This will mostly be a review of Fable 3 (even though probably done to death since it's release)
Beware, no nice pictures or formatting.
I want this "one step forward, two steps back" approach to this series gone.
Why is it that every time a new one of these is made, it forgets what made the others good?
The Fable series is an RPG. In each one you are a hero, going through your story. It using moral choices to make it more personal, so you can be the hero you wish to become.
Story:
In Fable 3 you are the second son of the former king (the hero in Fable 2). His first son is the new king and is a tyrant. You are the prince and are encouraged to over-throw him and make Albion better. You will make promises to factions to get them to follow you and eventually become king and make chocies of your own.
There are many new features in Fable 3 compared to Fable 2 which I will explain:
Health:
There is now no health bar. Instead replaced by a CoD like redness and paleness on the screen, that heals over time. Unfortunately it takes forever, and even though more immersive, I wouldn't have minded a health bar.
Weapons:
There has been a drastic change to weapons. Yes, like Molyneux said, they change depending how you use them. But they change every time you level up the weapon, based on how you used it before levelling up. One of my main problems is because of how you level up weapons, all weapons you have and buy will be at whatever level you are at overall with weapons. So you won't see how they started looking.
Also there are no more classes of weapons like there were in Fable 2 eg. Master
Instead you have Hero weapons and Legendary weapons.
Hero weapons:
There are only 4 of them and you get them in the beginning. They are a sword, hammer, rifle and pistol. No, there aren't any cleavers anymore, or maces or different types of rifle or pistol. The good thing about hero weapons is that the info after they have changed will tell you how they have for each upgrade and why.
Legendary weapons:
Weird, these are ALL other weapons in the game. There are 50. They don't seem as special anymore since you can buy about 4 of them in each shop you visit. And there are some you still get from adventuring and demon doors, so shouldn't those be super legendary? These weapons don't say what you've done to make them change, but they do have built in challenges in their info that if you complete they unlock extra things e.g. +8% damage to hollow men.
The down side is neither of these classes feels particularly powerful. I've completed the final quest and the most powerful weapon I have does about 48 damage.
Road to rule:
This is how you level up and buy new abilities. I like the way this works, but it isn't without it's flaws. At every major point in the story, Theresa, your seer, will transport you here to upgrade abilities. It is shown as a long road to a castle (road to rule, haha). It is split up in sections by gates, that open up at these important points in the story. Each section has a certain amount of chests, that contain abilities. Anything from Melee level up to dye packs, expressions and job levels. They each cost a certain amount of Guild Seals, which are now the new experience points and can be earned from quests or doing things for random people in towns, like making the first good or bad impressions.
Melee, Ranged and Magic upgrades:
These attributes, no longer named strength skill and will, upgrade in level from level 1 to level 5 as you buy the appropriate chests. This is where the trouble with weapons comes in. Every weapon you ever get will be upgraded to your current level so it seems like you barely do any work with them. The other downside to this upgrade system is that it gets rid of previous sub-sections of attributes. Improving physique by just getting these things is ok I guess, but I really miss sub-targetting. All battles in this game just seem like a spam of the buttons because they just go up levels without any extra effort. Magic powers being the only slight exception because as usual you have to charge it to certain levels, within combat.
The Sanctuary:
This undoubtedly is a good way of erasing the menu experience in a lot of ways, but still has many problems. This is the area you go when you press start, which unfortunately means there is no way to pause and take a break from this game. It is filled with sections for dressing, equipping weapons, a map, a culis gate to go to the road to rule any time, and even it's own pile of money section to show your trophies, achievements and how rich you are. There is also an online room to travel to friends' places and buy from the online store.
Clothes:
The sanctuary is well done in this way and makes it easy to change clothes, dyes, tattoo sets, makeup and hair. Unfortunately, there is very few sets of clothes, and only some that I like. There are 106 pieces of clothing, which you will require all for an achievement. People will be glad to hear that your cry for armour has been heard, too bad it's only one set and doesn't suit an evil hero very well. In fact there's so little clothes that technically there's only half the pieces of clothing there are, since the other half is the other gender's version, which you still require for the achievement. Also, clothes seem to lack stats. I just seem to randomly get more attractive according to my hero status statue in the main room of the sanctuary. Tattoos nicely glow when you charge any melee, ranged or magic attack to either blue or red, depnding on your morality.
