gzsfrk
11-02-2010, 07:29 AM
<table width="100%" style="padding:2px; background-color: black"><tr><td>Fable III Review [360]
Developed by: Lionhead Studios (http://lionhead.com/)
Published by: Microsoft Game Studios (http://www.microsoft.com/games/)
You pay: $59.99</td><td align="right"><img style="border:1px solid red;" src="http://evavhost.com/i/press/gzsfrk_head.jpg"></td></tr><tr><td>Release Date: October 26, 2010</td><td align=right>Matt 'gzsfrk' Williams</td></tr></table>
You still can’t plant a tree
Peter Molyneux. If ever there were a perfect example of a man who manages to succeed despite himself, it would be the god-game designer from Guildsford. He has perfected the art of creating really good games that see high sales yet still somehow manage to disappoint his most ardent fans. This happens because the starry-eyed British designer--acting as his own biggest promoter--has a penchant for promising Christmas lists of features to be included in his titles under development while ultimately delivering a more meager grocery list of elements in the final product. And even though Mr. Molyneux has been a good deal more muted than usual when setting expectations for his latest creation, Fable III, the retail release yet again remains a far cry from the flowery vision set out by its (in)famous creator.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_01.jpg
Fable III takes place 50 years after the events of Fable II. You play as a child of the hero from the previous game who lives in the shadow of their older sibling, King Logan. As the game’s story unfolds, you quickly learn that Logan has become a cruel tyrant who oppresses the people of Albion, imprisoning or slaughtering all who oppose (or that he even suspects of opposing) him. Thus it becomes your task to raise up an army of followers who can stand against your evil brother, overthrow him, and establish you as the rightful Hero king. The campaign plays out in three distinct acts: In the first, you focus on gaining combat strength and forging alliances, after which you wage battle to overthrow the king. The second is a period of monarchical decision making and preparation for the end-game confrontation. The third and final portion is an open-ended section where you can explore and manage your kingdom without the constraint of a fixed timeline or major pending event.
Let me be clear on one point: despite its flaws, I loved Fable II. Yes, the menu system was cludgy; yes, there was a dearth of memorable boss encounters; and yes, the ending was poo on stale melba toast. But I was able to look past those shortcomings and happily play through the game and both DLC expansions because of everything it got right: an open world with lots of character, distinctive set pieces, a good story, and enjoyable combat. Given my positive experience with Fable II, then, it shouldn’t be a bad thing that Fable III inherits so much from its predecessor. The problem is, it doesn’t so much inherit the features, concepts, and content from Fable II so much as it outright copies them. Indeed, if it weren’t for the big roman numeral “III” on the front of the box, those who play the game could well be forgiven for assuming that it wasn’t the next iteration of the Fable series so much as a stand-alone expansion for Fable II.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_02.jpg
Visually, the two games are nearly identical. The character styles have been tweaked a bit, doing away with the grotesquely disfigured body proportions and, amazingly, having some of Albion’s female NPCs look reasonably attractive. Albion itself has evolved from a 17th-century English setting to a steampunk 19th-century France theme with factories, period soldiers, and a few mechanical contraptions littering the landscape--when you’re in the city. But once you’re out wandering the country-side, you’d be hard pressed to say, judging by the environment alone, which game you were playing. Most of the monsters from the previous game are also here: bandits, hobbes, hollow men, shadow creatures, ghosts, and balverines each show up in droves, although they have at least been given slight make-overs. There are a few new enemies you’ll face, but they make up a minority of the mobs you’ll encounter. Demon doors also return for an encore along with flit switches, your dog serving as a glorified metal detector, and that same, infuriatingly long digging animation.
