AW: Fable 3
Editorial: Fable III - Why It Fails
For every element that Fable III gets right,
there are two that it gets wrong.
I'm just going to come right out and say it. As far as I'm concerned,
Fable III is
a step backwards from Fable II and a big disappointment. Both games
have huge flaws, but unlike Fable II
which was
able to overcome its issues , leaving an experience where the
whole was greater than the sum of its parts, I think Fable III is
defined by its failings because the experience doesn't come together
into a unified whole nearly as well. Let's break it down.
A good starting point for talking about Fable III is the fact that
there's less emphasis on the choice of being good or evil. This makes
sense because the game is structured around the player leading an
uprising against his despotic brother and becoming king. Being evil is
basically at odds with the journey Lionhead is trying to take the player
on, as the player is defined by being in opposition to an evil
character.
Being good or evil is still technically a choice, but whereas there were
plenty of incentives to be evil in Fable II, that path simply doesn't
feel as fleshed out or integrated into this title. And as mentioned,
taking it wouldn't make a great deal of sense either.
http://au.media.xbox360.ign.com/med...box360.ign.com/media/143/14328887/imgs_1.html
You'll wind up with a few weapons, but it's
definitely less rewarding to upgrade and fill out your armoury than
other games in the genre.
Now, that's fine, and for the first couple of hours the player has very
little money so can't really start buying up property. It's not long,
however, before players who like to explore will have a serious windfall
and the game balance starts to spiral out of control. Specifically,
once you've found ten silver keys you'll be able to open the chests that
require said number. And what's inside? 50,000 gold. Within half an
hour of finding my tenth silver key I had 100,000 gold – way more money
than I'd had in the game until that point.
What did I do with it? Well, I didn't buy weaponry, because the weapons
you start with are fine (in fact, I only changed swords and guns
once
in the entire game). Nor did I buy items or clothes, because I had no
need for them. Nope, I invested the whole lot into a couple of
businesses. Doing this means your income goes up markedly, and if you
re-invest all the money that's coming in on more businesses and rental
properties (again, it's worth stressing that there's very little of
genuine value to actually spend it on outside of property), you again
raise your income and can invest more.
In Fable III money begets more money, and the more time you spend
playing, the more money you have. By the time I became king I owned
every business and residence I was – at that point – able to buy. And if
you want to really sure things up, you can simply plug in a wired
controller so that the game never pauses, position your player somewhere
safe and leave the machine on overnight. In the morning you'll have
millions in gold.
This is not cheating, it's simply using the tools the game gives you to
try to find a solution to the overarching 'paradox' the game poses. And
yet it negates the entire point of the endgame. You can afford to do
EVERYTHING. You never have to make the 'difficult' choice. You can
honour ALL your promises and still have the money required.
In the end the only real choice you have is: "do I want to be nice or do
I want to be an utter dick?" and given the game pushes you to be noble
from the off, it's unlikely that it's a real choice by the time you
become king. Oh, there's also the choice: "when I've finished the main
game, do I want the world to be full of brothels, quarries and
disgruntled people, or would I prefer universities, lakes and adoring
subjects?"
I'd imagine that most people who spent much time with Fable II will
be familiar with the power of investing, but it's not even necessarily
something you have to do at the start of the game. There's a Demon Door
that rewards the player with 1,000,000 gold when they become king. Spend
that on houses and businesses and if you take your time getting to the
end of the game you can build up a huge sum of money.
As mentioned earlier, it plays out this way because the questions are
economic in nature. Not basing the endgame on money could have been far
more powerful and could still have led to meaningful ramifications for
the game's climax. At the very least the game shouldn't hand out heaping
piles of gold too early, or perhaps the option to buy property should
be locked until much later in the game.
That's probably the biggest disappointment in game design terms in
Fable
III , but it's by no means the only one. Let's go through a few. The
conversation system has taken a big step back and is now – frankly –
laborious and clunky. You must actually enter into conversation now,
instead of just performing emotes in front of people, and the timing
system from the last game has been replaced by a very plain mechanic
that requires no skill. There's less choice, it's less interesting, it's
not as well designed and it actually feels far less social. Dealing
with people in general has been dumbed down too. Sure, you can still get
basic stats on each person, but the more involved information from the
last game are nowhere to be seen.
[img src="http://au.media.xbox360.ign.com/media/143/14328887/imgs_1.html[/img]
You wouldn't think this would be the title to
teach gamers the power of making wise investments, but that it does.
The series
still doesn't have a map system that works for
adventuring. No mini-map, only a pause menu map that's fine for buying
property, setting quests and seeing where Demon Doors are, but not for
actually exploring the world. Instead, you'll once again be forced to
blindly follow the bread crumb trail, and you'll still only have a
nebulous idea how different regions join one another. Oh, and as players
of the Fable games have come to expect, there are numerous bugs and
areas lacking in polish, including the bread crumb trail's habit of
disappearing semi-regularly.
Next one. The menu system. Fable II's menu system was a disaster –
players couldn't tell whether they had an item in their inventory while
shopping; they couldn't even tell if a weapon they wanted to buy had
better stats than their currently equipped weapon. The books and
documents section of the menu in particular was awful. Players could
have dozens of items in this inventory, and they'd be presented in one
big jumbled list. One would imagine the solution would be to build a
better menu that puts everything the player needs at their fingertips
for fast, effective, intuitive access. Lionhead's solution was to put
the menu in a physical space – the Sanctuary, meaning that everything
had to be simplified and essentially removing the player by another
degree from the menu. It actually works okay, but it's in no way the
most efficient solution.