Weapon room:
Delivers what it promises, easy to use and check stats of weapons.
Map:
I hate this map, I hate it with a passion. It does nicely show how many keys etc. are left in a region when you look at it. You can fast travel to any region. But the reason I hate it is because it's unusable as an actual map. All the regions are represented as a cricle on the map that you can zoom in on and it shows the houses that you can buy for real estate wealth. But when zoomed in it retains this circular shape which is surely not the shape of the actual region. Therefore the maps of regions is actually unusuable to tell where you are or how to get where you want to go(unless you have a gold trail) because they are not to scale. I had to use my guide several times to have a map I could actually use to tell where I was.
Also, the set up of what counts as a region is really annoying. Off the top of my head I say there are about maybe just over 12 regions in this game. Bowerstone takes up 4. Why? Because it was apparently too much work to make them scale maps so you could fit all of Bowerstone together and see where they connect.
Another problem with the map is you can't fast travel to caves. You can only fast travel to somewhere randomly defined in the region or to a quest start, which is why you really needed a comprehensable map. It is hard to tell where regions connect. Because of this I went through the entire game, being able to see that there were two regions I hadn't visited because there wasn't a golden quest trial that required me to, so I had no idea how to get there from the nearby regions without using my guide.
Collectables:
There are many in this game. Silver keys, Golden keys, Gnomes to shoot, books to find etc.
Silver keys:
There are 50 of them as usual and are used to unlcok chests with certain numbers on them for rare items. My problem is that I have yet to find a chest where I needed more than 20.
Golden keys:
These are new. There are 4 of them and they are each unique and can only be used once. They are used to open golden doors to secret areas. You need all 4 plus the 50 silver keys for an achievement
Gnomes:
Anyone familiar to Fable 2's Gargoyles will understand this premise. Find them around Albion and shoot them. The clue is that you can hear them insult you when you're nearby and they make even cruder insults than the scottish sounding gargoyles. They show up around the world after completing a few side quests for a gnome dressed man in brightwall village. This also has an achievement.
Books:
There is a librarian of sorts who requests you find him some rare books from around albion. This also has an achievement. The downside is apart from these books, there is no lore to collect in Fable 3. The only letters you find around the place are just read by voice actors. You can't pick them up and read them later. This could've easily been fixed by having an archive section of the sanctuary, if you are so desperate to destroy menus, Molyneux.
Shopping:
This is part of the reason there is so little clothes in this game. To eliminate menues (Molyneux, we don't hate them as much as you do), you can only buy what's shown in shop. You walk up an examine it. The problem comes is that you walk into a general store and it has three stands: health potion, slow time potion and summon creatures potion. (WHERE THE **** ARE MY CONDOMS?(seriously, they're hard to find.))
It's the same with stalls, except stalls only have one item to buy each day and if you dont want it, you're screwed. In Fable 2 I remember getting fat from eating pies instead of potion and then losing it all later. There's barely the risk of that. You only really find pies when adventuring, or you can buy the ONE pie they're selling that day.
And you sell everything in a pawnbroker, which adds to confusion fo finding things within regions, because instead of selling at appropriate shops you sell it to the guy who'll take anything. Also there are no traders walking around anymore because obviously people by themselves would require a menu.
Interacting with people:
This is now annoying. You don't have an expression wheel anymore. You can only interact with the ONE perosn you select and it gives you a couple of options: random good thing, random bad thing, random silly thing etc. This makes it impossible to do what you did before and get tons of people to love you at once, because you can't perform any expressions outside of talking to a single person.
Also, simple commands like follow no longer exist. If you want some one to follow you literally have to hold their hand the entire time (It's on leaderboards, so how the hell am I supposed to have group sex if I can only hold one person's hand?).
Houses:
You can buy houses to rent out or live in with your spouse and children. You can also set the rent. You can see the houses from the map in the sanctuary (probably one of the only good uses of the map). Houses also require occasional repair over time or tenants will refuse payment. This really makes me wish I had a repair all option instead of doing it one by one.
