The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

My Xbox returned! Happy day! That meant I finally got to polish off Fable 3!

It was Giant Bomb’s Disappointment of the Year, and while I don’t think it’s a complete failure as a game, it is a pretty big disappointment. I mean, Fable 2 blew me away (IGN.com) when I played it. It was a fantastic game, with fun but casual combat and a story where it really felt like your decisions mattered. The property-buying distraction was also enjoyable. It was a really great game. The idea of more of that, but better, was so awesome.

However, Fable 3 simply doesn’t do that. The combat is almost too casual now. They removed the scarring system from Fable 2, giving you no real reason to actually heal yourself in battle. Dying had consequences in Fable 2. In Fable 3, you lose your progress to your next bit of level up currency, which never seems like much of a penalty. Sure, there’s an achievement for finishing the game without dying, but that’s only for the sort of people who would play through the game multiple times. I had a huge stockpile of potions I never used because I wasn’t risking anything to try to cut it close without using one. The tension of having something to lose by dying is apparently the key between combat feeling fun and combat feeling like a boring button mash, though. When you hit the harder enemies that block you in Fable 3, it just feels so frustrating, because you just want to get on with it and see more of the writing and such. I never remember feeling that way in Fable 2.

Similarly, they made some mystifying decisions on how you affect the world in Fable 3. Instead of having it happen all throughout the game, like in Fable 2, it’s all basically boxed into the last hour or so of the game. This makes it so you don’t actually FEEL the consequences, because by the time there are consequences, the game is over. Instead of seeing a world change over time, you just feel like you’re making a bunch of arbitrary good/evil decisions. It just doesn’t quite work.

Finally, the creative menu system in Fable 3 just doesn’t really work. It’s cool in theory. Having an actual space act as your menu makes a certain amount of sense. However, in practice, it’s slow and cumbersome, and the extent they went to in order to make it work means that you lack useful menus for things where you should have had them. For example, you can only go to the “Road to Rule” to level up when the game decides to randomly pop up the icon for it. There’s little reason why it decides to except it decides then would be a good time. It’s really just kind of unfortunate.

To top it all off, the storyline is a bit anticlimactic. The enemy is like… Ansem. It’s just a generic, formless evil, and the last boss fight is not anything special at all. It takes like two seconds, and then whoops, game is over.

All that said, I did enjoy the game. There are a lot of good quests and good dialog to be enjoyed throughout it, and the combat is fun, although perhaps only in smaller-sized doses. I’m not about to claim everyone needs to play this one, though. It’s, unfortunately, a misstep. Hopefully they can fix it in the next game, as I would love to play a real sequel to Fable 2. I really would.