Character progression is significantly different than Fable II, but that’s unfortunately not a good thing. Rather than using your orbs (XP) to buy and upgrade abilities from a simple menu, you now progress down what’s called the “Road to Rule”--an actual in-game area you walk along littered with treasure chests that you open by spending "seals" which are gained by killing mobs, completing quests, and interacting with NPCs. That would be fine except that many of the upgrades you get by opening the chests are ridiculously trivial. Want to buy a home or business? There’s a chest for that. Want to dye your clothes or hair? There’s a chest for that. Want to get married, steal, or hug your kid? Yeah--there’s a chest for that. At least half of the chests you find on the RtR are for things that you could do outright in Fable II and feel like they were just placed there to make it look like there’s more character progression than there actually is.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_03.jpg
There are, of course, chests that give you significant upgrades such as new spells or increased power for melee, magic, and ranged attacks. But gone are the more useful Strength and Skill upgrades from Fable II such as Physique or Speed, which also means combat has changed significantly as well. You can no longer max out your ranged skills and target specific areas of an enemy (goodbye headshots), nor can you perform counter attacks in melee. And in much the same way that Fable II saw a reduction in magic spells from the original game, Fable III has likewise seen the number of available spells dropped from 9 to 7. However this isn’t all bad, as a magic combining mechanic called spell-weaving has been added. This allows the player to equip any two spells at one time to make for some interesting effects such as combining Force Push and Vortex, the result of which is that enemies are first slammed away from you before being picked up in a whirlwind for even more damage. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to figure out that the only combination you need for the entire game is Fire + Shock, the AoE version of which you can spam and win all battles aside from a few boss fights.
And that brings up another problem with Fable III: the combat. While Fable II had a great real-time battle mechanic, assigning each attack style to either the X, Y, or B face buttons, it was horribly unbalanced in favor of magic attacks, with ranged attacks being frequently useful and melee languishing as a mostly ineffective option. I had been hoping that Fable III would tweak the balance so that each style would be a more or less viable choice in most battles, but such is sadly not the case. For most mob encounters, you can either choose to engage in melee and risk taking a large amount of damage, or you can begin unleashing powerful magic attack after powerful magic attack until all nearby enemies are dead, losing little or no health in the process. There are some very nice melee and ranged custom kill animations, but these are only aesthetic in value and provide no functional improvement to the gameplay. And although the most powerful weapons in the game on a damage scale are melee, the ease and effectiveness of simply holding then releasing the magic button means that that is likely how you’ll handle most encounters.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_04.jpg
Lionhead has hit paydirt with some of the new features in Fable III. The re-done overworld map is fantastic, especially for the purposes of purchasing and maintaining your properties. It’s also a nice touch that most weapons now have their own “quests” which you can complete to provide combat bonuses. The decisions you get to make in the king’s court are very well done and provide genuine insight to the struggles of being a leader. It’s just a shame that this mechanic was only present during the second portion of the game and not an ongoing occurrence after you’ve won the final battle of story mode. But by far the greatest feature of Fable III are the new characters that are introduced. The love that went into creating and writing the dialog for your allies as well as the countless incidental characters you encounter is immediately apparent from the first time you hear them speak. And while this isn’t the best looking game you’ve played, I defy anyone to show me a greater repository of smartly written British wit and humor. From the chicken races to the tabletop RPG nerd mages (who had me literally laughing out loud as I played while struggling to wipe the tears from my eyes), Lionhead prove yet again that they remain the kings of English comedy in videogames.
Probably the most most widely touted new feature is the switch from a traditional menu system to the “sanctuary”, a refuge to which your player can retire at any time in order to perform actions like changing weapons or clothes, accessing the world map, or viewing your player stats--pretty much all of the tasks which would normally be accessed via an in-game menu. The problem is, just doing something different doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it better. Those who were tweaking their computers and fiddling with Linux in the mid-90s may recall a process monitor called psDooM (http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/). It was an implementation of Doom that allowed a system administrator to wander about a level of the game scattered around which were monsters, each of whom represented a system process or running application. To terminate the process, the admin could simply kill the monster. It was a novelty and even fairly entertaining for a short while, but it was a neither practical nor effective way of accomplishing the otherwise mundane task of process management. The same thing applies to the sanctuary: why should you have to teleport to a room, walk forward, and then press the A button to open another screen just to view the world map? Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply assign it to the Back button? While one can appreciate that the designers were trying to come up with a new game interface dynamic, they failed to create one that worked at least as well as the previous, more traditional implementation. Such an outcome is the very antithesis of progress.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_05.jpg
The multiplayer has supposedly seen a marked improvement from Fable II, now supporting independent movement in the same zone as well as the ability to form business partnerships with or marry other online or local players. Unfortunately, despite trying for over an hour I was unable to successfully connect to any other players via Xbox Live (I would either get disconnected or go into a never-ending “The other player has paused the game” state.). The ability to see other player orbs wandering around from within my own game is also not working correctly, so I’ve yet to be able to validate whether or not the improvements to the co-op play live up to the claims. What is working, though, is the store inside the sanctuary that supports in-game micro-transactions. There’s already a dog suit for sale, and it’s only 160 MSP ($2). Hurry and buy yours today before they run out!