Demon doors:
These guys are scattered throughout the land. They are doors with nicely bearded faces that wont let you into their magical secret area without a condition to be met. In old Fables you could easily forget about these guys, but in Fable 3 you can easily fast travel because after you find them they become a quest on your map. They seem a bit unspecial now since they have the usual range of "Area with outfit" or "Legendary weapon in chest". But it's a bit of a "So what?" now since apart from being nice looking areas inside, even the magical gift of a legendary weapon seems dull since most of the weapons in the game are legendary. I was also quite disappointed that one of the areas included dancing skeletons in a bar, had a chest with a common potion in it.
Combat:
Combat can be annoying since you mostly spam the buttons and can't lock onto enemies anymore, so you often miss or aim the wrong way with a ranged weapon. But it does autolock to a degree.
Melee:
Spam the X button to attack, or hold it for block, or hold X and point a direciton for a flourish.
Ranged:
Spam Y to fire whilst pointing in a direction. This can become annoying since the most common strategy for battle is roll around your enemy whilest shooting, which often causes fire in the wrong direciton. Hold Y for charged up fire. Hold the left trigger for manual first person aiming.
Magic:
These are in the form of gauntlets. The gaunlets to choose from (after you unlock all of them) are Fireball, Shock, Ice storm, Vortex, Blades and Force Push. They can all be used as area effect spells or point at a specific target. Later on you can also sue two gauntlets at once to "weave" spells.
Potions:
There are three. Health, slow time and summon creatures. The last two have been changed from magic to potions this time and doesn't really bother me since in the format of gauntlets this makes more sense, I guess.
Being King:
According to Molyneux this is when the real game begins, and is about half way through. Has there ever been a more important time to quote Lex Luthor? (WRONG!) It's actually more or less the end of the game storywise and most quests. It is where you get to go through with promises or break them. The problem arises that since you require a certain amount of money for the last plot point, decisions are hard and I generally felt guilt for every promise I broke, even though I chose to defaultly be a bad guy. It seems more like just making more promises over promises than going through with them since you won't know whether you have enough money for the last important plot point until AFTER you've done the promises which drain your resources.
Fight for king:
This quest is a bit of fun running a muck in bowestone before making it to the castle (But it's no spire).
Enemies:
There aren't many.The usual Hobbes we've come to expect, which barely have a curve for introducing the stronger types of them, more a random mash of them around the place. Hollow men are usual but suffer the same way as Hobbes. Balverines are the next thing you'd expect, but only one point in the main quest requires you to fight them and even after having all upgrades as far as fighting go they still give me trouble. Then there are new enemies which I wont spoil, but not very many. Some are introduced as slight bosses, but afterwards, chucked at you in the last quest. I would like the see the return of ACTUAL bosses to Fable. Fable 3 didn't even have Trolls. Remember when you broke the law in Fable 2 and you had to do community service like hunting trolls? Well now all community service is being immediately transported to a job and doing it to pay off money.
Jobs:
There are three.
Lute hero: playing the lute whilest hitting buttons to the times
And blacksmithing and pie maker are basically the same, except lacking the fun of knowing you're parodying a game.
Side quests:
Lots of these that aren't the recurring ones are quite fun and bring back some lesser known old characters. The important quest lines even have their own achievements.
Good/Evil:
I played as evil so I can only really talk about this from that perspective. But unlike previous games where being evil gave you glowing eyes and horns, this just made me look like a pale emo with mascara on. I only get horns when my wings show and you only get wings after becoming king, and even then they only show as an expression when talking to somebody or if you hold down an attack button.
Conclusion:
I'm sorry for this long ramblous review with very awful sense of paragrphing, continuous prose, and probably forgotten things which I may add later, and probably alot of typos.
I wish Liondhead could for once make a new Fable game without flaws to new stuff and without forgetting already established staples of series. This game was good enough that I didn't sleep the night of release until the next day where I lost all track of time.
Overall though, if someone were to ask me to get either Fable 2 or Fable 3 I'd say Fable 2. Fable 3 does carry on the good dark humour of the games, but the gameplay itself was annoying at points and the story seemed a bit unfulfilling and people quickly joined you. The famous voice actors seemed like a plus but barely do much and come across as a cheap way of selling the game, unlike Fable 2. I'd say the best part was fighting hollow men alongside Simon Pegg. Jonathan Ross only voices for about 10 minutes commenting on you fighting creatures.
Somebody did mention that the game had been moved forward a year, if that's so I wish it wouldn've stayed in development. I hope the DLC will have some redeeming features.
