Thanks for the link though, I’m always interested to see which blogs other people are reading, in case I’ve missed them in my web-based travels.

http://dragonchasers.com/2008/11/06/what-can-mmo-devs-learn-from-fable-2/

It’s hard to really explain the ‘living world’ feeling I get from Fable 2, or at least it’s difficult to quantify it, and perhaps that’s what makes it so good: it’s hard to break it down into numbers of X and Y with regards to AI, travel times, mini games and such. It’s perhaps one of those ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’ situations, and it’s very hard to see why. It just is. Or maybe some clever MMO developer will be able to see why, in which case good on them, and that would be the reason they’re a game developer and I’m an armchair designer.

I think MMO developers should definitely look closely at Fable 2, because it’s clear that the game has borrowed from MMOs in many ways, and I think it would be remiss or even negligent of MMO developers to not try to work out why Fable 2 succeeds in feeling more like a real world. As for other things in Fable 2 that could be emulated by MMOs, well, the gaining of experience is actually made fun, or at least made into a visceral thing, something that is so simple and yet makes me tingle with joy when I use it, but maybe that’s just me; combining this experience ‘gathering’ with the fact that the experience to be had depends on how you to choose to fight – such that if you prefer melee you will gain more melee experience to spend on improving your melee skills – is empowering the player to be who they want to be in the world, which I think is something that many, many MMO players deeply desire.

In the end, though, it may simply be that the game is the reduced sauce of MMOs, i.e. by being able to remove all the extraneous cruft that is required for a world that has to support many hundreds of real players, you get something that is essentially the same as the original, just a thicker, richer experience.