Why Fable 3 Falls Flat

Tonight, I missed what could have been a really good Pendragon RPG session out of sheer idiocy on my part. I won't voice an opinion on Pendragon as a game, as I've only played 2-3 times; all I'll say is that my mum made gammon for tea, so I'm not quite as sorry as I otherwise would have been.

**The main section of this post contains spoilers on Fable 3. You have been warned.**

Out of need for something to post, I'm gonna voice a concern I had with a game I very nearly loved: Fable 3. Now, I know a lot of people dislike the Fable series, and I see why to be honest: it's always been rather flawed, plus Peter Molyneux's fixation on the (rather stupid) task of selling an RPG to the casual crowd has meant that there has been less and less challenge within the games as they have been released - the third game really has no significant penalty for dying, so what's the point?

However, I've generally been able to forgive that because there was always some intangible quality to the games that would make me come back to them time and again; I found the game world, the characters and the narrative to be rich and engaging. So, my judgement of Fable has always been "flawed but enjoyable".

So, naturally, I got down to Fable 3 and began my adventures as an exiled revolutionary with gusto. Yay, swords. Yay, sorcery. Yay, pseudo-Pratchett humour. All fun. Then I got to the bit where you become king...and it all went horribly wrong.

This all happens after a section of the game where you fight a horrid demon-thing made of darkness and sludge, which has almost wiped out a nearby country. It's rather dark and atmospheric, and more than a little bit scary in places. Upon becoming king, I was told that the only reason that the previous ruler was being so tyrannical was so he could build an army because the big demon-thing is headed your way. At this point, I would have called the revolution off and chalked it up as a misunderstanding. Sadly, the game doesn't give you this option, you've gotta go through the next bit...

You are given rule of the country, which involves 1) deciding what to do with the kingdom's infrastructure in the wake of the revolution and 2) trying to gather as much gold as possible to fund the military action against the monster that your brother already had going before you wrecked the place.

You are given a series of choices when rebuilding the country. This will involve one of your allies asking you for something (build a school, help a country join your kingdom, etc) that you promised them in exchange for their allegiance, while Stephen Fry - well, the character with his voice - explains that this will cost too much money. Which it will. The game will clearly illustrate to you that to fulfill your promise to your ally is the "good"  option, while going against them for money is the "evil" choice. All the while with the knowledge that any money spent building house isn't being spent on the soldiers to save the people living in them.

This is pretty broken already, right? Damned if you do, damned if you don't, right? No way to structure a game's mechanics. But it gets worse. In the loading screens for this section of the game, there's a report as to how much money you currently have, and the projected civilian casualties. You start with 400,000 gold in the royal treasury, and you have to have 6,000,000 gold at the end of the game year if I remember correctly; the projected casualties are tied to this. After I about an hour of playing through this section, the treasury was about 600,000 gold in debt, and the loading screen was telling me that every last man, woman and child in Albion was going to die. That, folks, was my reward for building schools in workhouses and helping small countries get out of poverty. I would have tried to save money without looking like a tyrant, but unfortunately there's no button for "Sorry, love, but a while a education is indeed important for our nation's future, it won't do much good if the children are dead before they reach 6 years old."

The worst part is that "projected casualties" bit in the loading screen. Because it's a number. With that one little feature, Lionhead, a company I respected until then, turned an already poorly constructed moral choice mechanic into a numbers game. Or, if you will, a PUZZLE. You know what one of the defining characteristics of a puzzle is? That is has a RIGHT answer and a WRONG answer. You know, like morality doesn't? I think there's a bit where you can go on a quest to get some valuable treasure, but by that time I'd given up. Wasn't fun no more.

I've been told that the best way to solve this puzzle is to spend the earlier sections of the game buying up property and saving money so you can add it to the treasury. That makes sense but...how was I supposed to figure that out? I had no idea that that part of the game was coming, and I've never really bothered with the properties in the Fable games. So, the only way to win the game properly is to have played it through already? That's just plain stupid. I could play through again and buy stuff up as I go, but honestly - is it worth it?

Like Ann Hathaway walking in front of a lorry, it started out looking great, but ended in a horrific mess.

Comments down below :)

PS: I know I'm not the first person to moan about Fable 3, but like I said, I needed to post something...