Beware, no nice pictures or formatting.
I want this "one step forward, two steps back" approach to this series gone.
Why is it that every time a new one of these is made, it forgets what made the others good?
The Fable series is an RPG. In each one you are a hero, going through your story. It using moral choices to make it more personal, so you can be the hero you wish to become.
Story:
In Fable 3 you are the second son of the former king (the hero in Fable 2). His first son is the new king and is a tyrant. You are the prince and are encouraged to over-throw him and make Albion better. You will make promises to factions to get them to follow you and eventually become king and make chocies of your own.
There are many new features in Fable 3 compared to Fable 2 which I will explain:
Health:
There is now no health bar. Instead replaced by a CoD like redness and paleness on the screen, that heals over time. Unfortunately it takes forever, and even though more immersive, I wouldn't have minded a health bar.
Weapons:
There has been a drastic change to weapons. Yes, like Molyneux said, they change depending how you use them. But they change every time you level up the weapon, based on how you used it before levelling up. One of my main problems is because of how you level up weapons, all weapons you have and buy will be at whatever level you are at overall with weapons. So you won't see how they started looking.
Also there are no more classes of weapons like there were in Fable 2 eg. Master
Instead you have Hero weapons and Legendary weapons.
Hero weapons:
There are only 4 of them and you get them in the beginning. They are a sword, hammer, rifle and pistol. No, there aren't any cleavers anymore, or maces or different types of rifle or pistol. The good thing about hero weapons is that the info after they have changed will tell you how they have for each upgrade and why.
Legendary weapons:
Weird, these are ALL other weapons in the game. There are 50. They don't seem as special anymore since you can buy about 4 of them in each shop you visit. And there are some you still get from adventuring and demon doors, so shouldn't those be super legendary? These weapons don't say what you've done to make them change, but they do have built in challenges in their info that if you complete they unlock extra things e.g. +8% damage to hollow men.
The down side is neither of these classes feels particularly powerful. I've completed the final quest and the most powerful weapon I have does about 48 damage.
Road to rule:
This is how you level up and buy new abilities. I like the way this works, but it isn't without it's flaws. At every major point in the story, Theresa, your seer, will transport you here to upgrade abilities. It is shown as a long road to a castle (road to rule, haha). It is split up in sections by gates, that open up at these important points in the story. Each section has a certain amount of chests, that contain abilities. Anything from Melee level up to dye packs, expressions and job levels. They each cost a certain amount of Guild Seals, which are now the new experience points and can be earned from quests or doing things for random people in towns, like making the first good or bad impressions.
Melee, Ranged and Magic upgrades:
These attributes, no longer named strength skill and will, upgrade in level from level 1 to level 5 as you buy the appropriate chests. This is where the trouble with weapons comes in. Every weapon you ever get will be upgraded to your current level so it seems like you barely do any work with them. The other downside to this upgrade system is that it gets rid of previous sub-sections of attributes. Improving physique by just getting these things is ok I guess, but I really miss sub-targetting. All battles in this game just seem like a spam of the buttons because they just go up levels without any extra effort. Magic powers being the only slight exception because as usual you have to charge it to certain levels, within combat.
The Sanctuary:
This undoubtedly is a good way of erasing the menu experience in a lot of ways, but still has many problems. This is the area you go when you press start, which unfortunately means there is no way to pause and take a break from this game. It is filled with sections for dressing, equipping weapons, a map, a culis gate to go to the road to rule any time, and even it's own pile of money section to show your trophies, achievements and how rich you are. There is also an online room to travel to friends' places and buy from the online store.
Clothes:
The sanctuary is well done in this way and makes it easy to change clothes, dyes, tattoo sets, makeup and hair. Unfortunately, there is very few sets of clothes, and only some that I like. There are 106 pieces of clothing, which you will require all for an achievement. People will be glad to hear that your cry for armour has been heard, too bad it's only one set and doesn't suit an evil hero very well. In fact there's so little clothes that technically there's only half the pieces of clothing there are, since the other half is the other gender's version, which you still require for the achievement. Also, clothes seem to lack stats. I just seem to randomly get more attractive according to my hero status statue in the main room of the sanctuary. Tattoos nicely glow when you charge any melee, ranged or magic attack to either blue or red, depnding on your morality.
