Fable III Dev Lobs a Few Word Bombs at the Haters

Your once and future Fanboy

The Norwegian One
Feb 11, 2009
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From article: West: "We're making a co-operative role-playing game - there aren't any co-operative role-playing games out there, we're the only one."

Hmm, seeing how that the multi player mostly consist of having a teamate in the battles, and the multiplayer dosn't change the story or dialogue options. It reminds me of the Baldurs gate: Dark alliance games, a hack n slash Rpg based on D&D Forgotten realms, where you could also have two-player co-op, same with the Champions-seres like Champions return to arms. oh...and the se games came out on PS2.
If you narrow it down to RPG's with the ability to have another player control a character in battle, then you have games as old as Final fantasy XI on PS1 or even Tales of Vesperia for the 360 if you want something more recent.

So..in short: I call bullshit!
 

9Darksoul6

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Jul 12, 2010
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1) People say the game has a poor story; he disagrees, the story is not bad because "it's a pretty good".
2) He calls Fable III's voice acting great. Popular opinion says Fable III's characters are bland and annoying.
3) West doesn't understand why Fable III hasn't won any prizes, and thinks it's the best in the series; instead of looking back and see what went wrong, this guy thinks that mediocre piece of shit is a masterpiece and will get ofended by anyone who says otherwise.
He should be better at his job (combat system = mindless button mashing) and should stop annoying players with his stupidity - like this game being a complete failure wasn't bad enough.
4) "there aren't any co-operative role-playing games out there"
(I'm shocked) what a peasant.
 

Trentnes

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Sep 3, 2010
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He defended the story? I really didn't see that coming. Some points to consider for Fable 4 that I thought of playing Fables 2 and 3:

Telling the player from the start what is going to happen and how the story will end kind of kills the suspense.

If your players really don't have any feelings one way or another toward the big evil/person they have to fight at the end, you are doing it wrong.

A big AH HA! moment at the end of the game only works if it comes as an answer to a question. The Big evil thing jumping out of your buddy at the end of F3 just felt like the Devs went "OK you've killed enough random shapeless things, now here is the boss"

Now if someone had remarked about how these evil things were somehow portaling past the massive army I raised and into the center of the city, the big evil thing acting as a beacon might have been a good twist.
 

Veldt Falsetto

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Dec 26, 2009
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I think that this guys a moron now

Though he does have a point about the audio, the voice acting in the Fable games is brilliant and it should get more credit. Especially over generic brown fps.
 

ReiverCorrupter

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Jun 4, 2010
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Andaxay said:
Whilst I agree on vocal talent (even if the voice of the main female character was bland and flat) and music, I disagree on story. It was dull, predictable and unimaginative. I loved Fable II, but the same can't be said for III, it didn't suck me in, I didn't really like the characters and I traded it in because I couldn't bring myself to finish it.

Co-op was miles better than in Fable II, though.
Did you get to the Cthulhu wannabe? That's where it started to pick up. The story had potential and the characters were done pretty well. And it had great voice acting, that part is undeniable. But it just didn't execute. It was rushed at the end. Honestly you should have spent another 5-10 hours as King with more plot, but instead you got 15 minutes of rushed decisions. They just ran out of money and you could tell. They got to the most interesting part of the story where you have all these possibilities for plot twists and how you keep or break your promises, but they didn't do any of it. THAT was what made it an absolute disappointment. I'm renting the next one. If it's a single player RPG focused on story then I WANT MORE STORY. Period.
 

boag

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SO the game was too highbrow and people didnt get it?

Where have I heard that before?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C76QBg2p78&feature=player_embedded#
 

Typhon1388

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May 14, 2011
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Part of the problem may be that gamers don't know what they are playing. "It's a frustrating situation to be in because we make good games, but people expect something that no one else is doing," said West.
This is Molyneux's over-exaggerating statements coming back to bite him. When you have a developer making promises and statements like he does in regards to the game this is bound to be the response.

I honestly liked Fable 3. The voice acting was excellent as West said but the story did lack a proper structure. It went for ME2-esque build your team then face down adversity formula. Problem is there was no real character development so you felt little for these characters when it all kicked off.

The decision making time as ruler was the best part. Its just a shame it felt so rushed with the way time jumped forward between each one.
 

ReiverCorrupter

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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.
 

Nimcha

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You know, I actually was looking forward to playing this game but I can't even start it. I've tried everything but apparently it's some problem with Games for Windows Live that a lot of people are experiencing. So, yeah. I really regret getting this now.
 

kromify

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Feb 9, 2011
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i agree about expecting something it's not. fable is like twilight or scrubs; trashy and not very good, but easy and fun. thinking it should be like LOTR, in their example, will lead to a let down.
i've had this thought before so it's kinda nice to see a concordant opinion
 

AndyFromMonday

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kromify said:
i agree about expecting something it's not. fable is like twilight or scrubs;
The first two seasons of scrubs weren't that bad. In fact I could go as far as saying they were excellent. For some reason though, maybe the stars aligned or maybe there was some sort of fucking space anomaly, the writers decided that from the 3rd season onwards the main character should be a sterotypical gay person who isn't gay and that any resemblance of realism the characters had should be stripped away in the name of cartoon comedy. Is it just me or are writers nowadays purposely sabotaging decent shows?

