Fable 3 was one of the first games I bought for the Xbox
360, and for the longest time I didn’t play it. I wanted to beat Fable 2 first,
and by the time I did (during No Game New Year!) I was all ‘Fabled’ out. I had
heard that it wasn’t as good as Fable 2, but I wanted to play it myself before
I passed judgement. Here’s what I found out:
I think this game is to RPGs of the 7th
generation of consoles what Final Fantasy Mystic Quest/Legend[1]
was to the 4th. Enjoyable enough, but sorely lacking in a lot of what
makes RPGs so compelling to people who play them. Fortunately for me, that’s
things like crafting and customising equipment, picking the correct combination
of skills and feats for character customisation, and min-maxing stats. None of
that is in Fable 3. Here, you always know what you’re supposed to be doing,
even if that never varies from fetch quests and getting from point A to point B
without getting killed along the way. There’s no point in building a character
to a certain archetype either; the Fighter, Rogue and Mage tropes are all there
but in Fable it is invariably more efficient to take a balance of all 3. You
just… progress. And that’s fine by me.
The game looks beautiful. It goes from gorgeous rural
landscapes to gritty industrial sections and still feels like part of the same
world. But graphics are rarely the selling point for me. As long as it’s not
hideous, I’ll happily play a game that looks reasonably average as long as it’s
fun to play.
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| Let's not forget whose show this was... |
Is Fable 3 fun? Yes – but not necessarily because of the
gameplay. The combat has been criticised for being too easy and unbalanced, and
while I think some of those issues may have been fixed in updates, the combat
encounters sprung upon you are rarely welcome. The fun in Fable 3 comes from
the story, which is good, and the voice performances of the lead characters
which are excellent. The show goes to Steven Fry, who reprises his role as
Reaver with exactly the right balance of menace and panache, but the huge list
of big names – almost a who’s who of British actors – do a sterling job of
bringing the world to life.
Peter Molyneux has been criticised for over-promising and
under-delivering, and this is no more apparent than in the last few hours of
the game. You overthrow the tyrannical ruler of Albion and become the Queen.[2]
At this point, your country is under attack from the Darkness and will be
attacked within a year, by which time you need to have raised 6,500,000 – it
purports to fund an army, and a citizen will die for every gold piece you don’t
raise. You have a number of moral choices to make in the form of petitions
given to you by the community, including some of the NPCs – do you choose the
good option, which almost always costs you money, or the evil option, which
potentially saves you money but reduces the moral standing among your people? I
chose the good moral choices thinking I could make up the excess later, but
here the game presents its real challenge: People are always asking for money,
and it’s not easy to make enough of it to defend your kingdom.
The only way that you can potentially have it both ways is
to buy every property in the game, rent it out and spend a lot of time faffing
about (the game credits you every 5 minutes or so) to raise the money. That was
my strategy, but the game mis-represents the time you have to do this. There’s
no warning; there’s something like half the year left between the last time you
could affect the treasury and the final battle. By this time I’d raised less
than 20,000, and when it was over, most of the people in my kingdom were dead.
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| Always a lot of money - but never enough. |
I guess that’s a learning experience that I’ll take into the
game next time, if there’ll be a next time. Not that I’m bitter, or anything –
it’s more of a practical issue. I bought the game second-hand, and whoever had
it before me didn’t look after the disk very well. It’s tanking the motors on
my 360 just to run the game, probably not thanking me for it, so unless I
really fancy going through the game again and meta-gaming it right up until the
end, I’ll probably put the Fable series to bed, having now completed all 3
games.
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