Flyv's Warcraft Blog

Fable 3: how to ruin an ending

I just finished Fable 3 and I'm pissed. Long story short; I got screwed when the game advanced too quickly and removed my ability to choose how to finish the game. Rest of this post contains broad spoilers about the structure of the game and the main events. I don't think it'd ruin the game for you, but if you want to play Fable 3 with no idea what happens, stop reading. (Personally I give the game a 3 out of 5, definitely skippable.)

The main story arc is in two parts. Part 1: develop as a hero and overthrow your brother, the tyrant king. Part 2: become the king and make a series of difficult choices. The choices in part 2 are interesting: you can either do the good thing (say, making a lake a nature preserve) or doing the evil thing (draining the lake and strip mining the lakebed). The catch is the evil thing makes more money for your treasury and you're told you have 1 year to save up enough money to build up defenses against the Big Bad and save your people. There's even a handy counter: days remaining, money needed to save people.

I liked the second part of the game, it was nuanced storytelling and required making actual difficult choices. (Presented to you by your secretary Hobson, no less). It also presents a pretty bleak moral view of the world, that leaders have to be jerks or else their people die. But ok, I can go with that. And I had a trick! I did all the goody two-shoes choices, spending all the money. But I had my own personal real estate fortune. My plan was to make enough money off of rent to cover half the kingdom's needs, then sell all my real estate to make up the rest and save the world! So clever.

Then I got screwed. I'm sitting there with 121 days to go, doing my story, when I turned in a quest and suddenly a big SAVING appeared on the screen. Then I'm teleported to the Narrator telling me my time is up, I'd made my choice, and all my people are going to die. No warning, no chance to tie up loose ends, no chance to use my money to save my people. I still had 121 days left, wtf? And the game doesn't keep old saves, so no way to go back and undo the damage.

I finished the game. And got a big rewarding speech about how I was a hero and saved the kingdom. Followed by a popup text saying I was a scoundrel and the few remaining people left alive all cursed my name forever more. Now the kingdom is largely empty, no NPCs wandering around, and my game is essentially over. Reading comments online I'm not the only person to have been tricked this way.

Two big mistakes ruined Fable 3 for me. One was triggering the endgame sequence without warning. The other was not having any way to go back to a previous save. Both are really amateur mistakes to make in a game that's supposed to be so polished.

 

What I'm playing

Still working off the fall gaming orgy, here's what I'm playing:

• Fable 3. Sitting down to play this intensively, but 12 hours in I'm finding it pretty tedious. There's not enough choice in the main line and the side activities are boring. It almost feels like the last gasp of story-driven classic RPGs. But it's beautifully done and more fun than not, so I'll stick with it. I just reached the big inflection point in the game where you become the king and have to make hard choices for the health of your kingdom, it's interesting.
• Super Meat Boy. What a fantastic little platform game. Totally worth playing. The key innovation is that each level is very hard but also very short (5-20 seconds), with no penalty or delay for dying and trying again.
• Bit.Trip Beat. Pong meets Rez. Very simple gameplay but the music is great. It's also too hard on the PC. The iPhone version lets you resume midway through a level, but on the PC you have to start at the very beginning each time.
• Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood. Only played a little bit of multiplayer so far, but boy is that interesting! It's much like deathmatch in an FPS only subtlety and stealth are rewarded instead of aiming skills. Interesting game.
• Lego Harry Potter. My partner and I played this together, a first for us, and had a great time. We finished the main story but I hope we go back to start getting all the extra collectibles.
• World of Keflings. I really liked Kingdom for Keflings, it's a weird game, sort of an RTS but without any conflict. Just building. The sequel seems to have more story and character, which frankly I could do without, but a quick look suggests they kept the parts of the first game I liked.
• Minecraft. I'm mostly bored with it, not to mention fed up with the hideous bugs, but it still holds my interest. My current single player project is building a mob tower: a tall dark building that spawns monsters, then kills them with a lava knife and collects drops via water currents.

 

Here's what's on deck:

• Civilization V. The big patch finally came out and apparently the game is more balanced and challenging. Time to go back to it.
• Fallout 3: New Vegas. Again, a big patch, this one fixing some of the horrible game-breaking bugs they launched with.
• Glitch. Not a traditional game by any stretch, a collaborative social game from the team that created Flickr out of their initial project, Game Neverending. Still in closed beta.
• Dead Space, Gratuitous Space Battles, Psychonauts, Dawn of War 2: Chaos Rising, Plants vs. Zombies, Hitman: Blood Money. These are all games I bought during Steam sales and haven't played.

 

And what's not on my list:

• Any sort of MMO. Warcraft Cataclysm has zero appeal for me. I hear they've made class mechanics more interesting with a bias towards priority queues, so the gameplay is more fun, but it's way too much of the same addictive game I stopped playing. And no other MMO out there now looks interesting to me. Rift is the new darling but I predict it won't last long.
• Any sort of Facebook game.
• Call of Duty: Black Ops. I played a lot of this in the fall, but I'm bored with it now.
• Starcraft 2. I never finished the single player game, and I never met my goal of getting competent and multiplayer. I've got such a love/hate relationship with RTS games as it is and SC2 emphasizes all the stuff I hate.

Single button RPG

The Flash game Super PSTW Action RPG is worth playing for 5 minutes for the lulz. OTOH between this and Fable 3, I'm tired of playing ironic winky winky RPGs. Give me epic story with no calling attention to how silly the RPG genre is!