Fable 3, or Fable meh

Unfortunately due to high demand of my skills as a Viking and a writer, this blog will be a little short. Also, I don't know how to connect my Xbox to record my awesome playing ability. and most devastatingly the fact that Fable 3 has come down with a chronic case of the 'meh'.

Fable 3 is set one hundred years after Fable 2, the start of the industrial age, and you are the evil kings brother or sister (one of the first choices you have to make, and the only one that seems to have effect on how something looks in the game). After having your lover/friend shot or some stupid peasants shot, you run away like a little bitch with your butler and some guard or soldier guy that will INCESSANTLY talk whenever you two are walking towards your objective. Well, when I say walk I mean I run and he dawdles his lard arse behind me. This somehow fails to kill the conversation that follows you despite being about three kilometers away.

Combat is split up into three sections, melee, magic and shooting.

Magic: is finally useful, unlike in Fable 2 where if magic was what you focused on you would inevitably lose like the chump you were. The area damage it provides now can actually stop attackers, making it useful during gameplay! When I discovered this I almost wept with joy, and I probably would have if Vikings knew how to weep.

Melee: is still retarded and not quite as good as shooting, especially when you might be doing roughly the same damage, the advantage being that you wont get hit. Having to hold down a button to block is something else that mystifies me. The whole point of a game is to minimise reaction time between pressing and action to make the game more immersive. So instead of last minute blocks you are more likely to get slashed the fuck out of before you finally hold your weapon up in front of your face by which time the enemy is quite content to stand back and laugh at your bleeding face.

Shooting: is shittier than it was in two but still quite good, and this is where the 'industrial age' climate of the game truly shits its pants and then tries to blame the smell on you.
Imagine this: nearing the end of Fable 2 you can buy the best possible 'normal' gun from a travelling salesperson. Clockwork pistols and rifles, which shoot, as I recall, about 6-7 times before reloading and the reloading is as smooth and quick as the Gentle Beauty through a peasants abdomen. In the industrial age, however, they've decided to forsake clockwork machines and give you a shitty pistol that fires slowly, only fires 4 or so shots, and takes about as long to reload as it does to swim to France (my best time including one count of raiding is about 5 hours).

Your abilities are no longer bought after killing enemies in certain fashions like in 2. Now you get points from doing missions and talking to people and crushing skulls and then to use these points you go to a secret road and open chests that magically unlock new power. In reality the main difference is that the points are universal now. That would have been great, but unless you somehow don't do every main mission you will always end up with enough points to open up the more important chests. No longer do you focus on one area, you just suck it up like a chump and become 'multi-skilled' or more accurately, 'bland'.

Despite Fable 2 taking as long to play as it takes me to walk down to the corner shop and pillage it, I really enjoyed it. Once you got over the fact that melee and magic were useless compared to the shooting, and the fact that the shooting skill tree had all the useful abilities (such as the ability to dodge. Seriously, figure that shit out) it was quite a ride.

Fable 3, on the other hand, seems like so much more of an effort. No longer can you pose and dance and belch for scores of people to come over and eventually love you, you have to talk to all of these suckers individually. I don't like people, it's what makes being a Viking much easier. Not only do I not like people, I fail to see how I should give a damn about cgi people that have the same charming conversation techniques as characters from the Sims do (with their irritating gibbering).

Getting people to like you is the next step in the drunken stumbling of this game. Once you unlock the ability to flirt, your character becomes a raging bisexual and cant talk or interact with anyone of any sex without dancing with them or tickling them or just generally being a massive pervert.

Because you can only talk to ONE PERSON AT A TIME, you have to go through this same song and dance (quite literally) before the dumb schmuck will inevitably send you on a quest which requires you to either run around the corner and dig something up or deliver a letter or parcel to some other schmuck somewhere else. And then they like you.

I would not go through that effort to save my Viking mothers life (if Odin had not already taken her soul in that Longship collision...it was late and it had been raining, the hull slick with oil...they swerved, but too late, they were never seen again...). I'm serious. If I got asked to make ONE MORE peasant like me from people threatening death on someone I love, I would give them this message:

Dear kidnappers,
Fuck no.

Yours sincerely,
The Viking Gamer

Fable 3 also failed to keep a lot of promises, or intends to and just fails miserably. If Fable 3 had promised you a sandwich it would have given you two mouldy slices of bread with a nicely coiled turd in between.

Guns and weapons evolve depending how you use them. Well, that's a complete pile of shit sandwich. The will evolve if you reach a certain criteria, like kill 500 enemies during the day time, or eat a shit sandwich. This is the equivalent of an rpg saying; 'you can go anywhere you want, but if you want to go anywhere it has to be down that road' to which you would reply; 'but you promised the gameplay would change on how I played!' to which it would reply yet again, 'and it will, as long as you follow that road only'.

This isn't where it ends though, and if you've just bitten into afore mentioned sandwich and your teeth are brown and you wonder why you ever bit into it in the first place, prepare yourself for another, big bite and try to swallow this:

Guns and weapons damage differs so greatly that there is no point, I'll say it again with more emphasis, NO POINT in wasting your time trying to kill hundreds of enemies or walking however far for the upgrade. If one weapon is 50 damage and another is 100, unless the former weapons upgrade makes it more powerful than the 100 ( and assuming the 100 stays the same or gets a different power which isn't upgraded damage) then WHY WOULD YOU EVER CHOOSE THE FUCKING 50 DAMAGE GUN!?

Fable 3 promised innovation in making your character unique, but it lies. It's a phony, a big fat phony.

Fable 2 had weapons with slots in them, in which a player could fill with an emerald that caused fire damage or something that stole life or something that made it more powerful. Mathematically anyone could have had up to 1000 different weapon combinations. Choice=individuality.

Fable 3, on the other hand, makes you a giant bland sack that needs to be beaten.

Lastly, the choices. Oh the choices. I've done two missions with choices, one where I either killed this guy so I could marry his wife who he got me to seduce so he could get divorced, or another when I gave two dead brothers a book of death that they used to summon a party for ghosts.

In the former I let the guy go because quite frankly his wife was a bitch. To do so, I simply walked out of the house. In the second occurrence, I was supposed to either tell the brothers to go back to their graves where their dead mother had asked me to tell them to go, or give them the book.

What I got instead was the option to give them the book, and that was the ONLY OPTION.

I have no idea if it was a glitch or a bug, either way it would surprise me as this game is only too full of glitches and bugs, such as that glowing trail never, EVER being there when you actually need it, or prompts just simply not appearing on screen or buttons simply not working.

I'm giving Fable 3 four 'mehs' out of five, and a score of 2/5.

Til next time, the gamer with horns on his hat.