I picked up Fable 2 for the first time in a while yesterday, and after a good fifteen minutes of abusing my 360’s internal clock to make some quick cash, I got to thinking about the way that game handles saves.

Fable 2, for the uninitiated, is all about moral choices. These take a number of forms, some more blatant than others, but all have some kind of real effect on the game world. Or at least this is what the game’s creator Peter Molyneux would have you believe. Regardless of the outcome it’s without question that most all of your choices actually do matter. To emphasize this the game employs a somewhat dubious save system, where by the game auto saves frequently, and silently. I say dubious because there is only one save permitted per character, so like it or lump it you are stuck with the choices you make. The net effect of this is the player must really think about his or her choices – if you decide to jack some fool that fool will remain jacked, there are no do-overs.

Fable 2 was very influential over the course of last year, as has Molyneux been over his entire career. This is exemplified by the increasing number of games being released that allow for the player to make choices that have a lasting effect on not just the gameplay experience, but the story as well. This is not to say there are a bunch of Fable 2 clones on the market, far from it, developers have been very clever in the way they have implemented the mechanic. But what has interested me most over the past year is the ways in which developers are making us live with our choices.

There seems to be two prominent design philosophies, the first being the Fable 2 trigger happy 1-per-character auto-save. The polar opposite to this is what I can only dub the manual quicksave-fest, the most recent example I have played being Fallout 3. Fallout 3 also gave the player moments to make choices, also big or small. But with Fallout 3 the player was left to fend for themselves in the big wide world of progress recording, having to hit the save button mostly for themselves. Sure there was an auto-save, but only on entering or exiting a door and relying on it could often be at your own peril as there are large expanses of that game with no doors in sight. But then, what more can one expect from the post-apocalypse. However, Fallout 3 allowed for as many save files per character as your hard drive could contain. This created one big opportunity – experimentation. Not happy with how things turned out after playing nice with the good folk of Megaton? No worries, just rewind a couple hours and find a different use for that big old atomic bomb in the center of town.

So what’s the problem with all this? Put simply for every action there is a reaction, for every risk there is a reward, and the rewards are what we are all here for. It’s just that you often don’t really find out what the exact rewards will be until after the fact. And this is precisely what creates the conundrum that all my save-loading got me thinking about. If choices are to matter they should be permanent ala Fable 2. This also means that if I don’t get the awesome sword I wanted I never can unless I start over. This really got to me while playing my first time through, I was constantly worried about what was the “right” choice. Not the right choice morally, but in terms of what would actually give me the material outcome I was after, be it what my moral center told me to do or not. Though to the contrary, when playing Fallout 3 I found that the choices I made never weighed on me much because I knew they were easily undone should something really not sit with me right after doing it. Though that sweet new plasma rifle did help me wipe away my tears.

As game designers really start to go crazy with all these moral choices I really do hope that somewhere in the design process they start to think about why we play their games. A lot of people do enjoy seeing realistic consequences to their actions, but I’d wager an equal number also get their kick from powering up their character exactly the way they want to. So whilst on the one hand having to think about what we do because we will have to live with it creates a really powerful experience, I do hope that designers start to be a bit more up front about what we might get from doing it. And while I know that might impede on the realism to some degree, given the option between making choices that matter “just like real life” or a truly fun experience to help me escape my real life, I know which one I would pick.