Fable 3 – the sequel to Fable 2. Lionhead’s latest game came out in October 2010 and was plagued from the beginning with some very frustrating bugs. I fortunately dodged the game breaking bugs, but did encounter the muted Jasper bug, which was fixed in a later patch.
I love this game for a lot of reasons. I love the theme, the story is interesting and the customization options for my character are pretty awesome. I also hate the game for a lot of reasons. There are broken mechanics, bugged quests, bugged achievements and some of the changes they made from Fable 2 were not really thought out.
Let’s begin with the User Interface (UI). The developers decided to take an interesting approach with this. It’s clear that their intent was to maximize player immersion, but this actually became annoying. It wasn’t always clear that my options (shown as buttons) were floating around the NPC’s heads. After playing for a long time, I’ve finally gotten used to it. Actually, to be honest, I don’t even really look for the buttons. Maybe this was their intent, but I assure you that my “comfort” with it took a very long time. Instead of having a traditional pause menu, inventory management menu and other such menus, all of your selections and information gathering is done using a 3D room – your sanctuary. This was an extremely cool concept at first. I liked interacting with a 3D wardrobe, seeing the weapons held by mannequins and having the map be represented by a mini model you interact with. This got annoying late game, though. It takes too many button clicks to get to: switching a weapon, switching an outfit, opening the quest list and saving your game. It honestly feels like Lionhead decided to sacrifice usability for the “hey it’s cool!” factor.
Next, there’s the combat system. They really didn’t improve this over Fable 2. I don’t know if that was an oversight or a conscious decision. They tried to keep everything simple, X for melee, Y for ranged and B for magic. Unfortunately, this meant that learning to properly block was actually extremely frustrating. Whenever you hit X, it wasn’t always clear as to whether you’d get a melee attack or a successful block. When facing creatures such as balverines who are armed with a pretty ridiculous attack, this can be devastating. A good supply of health potions is essential and the combat frustrations made it so that I generally tried to avoid the balverine-ridden areas. They are, without a doubt, the most irritating type of creature I’ve encountered in a game in quite some of time. Irritating to the I-don’t-want-to-play-anymore point, which is terrible. This really made me wonder whether or not they properly focus tested combat and whether or not their QA was even good for anything.
Fable 2 was well known and appreciated for the moral choices it presented the player. Not all decisions were obviously good or evil and it wasn’t always clear how to stay straight-laced. The effects your decisions had on your game experience were also quite interesting in how they varied. Unfortunately, it feels like Fable 3 has left some of that behind. Or perhaps it’s the nature of the story, I’m not sure. The story opens up by painting a very clear picture of the current state of Albion. Industry is booming; the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. Child labor is accepted and practiced, beggars litter the streets and taxes are unreasonably high. It’s very easy to distinguish between how to appeal to the commoners and how to enrage them. Granted, most of the situations presented to you as major decision points are very easy to understand. It’s unfortunate, however, that everything is so straight forward.
I’d like to think that Fable 3′s creative team had multiple opportunities to come up with decisions that would actually be difficult for the player. The game’s beginning teased you with the potential for difficult decisions, but I didn’t see anything similar to the decision you’re forced to make regarding your best friend (or lover, if you played a female). When you become monarch, the decisions will either cost or gain you money. Without fail, when it costs you money, you’re being good; when it gains you money, you’re being evil. The decisions feel trivial and like they were just looking for opportunities to beef up the storyline and the main quest.
I do, however, like how the world changes once you’ve made those decisions. Lionhead did a very good job of creating a dynamic world that properly adapts to the decisions you’ve made as a ruler. The environments are rich, most of the NPCs feel like believable characters. I could have easily overlooked my issues with the UI and the combat system if the game wasn’t so damn buggy. Seriously. Off the top of my head, these are the annoyances (I admit that I may have include non-bugs, but really just bad design decisions) I’ve encountered:
- The golden path (which leads you to your quest’s objective) sometimes got very confused or simply did not work.
