…aka Why You Shouldn’t Spend Sixty Bucks On Fable III

Let me go ahead and say that this will NOT be a spoiler-free review. If you don’t want spoilers, turn back now. You’ve been warned.

After playing Fable II and enjoying it thoroughly, I was more than willing to lay down sixty bucks for Fable III. I’d heard some shaky things about it, but I doubted it could really be that bad. How wrong I was.

I happily took my purchased game home and when the time finally came to start it, I cheerfully put the disc in the XBox and booted it up. It took maybe all of twenty minutes for the luster of it to wear off. I don’t know how they did it, but they managed to take the things that worked in Fable II and break them.

The simply explanation of the plot of the game is that you are a prince or princess and your brother is in charge of the kingdom and is messing it up royally. (Pun intended.) You end up having to flee the castle and go to work on building a revolution to take your kingdom back. You do and then find out there’s actually an even bigger threat and defeating it is the real goal of the game. The more in depth explanation of the game is about the same. There’s really not a lot to it.

Overall, the game is pretty dull. Even the characters are pretty bland. You waste a lot of time on what generally seem like pointless tasks that lack much creativity. I also found a few glitches that kept me from finishing (and even starting) a couple of the quests. The main point of the game is to run around your kingdom, trying to gain support and making promises to various groups in return for their promise to fight in the revolution. Each task that you complete earns you Guild Seals which unlock certain items on the Road to Rule. I’ll elaborate…

The Road to Rule is what was put in place in Fable III to help explain your progress and allow you to unlock more powerful spells, weapon abilities and so forth. The creepy blind woman from Fable II is back and appears on the Road to Rule as some kind of strange spirit guide. There are a few problems with the Road to Rule. The first is that you have to play a lot of side quests to earn enough seals to unlock the treasure chests containing various skills, so you have to pick and choose carefully or do just about every quest in the game. However, a lot of those chests are for things that I feel your character should be able to do from the beginning. Did we really need to unlock the ability to buy houses, to buy businesses, to have other characters fall in love with you, to earn additional character expressions, to go up levels in the mini games and dye your clothes? Are you saying my character is too stupid to be able to fall in love without wasting seals for them to learn how? Or how hard is it to go and buy a house? Did I actually unlock some kind of medieval home buyers guide?

The combat in the game is pretty easy. You have three focuses you can work with: melee, ranged and magic. Depending on which you focus on more, your character’s physical appearance will change. Melee combat makes you more muscled, ranged makes you taller and magic makes you all glowy. Attacking is really basic and there aren’t really any special moves. The best part about training your character up in any of the three options is that with a focus in melee or ranged weapons, your weapons actually evolve to look more bad ass. With magic, you are able to do a thing called spell-weaving which actually lets you combine two different magic spells together. For example: fire and electricity or ice and magic daggers.

Individual enemies in the game are pretty simple to beat, but it’s easy to get swarmed by bad guys and have your ass handed to you. This wouldn’t be so bad except that the only times I ever got knocked out were because of random swarms of baddies and not the final boss fight. How does that work? I also got tired of the non-randomized enemy encounters that seemed to happen every five feet. It wasn’t exciting, it was annoying.

Instead of tweaking the menu system from Fable II that so many complained about, they removed it entirely. This removed easy access to your inventory, stats, saving, etc. Instead they decided to give you a sanctuary that you could return to any time by pressing the “start” button. Even once you arrived there, you had to go into a separate room for you weapons, clothing/hair/makeup and money. When you access a side panel for your character’s stats, you receive a watered down status. There are no fun stats like how many chickens you’ve kicked, bad guys you’ve killed, STDs you’ve received (I’m not making this up), etc. Instead, you will see those randomly appear on your loading screens. The main room also includes a map which allows you to check in on the status of property and quests and then to teleport to different locations.

One of the other rooms in your sanctuary is basically the XBox Live room. You can locate other players and buy in-game items with your Microsoft points. That’s all very well and good, but you are constantly reminded of it when you teleport back and your butler recommends checking out the shop. I get it, you want to sell me stuff. Shut the hell up already! It was like listening to a bloody commercial on repeat. Wait, that’s exactly what it was. Infinite infomercial loop.

While it may seem nice to be able to save your game at any point by traveling to the sanctuary, it’s really not that necessary. The game auto-saves a lot, but that’s also part of the problem. If you screw up, there is no going back. Maybe the point was that the game makers wanted you to have to live with your decisions, but I found it ultimately frustrating. It also means that to see an alternate outcome to something, you’d have to start a whole new game.