Overall, Fable III is a good game, but one that feels like it’s taken several steps backward from the progress made in Fable II. The various characters and personalities are well developed with fantastically written and acted dialog, the story is engaging, and the execution of monarchical judgments once you become king is a great addition. But the game feels watered down, with character progression options limited and combat made simplistic to the point of being an afterthought. And the final battle, while a definite improvement over Fable II, was still a huge letdown and far less than I had been hoping for. So while I can indeed recommend Fable III to those who enjoyed the previous Fable titles, they should--ironically--expect more evolution than revolution from this one.
http://evavhost.com/public/35n.gif
<table width="100%" style="padding:2px"><tr><td width=33% valign=top>http://evavhost.com/public/the_good.jpg All the characters in the game are wonderfully acted with excellent dialog Great story with a villain that you will grow to absolutely despise and loads of genuinely great humor The new overworld map is brilliant John Cleese. That is all.</td><td width=33% valign=top>http://evavhost.com/public/the_bad.jpg Combat is simplified, even moreso than in Fable II, to the point of being dull Character progression is weak The sanctuary menu system is needlessly tedious and time consuming Far too much is recycled from Fable II in the way of enemies, puzzles, environments, music, and concepts Multiplayer is broken, but hey--at least the microtransactions are still up and running!</td><td width=33% valign=top>http://evavhost.com/public/the_ugly.jpg The thoughts that ran through my mind during the 20 minutes of credits that rolled following the final battle</td></tr></table>
Developed by: Lionhead Studios (http://lionhead.com/)
Published by: Microsoft Game Studios (http://www.microsoft.com/games/)
You pay: $59.99</td><td align="right"><img style="border:1px solid red;" src="http://evavhost.com/i/press/gzsfrk_head.jpg"></td></tr><tr><td>Release Date: October 26, 2010</td><td align=right>Matt 'gzsfrk' Williams</td></tr></table>
You still can’t plant a tree
Peter Molyneux. If ever there were a perfect example of a man who manages to succeed despite himself, it would be the god-game designer from Guildsford. He has perfected the art of creating really good games that see high sales yet still somehow manage to disappoint his most ardent fans. This happens because the starry-eyed British designer--acting as his own biggest promoter--has a penchant for promising Christmas lists of features to be included in his titles under development while ultimately delivering a more meager grocery list of elements in the final product. And even though Mr. Molyneux has been a good deal more muted than usual when setting expectations for his latest creation, Fable III, the retail release yet again remains a far cry from the flowery vision set out by its (in)famous creator.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_01.jpg
Fable III takes place 50 years after the events of Fable II. You play as a child of the hero from the previous game who lives in the shadow of their older sibling, King Logan. As the game’s story unfolds, you quickly learn that Logan has become a cruel tyrant who oppresses the people of Albion, imprisoning or slaughtering all who oppose (or that he even suspects of opposing) him. Thus it becomes your task to raise up an army of followers who can stand against your evil brother, overthrow him, and establish you as the rightful Hero king. The campaign plays out in three distinct acts: In the first, you focus on gaining combat strength and forging alliances, after which you wage battle to overthrow the king. The second is a period of monarchical decision making and preparation for the end-game confrontation. The third and final portion is an open-ended section where you can explore and manage your kingdom without the constraint of a fixed timeline or major pending event.
