Tonight I finished Fable 2, and it made me extremely reflective. Suffice it to say that the end of Molneux’s masterpiece is evocative and (if you’re a softie like me) painful. I was specifically playing the game to be as ‘good’ as I could, and as a result had to make some hard decisions. I’ll be honest: it hurt. I didn’t get teary eyed. And, to be honest, I felt a little cheated because I thought some of the storytelling decisions were weak. It wasn’t quite as well told a story as I would have liked. I still really enjoyed the game overall.

Minor quibbles aside, Peter completely ‘hooked’ me. He really got those emotions he was looking for. I felt things, I really felt the impact of the story’s ending. I want a chance to go back and do it over again, it’s so painful. But I can’t, because Fable’s not that kind of game. I can’t help but think about our favorite game genre as it relates to these emotional and storytelling questions.

MMOs are the ultimate saveless game. You can’t undo spending thousands of gold, you can’t unsay rude things to a guild member, and you can’t go back and re-experience live events whenever you want. MMOs are just not meant for your enjoyment – they’re environments meant for hundreds of players to inhabit.

As a persistent space, memories are in the making every moment you’re logged in. I still remember the spot my Beta guild and I posed for a screenshot (by the tanks outside of Ironforge). I vividly remember the spot I first saw a piece of blue equipment as a random world drop. And I just as clearly recall the spot where my guild dumped me (I was in Tanaris at the time, hunting near the big vulture-haunted skeleton).

Adjacent to these emotional musings, I’ve been mulling the power of storytelling in MMOs a lot. Fable 2’s somewhat unsatisfactory ending wasn’t the prompt for that. Actually the small amount of info on The Old Republic is what made me really question my viewpoint on the genre. Everything I know about MMOs tells me that what BioWare is trying to do won’t work. And yet. And yet, I’m sitting here knowing in my gut that SWTOR is going to be fantastic. It’s the way those guys operate, they do fantastic work. More than anything right now I want to understand what those three months of BioWare writing school net you.

What I want BioWare to keep in mind, though, is that the best stories are meaningless if no-one reads them. What really matters is how the player walks away from the story; you could argue that ultimately the written word is just an attempt by the writer to instill something in the reader. Tycho has stated just that argument elsewhere, and extremely well.

We need BioWare stories that conquer where Fable 2 fell down. We need an Old Republic that instills emotion, a Jedi experience that makes the player feel that heroism rather than just understand it intellectually.

Ultimately we need a game that can instill drama and emotion into the persistent spaces we’ve all come to love so much over the last decade. I think BioWare is up to the challenge … but I hope it’s understandable I’m simultaneously skeptical and brimming with anticipation.