Tektodo

In yesterday’s article, I talked about how the Internet is changing the way we play our games. I also talked about how Fable 2 is introducing a new, seamless co-op experience, on and offline.  However, Fable 2 is doing something else as well, something much more revolutionary. As Peter Molyneux announced at GDC last month, Fable 2 is going to have the ability to communicate with other games. A few weeks before Fable 2 is released, Lionhead Studios is going to roll out an Xbox Live Arcade game called “Keystone”, that will allow gamers to gamble and earn money and then transfer those funds over to Fable 2 when it comes out. While this may not seem so spectacular on the surface, after all, it’s just a gambling game that lets you transfer your winnings over to Fable 2, when you actually think about what’s going on, the genius of this concept becomes apparent. What is going on is that two games are talking to each other. As Peter Molyneux stated during his speech, “this is a dream of mine, imagine games communicating together”.

Imagine the possibilities of having more games communicate with each other. We have already seen Gamecube games that could communicate with Game Boy Advance games and let’s not forget the Pokemon series, which is famous for communication and trading between games. Why not extend this sort of connectivity to more games? Imagine having two Zelda titles that could communicate with each other. Maybe you could play one title on your DS and transfer over items earned in that game to a Wii title. Or how about a Wii Ware or PlayStation Network game that could communicate with other Wii or PS3 titles? We have already seen the announcement of the Wii Ware title Pokemon Farm, which will allow gamers to transfer data over from Diamond and Pearl.

What’s unique about the Fable 2 announcement is that, unlike the Pokemon examples described above, the two games described at GDC are both on the same console. You don’t have to own a handheld and a console for the two games to communicate with each other, but rather, they are both on the same system. We have already seen a similar development with the Wii in regards to Miis. Granted, the Mii Editor is not a game, although some may argue otherwise, but it does has the ability to export your Mii characters for use in other Wii games, such as Wii Sports. In the Iwata Asks feature of Nintendo.com, Nintendo President Satoru Iwata interviewed Shigeru Miyamoto, the man behind Mario and, more recently, Wii Fit, as to how the concept of Wii Fit came about. During the interview, Miyamoto talked of how his team initially was considering using the DS to enter food into. Although this idea did not come to fruition, imagine being able to enter the food you’ve eaten into your DS and then upload that information to your Wii with the rest of your Wii Fit data? Or how about a Brain Age game that could communicate with Wii Fit? You could have both your physical and mental data all in one place. When Nintendo released the Wii Zapper, it also came out with Link’s Crossbow Training. Imagine if the time invested in Link’s Crossbow training could have an effect on say, Twilight Princess. Imagine being able to play a game like Link’s Crossbow Training, one that is easy to pick up and play for just a few minutes, and have the rewards from that game transfer over to the main Zelda world. It could be money, experience, items, or something completely different that we can’t even imagine yet.

With “Keystone”, Lionhead Studios is giving gamers multiple access points to the Fable world. If you just want to sit down and play a quick game, you can do that. If you want to sit down for a few hours, you can do that too. What’s important is that, either way, what you do ties into the main game world, just as the hypothetical Zelda example above. Games communicating with each other is nothing new, but what is new is the rate at which inter-game communication is occurring. The prospect of having “games communicating together” is certainly an exciting one and hopefully Fable 2 will serve to inspire more developers to get their games to talk with one another.

If you’d like to learn more about Fable 2 and its Xbox Live Arcade companion title, “Keystone”, be sure to check out Major Nelson’s latest podcast, Show #272, where Major interviews Peter Molyneux, who talks about Fable 2, as well as how he entered the video game industry.