Let me be clear on one point: despite its flaws, I loved Fable II. Yes, the menu system was cludgy; yes, there was a dearth of memorable boss encounters; and yes, the ending was poo on stale melba toast. But I was able to look past those shortcomings and happily play through the game and both DLC expansions because of everything it got right: an open world with lots of character, distinctive set pieces, a good story, and enjoyable combat. Given my positive experience with Fable II, then, it shouldn’t be a bad thing that Fable III inherits so much from its predecessor. The problem is, it doesn’t so much inherit the features, concepts, and content from Fable II so much as it outright copies them. Indeed, if it weren’t for the big roman numeral “III” on the front of the box, those who play the game could well be forgiven for assuming that it wasn’t the next iteration of the Fable series so much as a stand-alone expansion for Fable II.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_02.jpg
Visually, the two games are nearly identical. The character styles have been tweaked a bit, doing away with the grotesquely disfigured body proportions and, amazingly, having some of Albion’s female NPCs look reasonably attractive. Albion itself has evolved from a 17th-century English setting to a steampunk 19th-century France theme with factories, period soldiers, and a few mechanical contraptions littering the landscape--when you’re in the city. But once you’re out wandering the country-side, you’d be hard pressed to say, judging by the environment alone, which game you were playing. Most of the monsters from the previous game are also here: bandits, hobbes, hollow men, shadow creatures, ghosts, and balverines each show up in droves, although they have at least been given slight make-overs. There are a few new enemies you’ll face, but they make up a minority of the mobs you’ll encounter. Demon doors also return for an encore along with flit switches, your dog serving as a glorified metal detector, and that same, infuriatingly long digging animation.
Character progression is significantly different than Fable II, but that’s unfortunately not a good thing. Rather than using your orbs (XP) to buy and upgrade abilities from a simple menu, you now progress down what’s called the “Road to Rule”--an actual in-game area you walk along littered with treasure chests that you open by spending "seals" which are gained by killing mobs, completing quests, and interacting with NPCs. That would be fine except that many of the upgrades you get by opening the chests are ridiculously trivial. Want to buy a home or business? There’s a chest for that. Want to dye your clothes or hair? There’s a chest for that. Want to get married, steal, or hug your kid? Yeah--there’s a chest for that. At least half of the chests you find on the RtR are for things that you could do outright in Fable II and feel like they were just placed there to make it look like there’s more character progression than there actually is.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_03.jpg
There are, of course, chests that give you significant upgrades such as new spells or increased power for melee, magic, and ranged attacks. But gone are the more useful Strength and Skill upgrades from Fable II such as Physique or Speed, which also means combat has changed significantly as well. You can no longer max out your ranged skills and target specific areas of an enemy (goodbye headshots), nor can you perform counter attacks in melee. And in much the same way that Fable II saw a reduction in magic spells from the original game, Fable III has likewise seen the number of available spells dropped from 9 to 7. However this isn’t all bad, as a magic combining mechanic called spell-weaving has been added. This allows the player to equip any two spells at one time to make for some interesting effects such as combining Force Push and Vortex, the result of which is that enemies are first slammed away from you before being picked up in a whirlwind for even more damage. Unfortunately, it doesn’t take long to figure out that the only combination you need for the entire game is Fire + Shock, the AoE version of which you can spam and win all battles aside from a few boss fights.
And that brings up another problem with Fable III: the combat. While Fable II had a great real-time battle mechanic, assigning each attack style to either the X, Y, or B face buttons, it was horribly unbalanced in favor of magic attacks, with ranged attacks being frequently useful and melee languishing as a mostly ineffective option. I had been hoping that Fable III would tweak the balance so that each style would be a more or less viable choice in most battles, but such is sadly not the case. For most mob encounters, you can either choose to engage in melee and risk taking a large amount of damage, or you can begin unleashing powerful magic attack after powerful magic attack until all nearby enemies are dead, losing little or no health in the process. There are some very nice melee and ranged custom kill animations, but these are only aesthetic in value and provide no functional improvement to the gameplay. And although the most powerful weapons in the game on a damage scale are melee, the ease and effectiveness of simply holding then releasing the magic button means that that is likely how you’ll handle most encounters.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_04.jpg
Lionhead has hit paydirt with some of the new features in Fable III. The re-done overworld map is fantastic, especially for the purposes of purchasing and maintaining your properties. It’s also a nice touch that most weapons now have their own “quests” which you can complete to provide combat bonuses. The decisions you get to make in the king’s court are very well done and provide genuine insight to the struggles of being a leader. It’s just a shame that this mechanic was only present during the second portion of the game and not an ongoing occurrence after you’ve won the final battle of story mode. But by far the greatest feature of Fable III are the new characters that are introduced. The love that went into creating and writing the dialog for your allies as well as the countless incidental characters you encounter is immediately apparent from the first time you hear them speak. And while this isn’t the best looking game you’ve played, I defy anyone to show me a greater repository of smartly written British wit and humor. From the chicken races to the tabletop RPG nerd mages (who had me literally laughing out loud as I played while struggling to wipe the tears from my eyes), Lionhead prove yet again that they remain the kings of English comedy in videogames.
