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| Fate |
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Written by: Keith Durocher
Published: August 11, 2005
I'll never forget my first action role-playing game. It was Diablo, an intoxicating blend of leveling ever upwards, treasure acquisition and dungeon crawling mayhem. Since those pioneering days in the mid-Nineties, the click-and-loot format has become a multitudinous mass of clones, knockoffs and genuine tributes. Recently, I've had the pleasure of becoming familiar with arguably the best offering in this genre since Blizzard's Diablo 2, an innocuous little title called Fate.
In this game, you begin as a potential adventurer in the small village of Grove. The town sits at the edge of an ancient dark forest with an extensive series of labyrinthine dungeons and caverns beneath it. While the nature of the powerful magic that created the forest and its mysterious basements is unclear, abundant riches and power await anyone brave enough to explore their inner recesses.
When starting out, you're given the task of customizing your character. After deciding to be a boy or a girl, you can then choose from an assortment of facial models and hair styles. Next, you need to decide if you want your pet to be a cat or a dog. You're then assigned an end game task - the overall goal toward which you'll be working. Once all of that has been established, you're plunked down in Grove, free to run around getting to know the townsfolk and collecting quests from them.
Once you've collected three tasks, it's off to the dungeon gate to enter a long series of triumphs and trials. At its core, Fate is simple: Your avatar serves as the hero in a medieval swords-and-sorcery setting. From an isometric point of view, you use your mouse to point and click where you want your hero to move and what you want him or her to attack. Once you've defeated a creature, you can pick up any items it drops and equip your tiny champion with better and better armor, weapons and magic items.
Unlike most action-RPGs, you don't select a class; rather, you become a warrior or magic user (or a hybrid of both) based on the skills you choose. Complete quests and kill off enough evil creatures, and you earn experience to gain levels, each of which provides you with five points to distribute amongst your attributes, such as strength, dexterity and magic. You're also gaining renown within the town of Grove during all of this; the better known your conquests are, the more skill points you're given to spend. As a warrior, you'd want to push your sword fighting and shield skills higher; as a mage, you'd want to increase the various types of magic open to you. Charm magic is a good way to go, what with the summoning of creatures to fight for you and free trips to town. If you're falling behind on fame, you can pay off the local bard to sing your praises and increase your renown. It's expensive, but the extra skill points are worth it.
Your pet is more than a cosmetic feature. It fights for you, can be equipped with rings and necklaces, and has an inventory. If your packs are full of treasure, you can make your kitty act like a pack mule and even send it back to town to sell on its own. Best of all, you can take the time to go fishing in any of the watering holes you encounter, feeding your pet the different kinds of scaled treats you find. Each of a variety of fish will transform your pet into a new kind of creature for a certain amount of time, making fishing more than an exercise in meditation. To give you an example, a Fingerling Arrowfish will change your pet into a Greater Basilisk for 120 seconds. Some creatures have special abilities your pet will take on while changed, such as poison or magic. In rare examples, you can even find fish that will change your pet permanently.
The creatures you'll fight are all based on classic archetypes, but realized in very interesting ways. The first few levels offer giant rats, spiders and bats. Animated blobs of shiny goop are liberally mixed in to provide variety, as are anthropomorphic mushroom men and cackling forest imps. Digging further in, you'll find yourself vanquishing zombies, vampires, orcs, ogres, goblins and more. If it's a fantastical creature seen in fantasy literature, you'll come across a version of it in one of the dungeons of Fate. You'll do more than fight, though; you'll also uncover treasure chests, crates and urns full of gold and loot.
Fate is a visually stunning game, with rich lighting effects and superb artistry in the style of the models. The overall mood is a fusion of high fantasy and cartoon fanfare; clearly, a very talented team crafted this world. However, people not used to the rigors of 3D PC gaming might find themselves frustrated at the poor performance their older graphics cards offer. It doesn't help that there's no auto-detect for display capacity, meaning if you're on an aged machine, you'll need to manually disable many features like anti-aliasing and shadows to make things run acceptably.
My impression of the play mechanics for Fate leads me to believe it was created with a beginner's audience in mind; to that end, the designers succeeded perfectly. Those familiar with the genre might find it too similar to Diablo 2 to be blown away, but that doesn't mean there isn't any fun to be had. If there's one drawback, it's the structure for randomly generating dungeons. While an admirable goal, the fact that every single event in the game is random (including the end game boss) detracts somewhat from the feeling that there's a story arc and goal. Sometimes, Fate just feels like a loot treadmill. Does that keep me from playing it tirelessly into the wee hours of the a.m.? Not in the least. I've played many, if not all, of the Diablo-like titles available, and can honestly say this is the best of the best. By all means, download the demo and see for yourself. Just keep $20 close at hand, because before long, you'll want the full version.
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