Fable III
Fable III is the latest instalment in Lionhead Studios' critically acclaimed Fable franchise for Xbox 360. The game gives you the power to make decisions that affect an entire nation, but does it truly deliver the life-or-death morality promised by director Peter Molyneux, or is this another case of the hype overshadowing the true experience?
There is one thing that the Fable franchise has always got right that so many other games get wrong, and that is that it manages to be genuinely charming. From the simple yet appealing cartoon visuals to the superbly delivered voice acting, the game manages to appeal on a level that few others, with their focus on stern realism and gritty textures, fail to achieve.
Fable III is also genuinely funny, a rarity in videogames. With top-notch British talent including John Cleese, Stephen Fry and Simon Pegg delivering finely honed dialogue, Fable III is a game that it’s difficult not to smile at and laugh long with. The inclusion of such things as a serial insulter and verbally offensive gnomes make what could have ended up as dull fetch-quests infinitely more enjoyable. The ability to bring a genuine smile to the face is something that should not be understated about the Fable franchise as a whole.
The new menu system, and especially the new map, are fantastic. The menu system, which lets you physically interact with your inventory, is probably the biggest change in Fable III, and it works really well, loading quickly and letting you navigate efficiently. The superb map screen, which lets you manage all your property in a similar way to an overhead strategy game, is similarly excellent, and makes me wonder how property management ever worked properly in Fable II.
Less superb are some of the simplifications that seem to have been made to enforce this streamlined, simplified approach. The decision to allow the player to only address one character at a time is baffling, and means that after brief experimentation most players are likely to simply not bother. Combat has been completely neutered of any skill or challenge, and quickly slips from being visually impressive to a boring chore.
The new weapon upgrade system is clever, and could have been great, but the weapons are all so similar and the combat so dull that this feature just feels redundant.
Despite these simplifications, the game still performs badly technically. Animations all round, from the player, to your dog, to the people in the world, are often broken or simply bad to the point of distraction. The frame rate shudders regularly, being particularly bothersome when it renders some of the timing-based money earning mini-games unplayable.
The most important failing of Fable III in the much-flaunted final act of the game, where you get to play monarch of Albion. A promising concept, letting you decide whether or not to honour the promises you made earlier in the game, and letting you make decisions that affect the entire game world, turn out to be the least subtle good/evil choices seen in a game for a long time.
The moral outcome of your choice is made so abundantly obvious that the actual decision itself becomes irrelevant, with the player simply choosing whether they want to be ‘good’ or ‘evil’ with the appropriate button-press. There are a couple of choices in the game that might make you stop and think about your decision, but generally the lack of real impact to decisions renders this whole section of the game weightless to the point of boredom.
This could be a mere disappointment rather than a game-breaking design decision if it wasn’t for the fact that the whole game previous to the ruler section seems designed to rush you to this point. Improving your character is now tied to your progression through the game’s story, to the point that the game won’t even let you purchase property until you’ve completed a designated number of story missions. This has removed much of the sense of adventure and exploration that I particularly enjoyed about Fable II, and makes the ultimate disappointment of the reality of ruling Albion all the more frustrating.
Fable III is still a grand enough adventure, and it’s certainly still fun to play, but it seems at times that it is wilfully trying to frustrate you with its various restrictions and constraints. There’s still plenty to dig into, with some genuinely great quests, and the few improvements genuinely work well, but it feels as though a lot of the content that made Fable II great has been lost.
In fact, if you don’t take into account Fable II, Fable III stands alone as a great, if flawed, game. However, when you take into account how much of the formula has been negatively stripped back to make way for the lacklustre ruler section, it’s difficult to recommend Fable III over its erratic but more assured predecessor.