Bad move on Lionhead's part. They should be appealing to every person possible in order to garner as much sales possible. I don't believe insulting potential customers will do much good.
 

Inkidu

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Mar 25, 2011
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There's an old saying, "Those who cannot do but think they can *****."

You guys are bitching.
Now don't get me wrong, I thought Fable III was darn good. I liked the setting and the design. I thought the voice acting was superb and the music was fitting, only a few scores ever made me stop and say, "Wow, that's pretty good."

Now, onto yer bitchin':

Combat is kind of lackluster, but it always has been. Spells, swords, guns. Standard not good not bad, but not eyebrow raising.

Co-op: I'm in your your statement calling your bullshit. DnD, Diablo, GAUNTLET. All co-op RPGs. Next!

Okay story: Story was okay, but it's hampered more by your use of gameplay mechanics as reinforcement than anything writing wise. Crawler awesome, one year and no one could possibly believe you awesome. Asking me to care about the people of Albion, a people whose emotional depth is swayed by toilet humor, no. No long duel with perceived evil brother. Lame. That and you morality system is so black and or white. There's no ambiguity. It just makes the world seem flat. You can't ask me to care about a bunch of freshly lobotomized nothings. Hell there was no "Lady Grey" option for marriage. Dude, give us some fucking princesses or princes to marry. Some NPCs of greater importance. It really makes me look like a hero that they're all children, but when a hero wants to marry he don't want to marry no Gertrude the Flutist. He wants to marry Gwen Evil Sorceress, or Claire the Fallen Angel, or Chipolata Queen of the Sexy ladies (insert equally awesome male options here).

If you can do all this, expand your game time by about ten hours, and keep Peter M. tied up in a broom closet until the game is basically done and waiting for a Tuesday to be released on then Fable IV will be good.
 

kromify

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Feb 9, 2011
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yeaaahh... stories seem to keep getting worse in the series. but i support fable 3 because it has stephen fry and simon pegg. i don't need any other reason :)
 

blackdwarf

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it was the worst game i played in 2010. nothing in the game had soul, but was was boring, repetitive, dull and easy. the idea of the game is great. have a story and you are making the decisions in that story. but not one of the fable games ever succeed in delivering that idea. its extremly 2-sided. gameplay extremly boring. and the story is just not that special. bioware succeed in making a game where you are the hero living the story and making the decisions. fable didn't.
 

Tom Phoenix

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Mar 28, 2009
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Yes, West. The customers must be wrong! There is no way you could produce a horrible game! It is all the customers fault for having "mistaken expectations!

...Seriously, it is beacuse of things like this that the modern gaming industry is in such a horrible state. Game developers live in denial and aren't willing to admit to themselves that they produced a terrible product.

To be fair, I can understand why; if you spent over 2 years of your life working on something, it is difficult to admit to yourself that you have failed. But alas, that is what one must do in order to find success. Besides, it's not like that is in any way unique to developing games.
 

Rooster Cogburn

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People saying the story wasn't very good was unfair. It's an interesting situation of you gather people together and then defeating the main bad guy. It's a pretty good story and it's pretty fun.
He says this like it's a point in the game's favor. Gathering people to defeat the bad guy is the most obvious and simplistic way to write an RPG. You can introduce them in interesting ways, or you can just give the main character a contrived quest to gather them up and give your writers the day off.

Fable I was just ok. Fable II was unplayable by mortal man. This guy isn't convincing me to try Fable III.
 

Mr Companion

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SirBryghtside said:
Mr Companion said:
I find Lionhead a little embarrassing, not in a horrible way. Its just that they put so much effort and passion into their games that somehow always end up... just plain bad really.
Im sorry they are! I liked the first few games (black and white, Fable the lost chapters The Movies ect) but other than that Black and White 2 and Fable 2/3 were all arguably very poor games with plots significantly weaker than advertised which makes it even more baffling that each time the creators boast about how fantastic its gonna be. Fable 2 was mind blowingly overhyped when really the story was riddled with holes, the combat was flicky and unsatisfying and the levels lacked pacing or structure.

Lionhead complains that gamers don't like their games, which is reportedly because gamers are all stupid and have no taste. But if the majority of your target audience dislike your game then I think the mindset of "Its them who are all mad not me" fails to be practical.
*notices pattern*

Why don't they just make new IPs?
A very good idea.