This is not a Fable!

To entertain myself, I have now been playing the remastered edition of Fable. Yes, that Fable; the one from 2004.

For those not in the know about these things, the game was perhaps most famous for the job Peter Molyneux, the head of Lionhead Studios, did in hyping it to the stars. He claimed that it would be the most beautiful, revolutionary, immersive gaming experience ever. A game that would allow you to experience a living world where you are free to interact with other characters however you want.

The game that was actually released was…not a good game. In fact, it was shit.

Now, I don’t think it would be fair to judge the game by the lunacy of Mr. Molyneux, and so I prefer to judge it on its own merits. That said, it was a curiously unfortunate thing for Molyneux to focus on hyping up the immersion factor in particular. See, there is none.

What do you think about when I say the word “immersion” in a gaming context? A living world with different people going about their lives? Being able to interact and converse with NPCs? Good voice acting?

The developers of Fable clearly put a lot of work and effort into making sure the game has absolutely none of those.

The NPCs are all the same, and every single one speaks in ridiculous phony british accents. They can have different facial hair, or a different hat, but they don’t have personalities to begin with, let alone different ones. The extent of your interactions with them is using stupid emotes, like flexing, laughing, or belching. You can’t talk to them, you can’t hold conversations with them. You don’t even have a voice. And I’m not talking in the way most player characters in RPGs don’t speak but you still choose lines of dialogue. You simply just stand there gormlessly. You can marry them, but why the hell would you ever want to?!

I suppose we have to get to the combat, but I don’t want to. It is atrocious.

It’s a pretty standard affair; you lock onto enemies one by one, and you attack. If you want to experience the joy of “Whack, whack, whack, bigger whack”, you can use melee. If you want to shoot slowly from afar, you can use a bow. If you want to die, you can use magic. Seriously, magic sucks in this game! It does less damage than whanking things with a sword, but you have a limited mana pool.

The targeting mechanic is a topic all of its own. It’s not good. Not good at all. It’s absolutely terrible. It’s a pretty standard affair; you pull the left trigger to lock onto an enemy, and you proceed to turn him into mulch. Putting a spanner in the works of this is the fact that whether or not you hit your enemy is not so much dependent on your relative position and direction to your target, than whether or not you prayed to the correct gods this morning. When the time has come and your enemy lies dead, if you don’t release the trigger you will automatically target the next being in the vicinity, without any regard whatsoever for their attitude to you. Yes, I’ve killed quite a few peasants in my day because the targeting system decided that they were the greatest threat and not the huge demonic beast slightly behind them.

I suppose that should be enough. It should, but it isn’t.

When you knock down an enemy with a strong blow, you just have to wait for them to slowly stand up again before you’ve even able to damage them.

On top of it all, your melee attacks have a wind-up time; it takes a moment to swing your sword before it connects. Naturally the enemies have no such limitation; they can attack instantly with no delay. Because if there is one thing that aids your immersion more than anything it is the feeling that the enemies play by different rules than you do.

The story is barely worth talking about, because it’s so bog standard. Your village is burned down when you’re a child, and you grow up to be a great hero who defeats the great evil and saves the day. During this journey you find that your mother and sister actually survived. I’m not leaving things out for comic effect, that is actually all that the story is about.

And the game world? There’s even less to say about it; tiny little areas that you can “roam” around for 2 minutes. It’s linear. The line goes back and forth, but there is no open world to explore.

I purchased this game not that long ago, and this is my very first playthrough. Have no doubt; there won’t be another. I actually had fairly high expectations. The game had gotten rather good reviews from all the review sites I frequent, and I was perfectly aware that the hype over it was nonsensical. Add to that the fact that Fable 2 was an excellent game, and it was all around a dour experience.

I’ll be back with a review of Fable 2 once I’m done with that. Maybe it’ll turn out to be shit too.

Toodles.