Weapon room:
Delivers what it promises, easy to use and check stats of weapons.
Map:
I hate this map, I hate it with a passion. It does nicely show how many keys etc. are left in a region when you look at it. You can fast travel to any region. But the reason I hate it is because it's unusable as an actual map. All the regions are represented as a cricle on the map that you can zoom in on and it shows the houses that you can buy for real estate wealth. But when zoomed in it retains this circular shape which is surely not the shape of the actual region. Therefore the maps of regions is actually unusuable to tell where you are or how to get where you want to go(unless you have a gold trail) because they are not to scale. I had to use my guide several times to have a map I could actually use to tell where I was.
Also, the set up of what counts as a region is really annoying. Off the top of my head I say there are about maybe just over 12 regions in this game. Bowerstone takes up 4. Why? Because it was apparently too much work to make them scale maps so you could fit all of Bowerstone together and see where they connect.
Another problem with the map is you can't fast travel to caves. You can only fast travel to somewhere randomly defined in the region or to a quest start, which is why you really needed a comprehensable map. It is hard to tell where regions connect. Because of this I went through the entire game, being able to see that there were two regions I hadn't visited because there wasn't a golden quest trial that required me to, so I had no idea how to get there from the nearby regions without using my guide.
Collectables:
There are many in this game. Silver keys, Golden keys, Gnomes to shoot, books to find etc.
Silver keys:
There are 50 of them as usual and are used to unlcok chests with certain numbers on them for rare items. My problem is that I have yet to find a chest where I needed more than 20.
Golden keys:
These are new. There are 4 of them and they are each unique and can only be used once. They are used to open golden doors to secret areas. You need all 4 plus the 50 silver keys for an achievement
Gnomes:
Anyone familiar to Fable 2's Gargoyles will understand this premise. Find them around Albion and shoot them. The clue is that you can hear them insult you when you're nearby and they make even cruder insults than the scottish sounding gargoyles. They show up around the world after completing a few side quests for a gnome dressed man in brightwall village. This also has an achievement.
Books:
There is a librarian of sorts who requests you find him some rare books from around albion. This also has an achievement. The downside is apart from these books, there is no lore to collect in Fable 3. The only letters you find around the place are just read by voice actors. You can't pick them up and read them later. This could've easily been fixed by having an archive section of the sanctuary, if you are so desperate to destroy menus, Molyneux.
Shopping:
This is part of the reason there is so little clothes in this game. To eliminate menues (Molyneux, we don't hate them as much as you do), you can only buy what's shown in shop. You walk up an examine it. The problem comes is that you walk into a general store and it has three stands: health potion, slow time potion and summon creatures potion. (WHERE THE **** ARE MY CONDOMS?(seriously, they're hard to find.))
It's the same with stalls, except stalls only have one item to buy each day and if you dont want it, you're screwed. In Fable 2 I remember getting fat from eating pies instead of potion and then losing it all later. There's barely the risk of that. You only really find pies when adventuring, or you can buy the ONE pie they're selling that day.
And you sell everything in a pawnbroker, which adds to confusion fo finding things within regions, because instead of selling at appropriate shops you sell it to the guy who'll take anything. Also there are no traders walking around anymore because obviously people by themselves would require a menu.
Interacting with people:
This is now annoying. You don't have an expression wheel anymore. You can only interact with the ONE perosn you select and it gives you a couple of options: random good thing, random bad thing, random silly thing etc. This makes it impossible to do what you did before and get tons of people to love you at once, because you can't perform any expressions outside of talking to a single person.
Also, simple commands like follow no longer exist. If you want some one to follow you literally have to hold their hand the entire time (It's on leaderboards, so how the hell am I supposed to have group sex if I can only hold one person's hand?).
Houses:
You can buy houses to rent out or live in with your spouse and children. You can also set the rent. You can see the houses from the map in the sanctuary (probably one of the only good uses of the map). Houses also require occasional repair over time or tenants will refuse payment. This really makes me wish I had a repair all option instead of doing it one by one.
