Fable 3 Has Been Announced For Production

I haven't quite decided how to feel about Peter Molyneux. After the announcement at GamesCom this year that there was a third Fable (Fable 3) in production, I went back to see what the hype was about Fable 2 before the game was released--and hearing Peter Molyneux promise that the game will make you feel love and sympathy for any of the NPCs made me laugh and feel a bit guilty on the inside, too.

For all of the optimism in Molyneux's speeches, I get the impression that he's not much of a gamer himself. Even from the way he touches the controller and refers to the buttons, he seems like the kind of person who can't really grasp the basic concept of what makes gaming fun or relate to gamers--just speculate on articles that he's found in a textbook somewhere. I have to admit that I felt bad while I was watching one interview in particular, in which Peter Molyneux talks about us, the players, being intended to feel love towards our in-game spouses and children, because for all of the promises that he makes, the final product is a joke.

If you've never played a Fable game before, let me recap the basic premise for you. In Fable, you start out as a young, wholesome child whose life is undoubtedly torn apart one day by bandits or a bullet to the chest, tossing you out of a castle window (which you somehow miraculously end up surviving with no explanation other than the fact that Heroes--yes, they're actually born with that title--are simply made out of tougher stuff that you and I). From there, you grow up and come back to town as either the most benevolent Mother Theresa of the land or a comic villain whose pastime it is to slaughter entire villages.

So you have your basic Ultimate Good or Ultimate Evil scenario.

Then, during your quest to do something or other, you can find a suitable partner and settle down briefly to raise some kids. It sounds like a nice layer of realism to add in theory, but what it does in practice is become utterly shallow and useless (except to earn achievements if you're playing Fable 2). Every NPC is given the exact same voice and spouts the exact same lines of dialogue so no offspring that you are able to produce will ever have any unique qualities (nor any spouse or any NPC that you encounter during the game for that matter). You are given a dog, which will tug at your heartstrings a bit before the canine becomes annoying. At the end of the game, when you are given the choice to either save thousands of people, save your dog or take one million dollars home with you as a consolation prize for saving the world, Peter Molyneux stated in an interview that he wanted us to turn off the game, go lie down in our beds and think long and hard about our decision (he is assuming, of course, that everybody is playing a Mother Theresa-type character). I chose to save the dog, forsaking light points at the end, only so that I could continue digging stuff up during the boring aftermath in which there's really nothing left to do whatsoever.

The combat is supposed to blow your socks off with mind-boggling levels of customization, however if you really suck at the game and only manage to earn so much experience, there's really only three avenues of character progression for you to take (and if you are even a casual gamer, you'll earn enough experience to max out every single stat and ability before the game is three quarters of the way done).

But I digress. This has all turned into a big, long-winded speech about Fable's shortcomings when, if you've already played Fable before, you either know what I'm talking about or condemn me for having such blasphemous thoughts. There are many other nits that still need picking out of Fable 2 (the economy for one, in which you could only earn enough wealth by pressing the A button to complete a little repetitive task for hours on end), but I'll leave it to the next Fable game to disappoint yet again with its shallow NPCs and unsatisfying gameplay elements. If the next Fable feels like an actual heroic tale instead of a life simulator with less ridiculous dialogue and gimmicks and more characters who you can genuinely care about, then I'll gleefully take back the things I've said about Peter Molyneux.