Fable III: Why It Fails

IGN AU is offering up a cheery piece that labels Lionhead’s latest Fable title a failure primarily due to the fact that gold acquisition is too easy, which therefore makes the game’s tougher choices, well, not so tough.

The set-up as you no doubt know is that by the time you’ve become king, you’ve made a number of promises to different people and factions. You want to honour those promises and be a noble leader, but what will you do if you can’t keep them all? How will you choose?

Great idea, but here’s where Fable III falls apart.

Why? Because the team has made the choices economic in nature. It’s not “you can build an orphanage and a school for Bowerstone OR you can honour your promise to that far-flung nation who helped you out”. Instead, it’s “you can build an orphanage, which will cost you 300,000 gold, or you can turn it into a brothel, which will earn you 500,000 gold”. This whole section of the game operates on the supposition that the player won’t have enough money to do everything and will have to make hard choices in order to try and keep the coffers full. (I won’t go into why the coffers need to be full, but let’s just say that it’s crucial that they are.)

The problem is that with some smart early investments, the player will have enough money to do everything. Like Fable II, you see, Fable III has a full economic system that allows the player to buy shops and houses. Prices at the former can be adjusted, while the latter can be rented out. Any investments like these that the player has brings in income every five minutes in the game.