Fable Legends - The Challenges of Asymmetric Multiplayer - Extra Credits

every once in a while a developer comes to us with a game that they're building that they think is novel and they ask us to help explain what's unique about it we like seeing AAA developers attempting to break new ground so it's a project we're usually willing to at least consider often we find the games in question don't innovate or experiment quite enough to make the collaboration worthwhile but when they do seem to actually have something new to offer we're happy to talk about it these are sponsored episodes and while our agreement with lion head explicitly states that we're going to talk about the game without any editorial input from them and that frankly we're going to talk about the bad along with the good we just want you to know that upfront if you don't like sponsored content no worries our regularly scheduled weekly extra credits episodes will still be happening so we'll see you there no problem otherwise consider this a few weeks of bonus extra credits episodes we're going to be using this conversation about the design of the game to discuss the industry and game design in general like always so I hope you enjoyed this little run of bonus episode as we explore what Fable Legends

can teach us about design the first thing I should mention about this game and you may have picked up on this yourself just from watching the trailers is that it's a huge risk which is sort of why we agreed to make these videos in the first place Fable Legends is absolutely nothing like any of the other Fable games it's not a large World story-driven RPG not at all it's an asymmetric multiplayer game where a team of four players play a co-op tactical action RPG while another player plays a Dungeon Keeper esque strategy game against them that's really the best on line description I could come up with imagine you're somebody from lion head having to pitch that to a publisher imagine sitting in a room full of suits and blank expressions and saying nope we're not going to be making Fable 4 right now instead we'd like to spend tens of millions of dollars trying to make something that nobody in our fan base is going to be expecting and nobody outside of our fan base may even glance at it because it's got the name Fable in the title now imagine having to do that when you hail from a company that is literally known for over promising on wild playay ambitious ideas sure the guy

known for doing that is no longer with the company and the game idea is largely sound from a development standpoint but that's not what's going to spring to mind when you announce to players hey we're doing something crazy get hyped you get what I'm saying this is a pretty big gamble on their part and real talk I'd like to see it succeed just so it can stand as an example to other AAA companies that yeah huge gambl like this can totally work and I'm not by any means saying that I endorse the game heck I have no idea how good it'll turn out to be when it's finished but I do fully endorse them rolling the dice like this so go ahead and Chuck out any Notions you may have about how Fable games work it's time to dig in this game actually plays much more like the multiplayer and Dragon Age Inquisition than it does your typical Fable game it's a four-person Dungeon Crawl Through an instantiated dungeon where you and your team try to make it to the end alive to gather Loot and gain experience which you'll then use to customize your character between matches grow in power and to tackle bigger and better challenges in the future pretty straightforward so far but the big twist here is that instead of the enemy simply

being controlled by an AI like they are in most other games they're directed by a fifth player who's playing a radically different game than our four Heroes the villain player gets to choose where to place all the enemy encounters traps even the major terrain features in the level and then plays from a top- down perspective directing his minions each dungeon is split into several small zones that begin with the villain getting some time to set up the area and then it's an allout brawl to the Finish okay so that's the basics of the game now we can finally do thing and dive into the ramifications of this one huge decision to let players control the enemies think about that choice from a development perspective it means you have to create two completely different sets of UI two totally different control schemes you have to build the basics of every level so that they work from two radically different camera angles you have to make your art look good and be visually clear from a far top down perspective and the up close and personal third person action view you're basically adding in a second simultaneous game just reusing some of the assets this is a pretty big risk and

honestly it's one James wouldn't be totally confident making in most AAA environments but you know what more power to them for going for it but beyond even all that think about what platform this is coming out for Xbox one they're proposing having one character play a strategy game on the Xbox on a controller this is something that basically no one's ever gotten right in a console game and yet their whole experience hinges on people being able to pick up and play the villain here though they did something very very clever and something that a lot of smaller scale console rtss could learn from they limited the number of unit types the villain could bring into each of the small zones to four so that they could map the four units to the face buttons and use the bumpers and triggers to issue commands to whatever group was selected this makes for a much smoother interface than basically any RTS we've played on a console yet for the few levels that James got to play having four different unit types worked pretty well and kept things simple while still providing a great deal of Versatility and tactical depth but as a designer one of the questions we always have to ask

is how our design decisions might limit us in the future will this system scale will they be able to keep four different units interesting for high level players a year down the road this streamlined control scheme was almost certainly the right choice for the game they're making but it'll be interesting to see what decisions it forces them into in the long run to keep the game feeling fresh now before we go there's one really interesting design question that pops up with any game that involves asymmetric team sizes how do you balance the win loss ratio every time the wins four Heroes lose now on the one hand this isn't too much of a problem because every time the heroes win only one villain loses so if you just tune your game to have a 50/50 hero villain win loss ratio you'll still have players winning an average of 50% of the time but it gets interesting once you start to tweak that imagine that you tip the balance ever so slightly in favor of the heroes let's say we give them a 60% win rate now your entire player base as a whole is winning over 56% of the time more players are winning this than losing that's something you can never do

with most multiplayer games should you do it might it be better somehow we don't actually know yet but it's an interesting problem to think around do you make more people happy by having more people win all the time at the expense of the villain player or do you try to balance your game so it's 100% Fair alternatively you could boost the villain's power lowering the win ratio of the entire player base and giving the whole experience a more hardcore feel which might also incentivize more people to play the relatively unusual villain side it's an aspect of group psychology that we've barely explored as an industry so yeah the folks at lion head are trying a lot of bold things succeed or fail Fable Legends will be a game to keep an eye on to learn a great deal about asymmetric play numerically unbalanced teams strategy controls on a controller and even how the game playing public reacts to a franchise breaking its own mold in such a major way join us next time for some thoughts on why lion head might consider such a big risk [Music]