Also located in your sanctuary is an area for gifts you’ve received from people in the kingdom. No more finding out what they gave you when you receive them. No, you have to go back to the sanctuary to open them.

On the subject of gifts from towns people, you can no longer win over crowds with your charm. You have to approach NPCs ONE BY ONE, waste a lot of time doing things like heroic poses or whistling to win them over and then they send you on an errand to win them over completely. (Winning them over completely is a crucial step to starting a relationship should you want to have an in-game romance.) The errands get dull and repetitive for not much return.

Starting a family in Fable III is fairly consistent with how it is in Fable II. (Even though my fair skinned child changed racial backgrounds for no apparent reason at one point.) However, there is one kink. Your children will ask you for presents, but unlike Fable II where you could go to most any shop and get a lot of similar items, stalls and stores only carry two to five items or so. So you either have to find the right stall carrying the right item or find it out in the world. One of my children got all upset because I couldn’t find the porcelain doll they asked for anywhere. It was like trying to find the hot Christmas item for kids on Christmas Eve.

So, let’s link this in to the problem with shops. It is incredibly hard to find what you want half of the time. There are items that are exclusive to each town and, as noted before, each shop has a stupidly limited amount of goods. Are you really telling me the guy at the gift vending stall only carries two things? Really?

In Fable III, they bring the money-earning mini games back. The available jobs are blacksmithing, lute playing and pie making. To play, you have to hit a sequence of buttons on your controller in time with the screen (sort of like Guitar Hero or Rock Band). As you play each section of any given mini game, your gold multiplier goes up (the amount you earn per successful sequence). The problem is that I kept running into lag on my system and it would screw me up around the sixth or seventh level multiplier. It also didn’t help that the NPCs were stupid and would walk right through my character while playing the games which ended up being distracting.

So, I’ve covered a lot of what I didn’t like about the game. What about the things I did like? Well, they were few and far between. There were a couple of quests that were fun (one is particularly entertaining if you’re a D&D player). There was a lot of quirky humour throughout, including some really awesome posters that are displayed in the cities. The game does seem to pick up a little bit in the second half, but it’s too little too late. What parts I did enjoy were pretty much washed away by the major problem with the game: it sets you up to fail.

As with the last two games in the Fable series, you are allowed to be a moral and upright character, a conniving villain or something in between. This game makes it exceptionally hard to start out playing an evil character. The whole point is that you’re supposed to gain support from various factions to aid your cause. How can you do that if you just piss them off all the time? I don’t know, maybe it doesn’t change things much to be evil, but with the auto-save system, it’s hard to give it a try and back up if necessary.

Here’s where things get screwed up. If you decide to play a moral character, the ending will screw you over. What seems like the goal of the game (winning back your kingdom and being crowned ruler) is only a part of the final story. It turns out there is an evil darkness heading your way and you need to amass enough wealth to properly afford protection for your citizens and you only have one year to do it in. As ruler, you have to make decisions that will eat into your money pile or will help build it. Keeping the promises you made along the way always eats into the funds, but choosing the more corrupt options will help you build it. So, if you’re playing a moral character you have to choose between most of the population of Albion dying or deciding to become a dick. Making unpopular decisions does more than upset your people, it also ruins your kingdom. Things like using one area as a place to dump sewage and draining a lake to mine for precious materials. Out of all of the decisions you have to make, only two or three (of maybe twelve to fifteen or so) are moral and earn you money.

The year you are allotted to try to build up your treasury counts down unevenly. You start with 365 days and once you complete the tasks for one day, you’re knocked down to 320-some days and so on. There is no knowing when you’re finally going to run out of time. This caught me off guard and prevented me from transferring personal wealth to the kingdom’s treasury. Because of this, the majority of my citizens died. After a ridiculously easy boss fight where I simply spammed the magic button, I came back to find my castle strewn with dead bodies. By doing the right thing I doomed most of Albion’s citizens to death. What kind of ending is that? If you play an asshole, then you save more people? Is it like Dark Helmet says in “Spaceballs” that “evil will always triumph because good is dumb”? I can’t recall ever being so dissatisfied with the ending of a game before.

Fable III feels unfinished, forced and unoriginal. It’s a short game, and it pales in comparison to Fable II. Sequel games should get better, not worse.

Save your money. Go by Cataclysm or, if you’re looking for another fantasy game on a PS3 or 360, get Dragon Age. I guarantee either of those options will be better than the fail that was Fable III.

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I’ve got two new guest blogs up over at ThinkLeet! Go check them out!

Learn New Words With Star Wars

The RPG Games of Bioware

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You can read my new Dragon Age: Origins review via my guest post at ThinkLeet.com:

Behold! Dragon Age: Origins

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Fail.

