Dragon_Nexus said:
Fable 3...once more I didn't listen to hype. Didn't care for previews or interviews or whatever, I just expected a game like Fable 2 but with improvements.
I didn't get it.
The notion of being a good or evil character was almost entirely removed. There was no real feeling of conquest. With a main character that spoke what they liked without control from you, your evilness was blunted by the heroic voice of the main character doing heroic things to save the world. And the main plot didn't even amount to anything. It felt like Lionhead had realised they'd given away pretty much the entirety of the storyline in previews (evil brother, rise to power, overthrow him and become king/queen) and thought "Ah crap, we need a twist" and through in the melevolent darkness at the last minute. That aspect by itself was good, that evil voice and the feeling of cruel, hateful evil creeping towards Albion was truely ominous...so much so that I wish it was introduced a lot earlier. Hinted at slowly and then suddenly you were hit with it. Instead it felt shoe-horned in.
Yeah. The other part of it was that they simply ran out of money. Here is the essential problem with the Fable games: they spend all of their money developing new engines and fighting/leveling systems and then have an incredibly short game because they can't design that many missions. You can tell that they ran out of money right when you became King/Queen, and had to shoehorn everything else in. Considering that was what the entire game before was leading to, it brought the entire story down and made it feel incredibly anti-climactic.
Honestly, instead of waiting another several years for another Fable game with a new engine and a story 10 hours long, they should make
Fable 3: The Lost Chapters and fill in another 20-30 hours of missions and story. I'd pay full price for it if it had that much more game time because it would actually give me my money's worth. Don't get me wrong, I like innovation, but only if I actually get to PLAY THE INNOVATIVE THING LONG ENOUGH TO ENJOY IT.
Dragon_Nexus said:
As for the gameplay itself...I couldn't believe how they managed to ruin the gesture system. Gesturing to only one person at a time? Making friends by completing utterly redundant fetch quests over and over and over? In the end I simply stopped caring about befriending people. The map screen was okay, but it didn't tell me where I was, nor in the open areas like the woods or the lake did it accurately depict the paths. If the paths weren't so linear it would be incredibly easy to get completely lost.
The idea of weapons changing depending on how you used them was a good one. It's a shame that this basically meant all the weapons looked exactly the same with just hilts, blades, barrels etc swappng between a handful of possibilities with none of them really standing out as unique.
I see Fable and The Elder Scrolls at two opposite ends of the RPG spectrum. Fable is 90% gameplay, 10% story. The Elder Scrolls is 90% story, 10% gameplay. We need a happy medium. Don't get me wrong, I love both franchises, but only for what they're good at. The short story in Fable just pisses me off, but the gameplay (combat) is generally smooth and fun. Alternatively I love the storylines in the Elder Scrolls games, but the hack-n'-slash combat puts me to sleep. It sounds like Skyrim has tried to improve the process, but I sincerely doubt that it will be as satisfying as tearing apart a bunch of hobbes in Fable.
Honestly the small cosmetic stuff isn't innovative. In terms of combat it only went backwards. Now I'm not a fan of complexity for complexity's sake, but there's also such a thing as oversimplification. Ultimately the depth of the combat should revolve on three things:
1) Offering enough diversity so that gameplay doesn't get repetitive. This is self explanatory I think.
2) Offering a tight control over the character's actions so that they feel fluid and dynamic and not awkward and stilted. This is the factor that makes a game feel good in your hands and makes it so that you just react naturally and don't think about the controller, which brings me to my third point:
3) Gameplay must revolve around what you are capable of doing with the controller. Ergonomics is absolutely key. That's why the one or two button technique is so successful. The controls need to have a certain logic to them. The face buttons make sense for primary actions in third person because you're controlling the character's movement and directionality with the left analog stick. In an FPS you use both analog sticks so the primary buttons become the shoulder and trigger buttons. It might seem obvious but it goes beyond this. The Y button in fable is higher on the controller because it is associated with the trigger buttons for going into first person mode, whereas the X, A and B buttons are close together because they're used together. That's one of the strengths of the Fable games.
The thing that pissed me off the most was the dumbing-down of the aiming system for ranged combat. They had a really intuitive and flowing system before for shooting people's limbs and what not, but they got rid of it because they thought simplicity is always better. Simplicity is NOT always better, there is a balance and they had achieved that balance in the past games. In Fable 3 the ranged weapons had lost most, if not all, of their purpose because of their lost functionality.
Dragon_Nexus said:
Fable 3 did something rare for me. It disappointed. Generally I buy a game and play it for what it is, not caring about what people tell me it should be. I enjoyed Assassins Creed for this reason also. But Fable 3 failed to improve upon Fable 2 and in many ways made things worse. What they tried to improve ultimately didn't add anything except needless fiddliness (changing weapons is a massive chore, and who thought degrading houses was a good idea? Just makes me not bother buying houses so I don't have to deal with it.)
Sorry guys, I've stuck with you for a long time but I think it's time you stopped trying to be so damn innovating and ambitious and tried to be a little more realistic. PM seems to be writing cheques the devs can't cash. I applaud the man's vision, we need visionaries in the games industry, but he needs to learn when to keep his dreams as dreams and when the technology is available to make them into a reality.
Couldn't agree more. The focus on faceless NPCs and economy that gives you utterly useless money is a waste of their energy. Those things have little to nothing to do with slaying monsters and becoming stronger, they're superfluous additions. The problem is that ole' Petey thinks they're the main attractions. They aren't, Petey. You've got a great basic formula for fun gameplay, but no one is ever going to care about faceless, generic and interchangeable NPCs. If you want people to care about the characters in the game, you actually have to develop characters.
