerstone, Page, is a black woman, but you, the player, are the white saviour (there is no character customisation), and her work is ineffective until you come along. You venture over to Aurora, an analog for the middle east, and perform the same saviour narrative there. The Dwellers (wisely renamed from g*psys in Fable II) take you in at the game's kick-off, and sure enough, you're gonna save them too. Fable 3 is not the story of an insurrection. It is the dream of liberalism - everyone equally helping the privileged whites.
This shines through even more once you take the throne. The choices you make are comically opposed - will you open a school or enforce child labour? Will you retain a natural lake or drain it to mine for diamonds? - and naturally these are the only ways to make money within the framework of ruler, outside of a couple of day ending quests where you travel to a corner of the empire and steal an ancient treasure (Lionhead is British, by the way). But don't worry, gamers - you can donate your personal adventuring funds to the treasury to make up the cost. Unfortunately, the final cost of saving everyone is 6.5 million gold, far more than you could ever earn from adventuring alone. But don't worry again, gamers, for there is a solution to that problem too - the One True Profession, Landlordism.
Yes, Fable 3 is, underneath it all, a game spewing the virtues of being a landlord. The way to win the game is to buy every house, every business, and jack up the rent. Doing this will net you an income of nearly 200,000 gold every five minutes. It doesn't take long to save up the money you need to win with that kind of income - and hey, once you have, why bother dropping the prices? You need a 6 million pile to reach a silver key in your Sanctuary, after all.
I think this, combined with the flimsy moral choices, should have been an early warning sign for the kinds of swindles Molyneux would try and pursue in future. It's a pretty direct line from "landlords will save us all" to shilling NFTs in the liberal mind - because in the liberal mind, equity and morality are but tools to make more capital. Molyneux's g(r)ift of the gab - vast promises, overambitious development, condensing down to games that while impressive, were just games - would go on to produce Curiosity, a vampiric F2P game that promised to reward the person who reached the centre with a then unknown gift (at time of writing, the winner of that has still yet to receive their prize, that is, to be the "god" of Godus and receive some of its profits), and is now ostensibly producing Legacy, the NFT-utilising god game that has barely been mentioned since 2019.
Fable 3, then, is a fascinating curio - a relic of a once impressive studio, a pale imitation of its forebear, and an ill potent of what would follow.
3/5.
CoKami
2 years ago