Some may recall a blog I posted a little while back about girls and gaming. You might also recall that I mentioned that female gamers seem to be fewer in number, and are sometimes treated as oddities by their male counterparts. To upset the balance further, a company called GameCrush has decided to try and make things even more polarized by offering a service where you can PAY to play games with sexy girls. Because, you know, no sexy girls would want to play games with you unless they’re paid to do so.

From IGN.com’s article:

On GameCrush, guys are Players and girls are PlayDates. Players pay to play and PlayDates get paid to play. Guys can browse PlayDate profiles (there are currently around 1,200), view photos, and even chat with girls for free. Publicityhazard’s turn ons include vibrating controllers, for instance, and is turned off by three red lights. Once you find a gal you fancy you send her a game invite and if she accepts you get six to ten minutes of one-on-one gaming time. PlayDates have the ability to block any guy they want for any reason. When the service launches tomorrow it will only support the Xbox 360 and a few casual games hosted on the GameCrush website, but there are plans to add PlayStation 3, Wii, and World of Warcraft support as soon as possible.

How sad is that? As the subhead on TechRadar’s article reads:

Buying girls’ attention? Isn’t there a word for that?

I also have a few more words for it: eww, eww and eww with a side of eww for dipping.

Of course we all know this service will turn a profit. Then again, so does prostitution and stripping. (The chicks joining this service are just trying to pay their way through college too, right?)

According to IGN, GameCrush’s payment system was calculated to be about the price of buying a girl a drink at a bar ($8.25). This price translates to about 10 minutes of game play. The girls on this system get to keep about 60 percent of the cash they bring in, and can store it in their virtual g-string. (So I made that last part up, what’re you going to do about it?)

After completing a gaming, er, session…players can rate their “PlayDate” on things like gaming skill, hotness and flirtiness. Those with the highest ratings will receive preferred placement on the site. Remind me again how this system isn’t just a computerized pimp? All it needs is a fuzzy hat and a mean backhand.

I know no one is forcing these girls to join in, but I still find the whole thing extremely creepy and pathetic not only for the girls, but for the guys using this service. Maybe you should get off your lazy butt and go to a strip club or something, at least that way you’d be getting exercise for more than your right hand.

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No women allowed?

A friend of mine posted a link to this article earlier, and boy does it make me want to kill something. (Though, according to some people quoted in that post, I’d rather be playing with babies and gossiping with the neighbours.)

It really comes as no surprise that gender bias is still alive and well in the nerd world, but there’s really no excuse for it. I cringe at the idea that some guys think all we female gamers are good for are acting as healers or filling an empty raid slot.

All of this reminds me of yet another discussion I read on a message board where a guy was asking how to make a D&D game that appealed to women. (He was bringing in not one, but TWO girls and wanted to make sure they didn’t get scared away.) A lot of the advice given was essentially that he should dumb it down and that the encounter mechanics would be too confusing for us poor little ladies to comprehend. Yeah, screw you people.

It’s true that a lot of women who do game tend to utilize more casual systems such as the DS and the Wii. I suppose both could be seen as a little less intimidating, but I also think it could be considered the “gateway drug” of gaming were the other systems made a little more gender neutral. There’s no denying that the 360 and PS3 marketing is targeted towards men as are the games available. I’m not suggesting that either the system or the games should be dumbed down, but it would be nice to see a wider array of non-boobified titles available that aren’t things like “Cooking Can Be Fun!” or “Super Animal Fun Time”. (Don’t Google those, I made them up.)

I know I’m in the minority of women who favour the 360 as their gaming system of choice. I’m also not one to be bothered or intimidated by bouncing, bosom-laden fantasy chicks romping across the game screen. (I was the one that picked out the pinup calendar in our computer room that my husband gets blamed for.) However, I can see how these sorts of games might count as a pretty big deterrent to other women.

A large part of the problem (as has been pointed out numerous times across the interweb) is not only caused by men, but by other women. As I noted in an earlier blog post, some girls think that other girls that game are aberrations. They have been given the mindset that games are not for them. It’s a lot like the idea that power-tools are for men and we women-folk are too petite and helpless to do so much as change a light bulb. Better stick to baking.

We have not evolved as much over the decades as we would like to think.

Unfortunately, there’s no one all-encompassing fix for this. Marketing needs to change and perceptions need to change; neither of these tasks can be accomplished easily. If game companies want to invite women to the table they need to do some more strategizing. If men want women to game, they need to be a little more inviting and less patronizing. If women want to game, they need to jump in there, flip everyone the bird, and show them how it’s done. Trust me guys, we can kick your ass.

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