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Fable II was addicting. So was Crackdown. Fallout 3 not so much. And Mass Effect I didn’t care for when it came out, but I’ve sort of come around on that one. I think I know why this is the case.

Let me back up for a moment. When I first saw Crackdown, I was like “Oh look, another GTA III clone.” When I played it, this was obviously not the case. It was much more some kind of super-agent platformer. Sure, it had that sandbox-y thing going on, and it had guns, but there was something very different.

These go in the _good_ column.

This game was so polished, and the rewards were doled out so just right, that I actually sold my initial Xbox 360 because I felt it was ruining my life. I was literally unable to stop myself from playing.

Every time you leveled up an attribute of your character, you gained access to a bit more of the map, but in a completely different way from a game like GTA. Instead of some section of the city suddenly opening up, you instead were a> powerful enough to go to another part of the city without being killed instantly, and b> vertical areas open up when your strength increases. You were always welcome to try going elsewhere in the city, but the bad guys made mince meat of you if you were to weak. It was far more elegant than just having a row of police blocking a bridge for days and days for some bogus reason.

Because of this, it never felt like there was some huge event that you would get to and then turn it off. There was always something just a little bit harder around the corner, another attribute to level up just a little bit more, and another achievement to unlock just around the corner. Very good formula.

Along comes Fable II, and it’s very similar in that manner. It also shares something with Crackdown which I happen to think is really, really good. When you shoot with a gun, your gun skill goes up. If you use a melee weapon, your melee goes up. If you keep doing things that involve strength, your strength ability increases. In other words, they’re both RPG-like action games that don’t turn you into some kind of stats machine. The experience that you earn doing different things are reflected in related abilities automatically.

Meh.

Contrast that with a game like Fallout 3. I really wanted to love Fallout 3. I ended up kind of hating it. The Pip-Boy 3000 drove me nuts after a while. Even though the Fable II interface isn’t great, you didn’t spend half the game with it up on the screen, changing weapons, micro managing health, and putting points into abilities, because they brought certain parts of it up to the top. In a battle, for instance, your d-pad actions change and are shown onscreen. If you’re hurt, things you can heal with are shown there. And more importantly, you were never assigning earned points to categories. I think if Bethesda had automated the experience/skill end of things in Fallout 3, it would have been much more enjoyable.

Crackdown and Fable II are games where you role-play. You’re a special agent, or a hero of olde. You go out into the world, and you do things. You find or buy things, and you do things that take skill to do. And in both games, your character changes to reflect what you’ve done.

Fallout 3 is some kind of throwback meta-game, where you aren’t really role-playing. Instead, you’re playing god to another character by sticking numbers into categories. In Fallout 3 I can go out into the wastes and do nothing but kill people with small guns and gain enough experience doing that to level up my character 3 levels. And when presented with the “level up screen” I can use all those points earned to increase my lockpicking skill. Suddenly my character is really good at lockpicking without ever picking a lock. Why? It doesn’t make sense.

I’m firmly on the side of Crackdown / Fable II on this one.

At the beginning of this post, I also, seemingly randomly, brought up Mass Effect. It wasn’t random. When I first played Mass Effect, with the default options, I was playing the micromanage meta-game. When I started replaying it last week, from scratch, I realized there was an option to auto-assign attributes when leveling up. The game is 500% more fun. It lets you focus on playing the role, instead of constantly having to manually make decisions about where earned experience points are assigned. The more you do something, the better you get at it. Like life.

And yes, I know games aren’t (and shouldn’t be) real life, but I think that the believability and immersion indexes go up dramatically when this type of character evolution happens automatically, based on your actions.