It’s been a strange year in the world of those little computer video games, you know, those things the kids play which make them shoot up schools. It could be a sign that I’m growing up but not much has really blown me away this year, the one game I was looking forward to was Fable III and it was totally akin to my excitement of Spider-Man 3 and then seeing it.
It came out over a month ago but the feeling in my toes has only just come back and I am now able to write about Fable III. Like Spider-Man 3 it’s not all bad but you can’t help but feel it could have been much much better. The Fable franchise is somewhat infamous or at least famous for its flaws. The purpose of a sequel is to improve on its predecessor, Fable II did that while having its own long list of flaws but sadly Fable III took one of these flaws and improved it a bit and forgot about the rest of them.
I shouldn’t have been so naïve to believe in Peter Molyneux’s hyperbolic ramblings about the game’s improvements, the time he spent on talking about the game surely could have been spent on making it better but still I was watching the interviews on IGN and Xbox Live genuinely excited that we might finally have a perfect Fable game. All that was needed was to iron the creases out of Fable II, put in a few new features and a good story and we’d have what we all wanted.
We were promised that the pretty terrible pause menu would be fixed with a super awesome interactive one and while we have it exactly as they described it would be, you don’t really need to use it that often, you won’t change your clothes because there aren’t that many and you won’t notice any difference in the weapons you use, nor will you appreciate John Cleese telling you that there are new items in the Sanctuary shop every two minutes.
The most irritating thing about Fable III though is the lag, why is there lag when I‘m not even playing online? It’s like I’m playing a game on an outdated PC. Combine this with the useless “breadcrumb trail” and you will spend most of your time getting frustrated as you’re left jerking around the screen not knowing where to go. Red Dead Redemption was so enjoyable because you could just explore, in Fable you only get little segments of the world and it doesn’t let you appreciate the world they have created. You can see a massive city in the horizon but when you get there it’s noting more than a few streets, and somehow it feels smaller than the last game with quite a few locations omitted, perhaps to sell to us in DLC?
What was disappointing about Fable II was the lack of stuff to do and there is even less to do in Fable III. They’ve even taken out some of the good stuff like the pub games and replaced it with…nothing. They’ve created this expansive world and not only do we not get to see all of it we don’t get to live in it either. Making friends and raising a family is so inconsequential there’s hardly any point in doing it and the new feature of having to complete a quest to do so makes it a tedious waste of time. The jobs are now incredibly easy yet mind numbingly repetitive, if I wanted that I’d just go to work but even that would be more fun than pressing 3 buttons again and again.
I said the most irritating thing was the lag but thinking about it the story ruins the game. The plot sees you on a quest to overthrow your evil brother and take over the throne which immediately contradicts a massive mechanic of the game. You can choose to be good or evil yet when the plot negates that you are good it seems silly that you can go around killing the citizens you are trying to save. Furthermore when you do overthrow your brother it turns out that his means were justified and you can choose to do everything he did and if you don’t you end up being just as hated as he was living in a world full of corpses once you finish the game leaving you unable to complete the side quests.
The game seems too linear especially in the second half and it suffers from shifting the villain from your brother to a dark entity which is absent for much of the game. You are told this entity known as Steve (I can’t remember its name) will attack your land in one year yet all you do is decide on things like choosing to restore an orphanage or turn it into a brothel and this takes any tension out of the game and when Steve does attack it is incredibly disappointing ending all too easily and on such a small fanfare. End boss battles are supposed to be OFF THE FUCKING CHAIN, this didn’t even tug it.
It is still an enjoyable game but continuing the Spider-Man 3 metaphor, it’s the bad that sticks with you. The developers have aimed to make the game more accessible yet the first two were hardly the most complicated of games and what we’re left with is a diluted version of Fable II which lags. As the video game market expands it has to cater for a wider audience meaning any concept the casual gamer doesn’t understand is removed which is pissing in the mouths of the not so casual gamer, why should we have to suffer because some prick doesn’t know how to level up properly or understand a complex (or even simple) plot?
I’m getting bored of games and this was supposed to be the game to restore my faith in them, instead I’ve been reading books! READING! What’s happened to me? If Fable IV is going to work then they have to start from scratch, go back to the beginning of the mythology they've created and make a game about being a hero, keep the style and humour, write a simple story with a decent ending and perhaps most importantly, make sure it doesn't lag.
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