Probably the most most widely touted new feature is the switch from a traditional menu system to the “sanctuary”, a refuge to which your player can retire at any time in order to perform actions like changing weapons or clothes, accessing the world map, or viewing your player stats--pretty much all of the tasks which would normally be accessed via an in-game menu. The problem is, just doing something different doesn’t necessarily mean you’re doing it better. Those who were tweaking their computers and fiddling with Linux in the mid-90s may recall a process monitor called psDooM (http://psdoom.sourceforge.net/). It was an implementation of Doom that allowed a system administrator to wander about a level of the game scattered around which were monsters, each of whom represented a system process or running application. To terminate the process, the admin could simply kill the monster. It was a novelty and even fairly entertaining for a short while, but it was a neither practical nor effective way of accomplishing the otherwise mundane task of process management. The same thing applies to the sanctuary: why should you have to teleport to a room, walk forward, and then press the A button to open another screen just to view the world map? Wouldn’t it have been easier to simply assign it to the Back button? While one can appreciate that the designers were trying to come up with a new game interface dynamic, they failed to create one that worked at least as well as the previous, more traditional implementation. Such an outcome is the very antithesis of progress.
http://evavhost.com/i/reviews/fable3_05.jpg
The multiplayer has supposedly seen a marked improvement from Fable II, now supporting independent movement in the same zone as well as the ability to form business partnerships with or marry other online or local players. Unfortunately, despite trying for over an hour I was unable to successfully connect to any other players via Xbox Live (I would either get disconnected or go into a never-ending “The other player has paused the game” state.). The ability to see other player orbs wandering around from within my own game is also not working correctly, so I’ve yet to be able to validate whether or not the improvements to the co-op play live up to the claims. What is working, though, is the store inside the sanctuary that supports in-game micro-transactions. There’s already a dog suit for sale, and it’s only 160 MSP ($2). Hurry and buy yours today before they run out!
Overall, Fable III is a good game, but one that feels like it’s taken several steps backward from the progress made in Fable II. The various characters and personalities are well developed with fantastically written and acted dialog, the story is engaging, and the execution of monarchical judgments once you become king is a great addition. But the game feels watered down, with character progression options limited and combat made simplistic to the point of being an afterthought. And the final battle, while a definite improvement over Fable II, was still a huge letdown and far less than I had been hoping for. So while I can indeed recommend Fable III to those who enjoyed the previous Fable titles, they should--ironically--expect more evolution than revolution from this one.
http://evavhost.com/public/35n.gif
<table width="100%" style="padding:2px"><tr><td width=33% valign=top>http://evavhost.com/public/the_good.jpg All the characters in the game are wonderfully acted with excellent dialog Great story with a villain that you will grow to absolutely despise and loads of genuinely great humor The new overworld map is brilliant John Cleese. That is all.</td><td width=33% valign=top>http://evavhost.com/public/the_bad.jpg Combat is simplified, even moreso than in Fable II, to the point of being dull Character progression is weak The sanctuary menu system is needlessly tedious and time consuming Far too much is recycled from Fable II in the way of enemies, puzzles, environments, music, and concepts Multiplayer is broken, but hey--at least the microtransactions are still up and running!</td><td width=33% valign=top>http://evavhost.com/public/the_ugly.jpg The thoughts that ran through my mind during the 20 minutes of credits that rolled following the final battle</td></tr></table>