Bid On A Role in Fable 2 For Child's Play

Via Joystiq, a post on the Lionhead website offers up a once-in-a-lifetime offer ... for charity! At this year's Child's Play Fundraiser, an annual black tie event scheduled for December 11th, the studio will auction off roles in their in-development title Fable 2 to help raise money for kid gamers. Roles include 'a Fable 2 Shopkeeper, a Farmer, an important Villager, a Monk, or a Quest character.' Other loot they're offering includes "Signed underwear by Peter Molyneux! The only known surviving Fable T-SHIRT signed by the Development Team in 2004. Limited edition, official Fable 2 team T-SHIRT. Limited edition, official Fable 2 sweater / hoodie. Exclusive Fable 2 printed and framed artwork. Limited edition, framed Black & White 2 poster, signed by the Development Team and Peter Molyneux. Framed copy of Fable, presented in recognition of your contribution to the making of Fable."

Re:Bid On A Role In A Sucky Game? No Thanks...

[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, and while Fable didn't live up to everything it was saying it'd be, it lived up to a fair bit. The game is an excellent title, one worthy of a sequel. Perhaps this time there will be more than just two endings, that was the biggest flaw in the first Fable, it was a binary ending, rather than a spectral one. You need the shades of grey if you're going to have a game that deals in morals, Bioshock has the same flaw.

Re:Bid On A Role In A Sucky Game? No Thanks...

[Voltageaav]

First off, I loved Fable and can't wait for Fable 2. But the game was a bit unfinished when they released it. Also, many of the features they had said would be included were not, even in "The Lost Chapters". It is a great game, but was over hyped to the point that it came as a disappointment to many.

Re:Bid On A Role In A Sucky Game? No Thanks...

[RogueyWon]

That's... a little harsh. Not necessarily untrue, per se, but it's not quite giving the full picture.

My own impression of Molyneux's output over the last decade is that it's been very strong on the ideas, but dreadful on the implementation. While this means that many of his games leave the user frustrated and infuriated, it doesn't mean he's a bad thing for the industry.

Take Black & White as a case in point. There are few games that have inspired such utter, blind rage in me as the original Black & White. I remember one of my friends hammering the eject button on his CD drive, yanking the disk out so hard he damaged the drive, then smashing the disk into tiny pieces with a hammer, sticking it in an envelope and mailing it to Lionhead with an obscenity-filled tirade. The concept was very strong; a god-game that you play not, primarily, through exercising a direct influence, but rather by training your own independently intelligent avatar. Unfortunately, the game was crippled by terrible mission design, one of the worst camera systems in the history of gaming and bizarre quirks in the AI that could cause your creature to snap and behave completely and irreversibly out of character for no discernable reason.

However, the core concept of a game in which you train up an avatar through "tactile" interaction, reinforcement of behaviours and more advanced training has lived on and now sits at the heart of the modern "virtual pets" genre, which has become such a cash-cow on the Nintendo DS.

Slashdot posters often complain about a supposed lack of innovation in the games industry (although this isn't a line that I personally subscribe to). But if you want to encourage innovation, then tolerating and supporting the eccentrics who produce terrible games containing great ideas (that others with more of a knack for polish can develop further) can't be a bad thing.