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 to access audio and video on collective you need real player.This week, Daniel takes on a new role. The fantasy Role Player Game genre seems to be especially vigorous at the moment. One key area of expansion has been in console games based on the elaborate, abiding worlds of massively multiplayer online RPGs such as Champions Of Norrath, which exists in the EverQuest universe. Purists may scoff, but the shift from PC MMORPG to console games has arguably involved a streamlining and focusing of key gameplay factors, making the games more accessible - with more dynamic combat, or more manageable realms. Sure, acquiring experience points, developing particular skills and levelling up remain, but it's simplified. Interestingly, the lessons learned by creating the console titles seem to have been an influence on PC RPGs in return. The upcoming Guild Wars is using its reported accessibility and dynamic combat as selling points. Producer and co-founder of developer ArenaNet, Jeff Strain, says that with Guild Wars they were determined to let gamers “get to the fun stuff” quickly, with a “focused story”. “There's an immediacy and frenetic pace to console games. There's the idea of only having 15 minutes to play. PC games should be like that too.”  Guild Wars One of the key console RPG releases of late has been Fable on Xbox (also home to the recent Sudeki). Fable is a fascinating game in that it both hones traditional RPG elements and allows a very developed sense of association with your avatar, via its moral choices device. However, given its long development and all the things Peter Molyneux and his Lionhead team talked about including, it's also something of a disappointment. It's not that it's not involving, far from it. It's just so darned short. Even dallying with your spade and fishing rod, and doing side-quests, you can complete it in around 14 hours. It's a shame, given how appealing the game world is – its Albion is a land of dappled woodlands frequented by traders and bandits, or gloomy forests home to werewolf-like Balverines; its towns and villages nicely designed locations for shopping, personal grooming, house buying, drinking, seduction, even marriage and (somewhat coy) sex. Where the game excels is in character development. Although the requisite options to specialize in magic or brute force are there, the main means in which your character is shaped is through the choices you make – for good or ill. Although these can on occasion feel somewhat arbitrary, for the most part it’s an eloquent system.  Guild Wars Fable's also good on the scrapping front, including a system that's, thankfully, more fluid than that of the most lauded RPG on Xbox to date, Knights Of The Old Republic. Lively fighting in a console fantasy game is something that was found in the games that accompanied the Lord Of The Rings films. I mention this not because there's any significant connection between Fable and the LOTR films, but because I suspect the current vigour in the fantasy RPG genre may be in part a result of the popularity of Jackson's enormously successful films. This is somewhat poetic really, considering the influence Tolkien's writing had on the Dungeons & Dragons scene of the 70s, which itself segued into the fantasy RPG computer gaming scene of the 80s and 90s (with Ultima's and EverQuest's adherence to the archetypes).
Daniel Etherington
Fable is available now on Xbox. Guild Wars will be available soon on PC.
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