Back in the mid 2000s, anyone whose family had gotten an eMachines desktop from Best Buy (you can swap out the details to fit your own personal experience as necessary) was soon met with a siren song in the form of the WildTangent Games Launcher, which might as well have felt like an infinite arcade for PC gamers with low budgets (or no budgets at all).
The WildTangent Games Launcher was often thought to be adware at best and spyware at worst, but at the end of the day I think it really was mostly just a launcher for WildTangent’s games as well as a handful of other third party games. You could buy any of the games for a given price, but you could also use “WildTangent Coins” to play time-limited sessions that were certainly restrictive but still good enough for kids who didn’t get an allowance. While anyone who experienced those days will remember a few other classics like Polar Bowler/Golfer, the shining star always seemed like it was FATE.
FATE? I Think I Remember that Game…
FATE (not to be confused with Fable, as I often did as a kid) was basically a Diablo knockoff that was intended for a more casual audience but still had plenty to offer core gamers. It involved plundering through endless procedurally-generated dungeons to defeat the main boss around the 50th dungeon floor, but it also had a charming hub village with merchants and characters that offered sidequests, as well as a pet that fought for you and could take stuff back to town for you. Some of the developers behind the game ended up making Torchlight just a few years later, so this was a knockoff with plenty of pedigree.
While I first played FATE around 20 years ago, I recently noticed that it (along with its three sequels, which I never played) was on Steam, and was being sold at a steep discount. Since I like treating my Steam account as a museum of gaming history, I instantly snatched it up, created a character, smiled at the nostalgic feeling it gave me, and then quickly closed out. However, I’ve gone back in the last few days and actually played for a few hours (in other words, more than the free WildTangent Coins used to let you play in a session), and it’s just straight up a lot of fun in 2023.
A Simple and Rock-Solid Gameplay Loop
The key to FATE still being fun in 2023 is that it’s a laser-focused game. While the hub town has many different merchants and characters that offer sidequests, all of the missions involve driving deeper and deeper into the dungeon, which means you’re always progressing to the ultimate goal of beating the main boss and completing the game. Once you do that, you can either just keep playing or make a “descendant” of your original character that carries on their legacy. In other words, this is a game that was built to be played as long as the player wanted to keep playing it, but which never bit off more than it could chew in terms of gameplay features or scope.
Charm is Forever
Another reason FATE still holds up is that while the developers knocked off a lot of the gameplay of Diablo, they opted for a completely different atmosphere and theme that feels more like a quaint village dealing with a somewhat-contained problem, as opposed to a nightmare apocalyptic wasteland. This gave FATE a unique identity that went a long way in attracting players back in the day and which still goes a long way in the rosy, nostalgic feeling it gives people. This is a game that was clearly designed for the player to simply have a good time while they played it, and that really shines through, especially now in the age of microtransactions and crunch-filled development environments geared toward satisfying shareholders.
Here in 2023, people who want to play ARPGs have plenty of modern, Games-as-a-Service-style options to choose from, like Path of Exile (2), Diablo (4), and Torchlight (Infinite). However, it can still be nice to play a singleplayer game with a narrow focus that doesn’t try to do too much, or even that much at all. If that sounds good to you, or if you liked FATE back in the day but aren’t sure if it’s still worth playing today, I’d say just give it a chance, and you’ll probably find yourself having some good old mid-2000s fun before long.
You can get FATE through WildTangent (though I don’t know why anyone would do that, other than as a bit or something) or from Steam for about $10, and less during sales.