Demon doors:
These guys are scattered throughout the land. They are doors with nicely bearded faces that wont let you into their magical secret area without a condition to be met. In old Fables you could easily forget about these guys, but in Fable 3 you can easily fast travel because after you find them they become a quest on your map. They seem a bit unspecial now since they have the usual range of "Area with outfit" or "Legendary weapon in chest". But it's a bit of a "So what?" now since apart from being nice looking areas inside, even the magical gift of a legendary weapon seems dull since most of the weapons in the game are legendary. I was also quite disappointed that one of the areas included dancing skeletons in a bar, had a chest with a common potion in it.
Combat:
Combat can be annoying since you mostly spam the buttons and can't lock onto enemies anymore, so you often miss or aim the wrong way with a ranged weapon. But it does autolock to a degree.
Melee:
Spam the X button to attack, or hold it for block, or hold X and point a direciton for a flourish.
Ranged:
Spam Y to fire whilst pointing in a direction. This can become annoying since the most common strategy for battle is roll around your enemy whilest shooting, which often causes fire in the wrong direciton. Hold Y for charged up fire. Hold the left trigger for manual first person aiming.
Magic:
These are in the form of gauntlets. The gaunlets to choose from (after you unlock all of them) are Fireball, Shock, Ice storm, Vortex, Blades and Force Push. They can all be used as area effect spells or point at a specific target. Later on you can also sue two gauntlets at once to "weave" spells.
Potions:
There are three. Health, slow time and summon creatures. The last two have been changed from magic to potions this time and doesn't really bother me since in the format of gauntlets this makes more sense, I guess.
Being King:
According to Molyneux this is when the real game begins, and is about half way through. Has there ever been a more important time to quote Lex Luthor? (WRONG!) It's actually more or less the end of the game storywise and most quests. It is where you get to go through with promises or break them. The problem arises that since you require a certain amount of money for the last plot point, decisions are hard and I generally felt guilt for every promise I broke, even though I chose to defaultly be a bad guy. It seems more like just making more promises over promises than going through with them since you won't know whether you have enough money for the last important plot point until AFTER you've done the promises which drain your resources.
Fight for king:
This quest is a bit of fun running a muck in bowestone before making it to the castle (But it's no spire).
Enemies:
There aren't many.The usual Hobbes we've come to expect, which barely have a curve for introducing the stronger types of them, more a random mash of them around the place. Hollow men are usual but suffer the same way as Hobbes. Balverines are the next thing you'd expect, but only one point in the main quest requires you to fight them and even after having all upgrades as far as fighting go they still give me trouble. Then there are new enemies which I wont spoil, but not very many. Some are introduced as slight bosses, but afterwards, chucked at you in the last quest. I would like the see the return of ACTUAL bosses to Fable. Fable 3 didn't even have Trolls. Remember when you broke the law in Fable 2 and you had to do community service like hunting trolls? Well now all community service is being immediately transported to a job and doing it to pay off money.
Jobs:
There are three.
Lute hero: playing the lute whilest hitting buttons to the times
And blacksmithing and pie maker are basically the same, except lacking the fun of knowing you're parodying a game.
Side quests:
Lots of these that aren't the recurring ones are quite fun and bring back some lesser known old characters. The important quest lines even have their own achievements.
Good/Evil:
I played as evil so I can only really talk about this from that perspective. But unlike previous games where being evil gave you glowing eyes and horns, this just made me look like a pale emo with mascara on. I only get horns when my wings show and you only get wings after becoming king, and even then they only show as an expression when talking to somebody or if you hold down an attack button.
Conclusion:
I'm sorry for this long ramblous review with very awful sense of paragrphing, continuous prose, and probably forgotten things which I may add later, and probably alot of typos.
I wish Liondhead could for once make a new Fable game without flaws to new stuff and without forgetting already established staples of series. This game was good enough that I didn't sleep the night of release until the next day where I lost all track of time.
Overall though, if someone were to ask me to get either Fable 2 or Fable 3 I'd say Fable 2. Fable 3 does carry on the good dark humour of the games, but the gameplay itself was annoying at points and the story seemed a bit unfulfilling and people quickly joined you. The famous voice actors seemed like a plus but barely do much and come across as a cheap way of selling the game, unlike Fable 2. I'd say the best part was fighting hollow men alongside Simon Pegg. Jonathan Ross only voices for about 10 minutes commenting on you fighting creatures.
Somebody did mention that the game had been moved forward a year, if that's so I wish it wouldn've stayed in development. I hope the DLC will have some redeeming features.
