Open-world RPGs are a tricky animal to tame when it comes to their endings, primarily because the larger they get, the less likely players are to ever actually see them. It's not necessarily because those players don't like the game, either. I've personally poured dozens of hours into open-world RPGs that I never finished, whether because I got distracted by another game or simply spent so much time doing everything except the main story that I eventually moved on. That's part of the appeal of these games in the first place, of course, but it also means developers can pour a ton of effort into something that only a fraction of the audience will ever experience.
Apparently, Fable game director Ralph Fulton is very aware of that problem. In a recent interview with The Guardian, Fulton specifically talked about how easy it is to look at industry metrics showing that virtually everyone starts a game while far fewer actually finish it, and then decide the game's ending doesn't deserve the same investment as everything leading up to it. Playground Games didn't do that with Fable, though, as Fulton said the team "relentlessly pursued quality" in the ending because, as he put it, "Most importantly, we stick the landing." I obviously have no idea whether Playground has actually done that yet, but as someone who has been playing Fable since the first game launched in 2004, I really like hearing that the studio isn't treating the ending like the part of an open-world RPG that fewer people are going to see anyway.
Fulton used 25% as his example for the percentage of players who might actually finish a game, and even though he wasn't presenting that as Fable's exact completion rate, the larger point is pretty easy to understand. The beginning of a game is basically guaranteed an audience. Every hour after that has fewer people left to play it, so by the time a developer gets to the ending, it has something working against it that the opening never had.
I can't even pretend I'm above that kind of player behavior, because I've done it plenty of times. Open-world RPGs are especially dangerous for me because I tend to get obsessive about completing every bit of optional content there is before I've even touched the main story, which means it can end up sitting untouched for hours while I run around doing something that probably doesn't really matter all that much. Fable has always been especially good at encouraging that side of me, which is probably why I've put hundreds of hours into the series as a whole since sinking my teeth into the original game over two decades ago.
Fulton said the team "relentlessly pursued quality" in the ending because, as he put it, "Most importantly, we stick the landing."
The reboot seems like it is going to be even more dangerous, for a completionist like me, in that respect. Playground has already talked about how much time players can spend simply living life in Albion, and the game's official social media account has joked about starting out wanting to become a legendary Hero only to end up checking rental income and worrying about property investments a few hours later. That sounds very much like Fable to me, but it also sounds like exactly the kind of open-world RPG where a lot of people are going to get distracted long before the story is over.
But the thing is, Playground is fully aware that some players won't even finish Fable, and it apparently knows that before the game has even released. The temptation Fulton described isn't hypothetical in the sense that developers have no idea where people stop playing anymore. They have metrics for that stuff now, so if a team knows only part of its audience is going to see the ending, I can understand why focusing more on it than the rest of the game leading up to it might be difficult to justify.
I still haven't finished The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion Remastered, for example, despite having finished the original game multiple times. And I know I'm not alone, as the game apparently has an incredibly low completion rate.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://gamerant.com/fable-open-world-rpg-ending-player-completion-rates/