- Broken achievement: Popularity Contest – Make 20 Friends (15GS). When I look at my character’s stats in the Trophy room (part of the “Main Menu” sanctum), it states that I have over 60 friends in Albion. I have researched whether or not this means Xbox LIVE friends and according to people providing feedback online, it sounds as if friends you’ve made once you’ve become ruler do not count. W.T.F. Seriously? Other people state that the friends only count if made by completing relationship quests. I’m fairly certain I’ve completed over 20, but I continue to do them just in case. It sounds like your best bet is to start with a fresh game and make friends as soon as your get the nice expressions, but before you become ruler. Ugh.
- Achievement forcing a lot of online interaction: We Need Guns, Lots of Guns - Collect all 50 legendary weapons. They won’t all appear in your world, so trade with other Heroes! (20GS). Really? I believe I’ve found, through playing solo, about 20-25 weapons. Less than half. Requiring me to keep a list of the weapons I’ve got and then work on trading for new ones with other players is silly. Multiplayer-forced achievements do not belong in an RPG. Furthermore, it’s not like Fable 3 needed another collection-based achievement. You have to collect books, gnomes, flowers, clothes and keys in addition to the weapons. Many people would argue that Achievements shouldn’t dictate how you play the game, but in reality, the Achievements reflect how the developer would like you to enjoy and play the game. This means they either think you enjoy collecting a lot of crap or it’s a giant troll on gamers. I could respect the latter.
- Jasper goes mute. Early after the game released, you could get the bug where your butler, Jasper (the main menu “spokesperson”, if you will) goes entirely mute. So you didn’t get quest information, item information or pointers. This was extremely annoying early in the game because he was a sort of tooltip. When the bug was fixed via a patch, Jasper had incessant verbal vomit. Everything he had ever had an opportunity to say spewed out at once. This was multiple audio files playing at once, in addition to the environment sounds, in addition to the NPC drivel and in addition to the book I accidentally clicked on.
- Random quest information pops up at the top information header. Your active quest information is supposed to show up at the top of your screen every so often to let you know next steps. It also lets you know what quest your golden path is supposedly leading you towards. Unfortunately, there were many times where upon completion of a quest, I would see an old/inaccessible/completed quest show up there. This was frustrating and confusing, as I always had to enter the menu to access the map to access my quest list to find out what is actually active.
- Coop doesn’t always work. A friend of mine and I were trying to get certain LIVE Achievements: getting married, having a baby and starting a business partnership over Xbox LIVE, but this wasn’t always successful. It was unintuitive and the simplified, <sarcasm> “immersive-friendly” </sarcasm> UI caused a lot of trouble.
- Multiple broken textures on different maps. Weird collision.
Now, while I did get very frustrated at sometimes. I did, overall, enjoy the game. It’s a very rich world filled with beautiful environments and some truly funny quests. The children are absolutely precious and some of the characters are well developed and interesting.
Unfortunately, their lack of attention to detail and their apparent disregard for proper QA kept this from being a truly polished experienced. I think that if Lionhead had turned around and gave the project a little more love, Fable 3 could have impressed a lot of people considerably more. While most of its metacritic scores seem to be favorable, I find that the opinions of fellow gamers are what really matter. And most people I’ve talked to have left Fable 3 feeling frustrated and a little cheated. I’m very close to completing the game, so I can’t comment on how the storyline ends. I would have finished it weeks ago, but I’ve been a bit of a completionist. I just won’t be collecting weapons, that’s for sure.
Tags: Games, review
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Oh Geralt. One of my few video game crushes. Gamers who lean towards enjoying female variety get a plethora of characters to choose from. I suppose you could argue that there are plenty of male characters to fall for, but none (I would argue) have quite as deep and (oh, hell, let’s just say it) sexy a personality as Geralt.
Ever since I mentioned that I would be looking at female antagonists, my mind has been churning thinking about this. Trying to come up with a comprehensible list of notable female antagonists, beautiful or not, proved to be more challenging than I had expected. I had to approach a fellow gamer with whom I couch coop many games and have multiple philosophical discussions – about games or otherwise. We came to the a generalized conclusion – “They are all forgettable.”
It’s a digital title, so you won’t find it on shelves. Just $14.99 
