Playground Games’ long announcedFablesequel got itsfirst real trailerover the weekend at theXbox Games Showcase, and it looks like it will be filling the humor hole inMicrosoft’s upcomingRPGroster.Starfielddisplayed some levity in its showcase, and Obsidian’s games are frequently funny, so it’s safe to expectAvowedto have jokes too. Still, Fable’s trailer had more in common with the mockumentary formula of The Office than a typical RPG trailer.
Seeing Fable effortlessly pull off cutaway gags with in-engine footage has me thinking about how difficult that style of comedy would have been to do in games even four years ago. Current gen consoles brought solid state drives to our living rooms in 2020, and we immediately began to imagine the wildest things the technology could help developers accomplish.Ratchet & Clank: Rift Aparthad portal jumping gameplay that took players from one dimension to another in the blink of an eye, andSonytrumpeted it as an achievement that was only possible thanks to the introduction of the SSD. Load screens were a thing of the past and now you could useXbox Series X’s quick resume to instantly jump back into any of several games on your dashboard.
RELATED:Richard Ayoade Was The Perfect Actor To Get Me To Care About Fable
There were a ton of flashy use cases for the tech, but Fable has me thinking about the smaller things the new consoles allow games to do. It’s been said that the easiest thing to capture well in movies — people talking in a room — is the hardest thing to capture well in games. you may go abstract and inexpensive, as in the case of a game likeKentucky Route Zero, or you can go realistic and costly, likeThe Last of Us Part 2, but whichever path you take, it’s going to be more work than plopping a camera on a tripod and pressing record.
It’s an issue that comedy games have run into in the past. Telltale’s comedic offerings, likeGuardians of the GalaxyandTales from the Borderlands, were often let down by the creakiness of the engine they were running in. You can’t pull off an effective reaction shot, even in cinematics, if the game stutters in the process of cutting to the character’s face.
The Fable trailer promised a fix. It’s difficult to know how (if at all) its mockumentary-style cutting and to-the-camera addresses will figure into the final game, but the trailer made me realize that the Xbox Series X gives Playground Games the ability to effectively pull off gags that would have been awkward and stilted on previous hardware. When Richard Ayoade’s giant character, Dave, refers to himself as “someone who’s breaking new ground with fruit, with veg, on the agricultural side of things,” and the trailer cuts to a character showing off a massive pumpkin to onlookers, yelling, “Just look at ‘em,” the game is borrowing the idiom of filmed and animated comedy with greater fidelity than has been possible until now.
Again, it’s hard to say how this will actually look in game. The trailer is labeled “in-game footage,” but that doesn’t mean that it represents the actual editing rhythms we’ll see in the final release. An editor cutting footage from two parts of the game together and linking them with voice over is, obviously, not as impressive as the game actually being able to jump back and forth between multiple fully rendered environments. But, as a statement of intent, the trailer shows the opportunity of the current console generation to create comedy by merging processing power and punchlines.
