In this groundbreaking role-playing adventure game from Lionhead Studios, your every action determines your character's skills, appearance and morality. Your character's life story is created from childhood through to adulthood and on to old age. Grow from an inexperienced child into the most powerful being in the world, spoken of by all and immortalized in legend.
Now, Fable:TLC is a good game. It's not a GREAT game, but it is a good one. The majority of the flaws from which it suffers are due not to actual bad design, but instead not enough GOOD design.
For example: the quests. There aren't enough of them. The quests that are in the game are fairly engaging, no farming to be found, although there are a couple of "go-get-em's." The problem's not the QUALITY, rather strictly a matter of QUANTITY: there are only enough quests in the game to guarantee about 12 hours of solid gameplay for a dedicated gamer. Contrast that with any game in Bethesda's Elder Scrolls series - I guarantee that without cheating it is totally impossible to win any game in the series in under 50 hours.
The game's morality system is fairly interesting in an academic sort of way - by which I mean, seeing what the game devs decided would count as good or evil. Not murders or stealing, but the minor stuff like healing party members, using particular spells, wearing dark, scary looking armor (?!?) or tattling on an adulterous husband. The only problem is, it doesn't go far enough. Although people will flee from you if you get scaaaary enough, shops will still sell to you unless you actually attack the shopkeeper, and towns have no memory at ALL - if you leave town and go throw some coins in a church donation bowl, suddenly you are Golden Boy again, and everyone loves you. Although your appearance changes based on your "alignment," it doesn't seem to really matter; you are at no point so repulsive that a change of armor won't cause women all over the game - and men too - to fall at your feet.
The romance system is fairly interesting, if not realistic at all. You can cause anyone in the game world to fall in love with you if you are impressive enough looking and say "hey," in a smutty kind of way, over and over again. Gifts ranging from flowers and chocolates to jewels of every description give you a boost in how effective your flirting is, and soon the tiny floating heart over your victim's head will become a giant golden heart, at which point they will begin pestering you in a VERY rude way for a wedding ring. Once you get them one, they pester you for a house, and you can acquire one in a couple of places. Actually, you can acquire several, complete with wives or husbands, in different locations at the same time, and none of your spouses will ever figure it out. You can have sex in this game, although it doesn't actually show anything; but you can listen to a variety of moans and groans based on how good you are at it - practice makes perfect. Occasionally, if you treat your spouse(s) well, they will give you presents, or if badly, divorce you in loud, public fashion, causing you to get laughed at by local children.
Combat is fairly well put together, with three divisions of fighting: magic, ranged, and melee. Melee is fairly straightforward, the more times you hit without getting hit, the more you charge up your weapon, until you can unleash a super attack. Repeat as necessary. Ranged is a function of patience; the longer you let your attacks charge before loosing an arrow, the more damage you do, allowing a constant stream of one-hit kills on even enemies of much higher level if you're patient. Magic... Ah, now there's the gravy.
I'll tell you why.
Unlike in melee, where your attacks move you around, and ranged, where you're pretty much obligated to stay locked onto one enemy, whether by target locking or sniper zooming, when using magic you can pretty much move freely, because most of your useful spells are area-of-effect spells. This is where combat starts to break down, though, as once you master the Enflame spell, you can pretty much whup the crap out of any monster in the game, including the bosses. The area-of-effect spells added in the Lost Chapters expansion are somewhat less unbalanced, as they require such a significant charge time that the enemies will virtually certainly get a free lick or two while you get your spell ready. Enflame, however, leaves you temporarily invulnerable to enemy damage, covers an enormous area, does really impressive damage, and best of all has no casting delay at all. None. Not even a little bit.
Which leads me to my next point, kids: don't smoke crack and then design a questing system. Why do I say that? Because the quest system is innately exploitable to a really impressive degree. See, saving your game outside of an active quest area is a "world save," which when loaded deposits you, items, xp, and all, right where you left off. Saving during an active quest, however, is a "hero save," which means that if you load it, you keep all the xp and items you'd found to that point in the quest, but start outside the quest area in the last position you were in before beginning the quest.
What does this mean? Well, effectively, it means that you only have to struggle for xp and items until you receive the Hobbe Cave quest, and then you're set like Chet. The Hobbe Cave quest features a really huge, ongoing outpouring of enemies, a ton of items, loads and loads of xp, and can be repeated ad nauseum until your character is maxed out in every stat- and it's about the 6th quest you get. Also, one of the items you can get repeatedly during this quest is a Silver Key, which means that you can open any treasure chest in the game by the time you've been playing for about 3 hours.
Similar exploitability is built into the trading system, as well, allowing you to trade repeatedly with the same trader without interruption until you have amassed amounts of wealth so stratospheric it looks like the score that breaks Pac-Man. See, the traders base their prices on the scarcity of goods, which means that if they have a bunch, it's cheap, but if they have one, it costs a ton. So, you go get yourself about 9,000 gold, run around to every merchant you can find and buy them out of health and magic potions, and then go to the merchant in the first town and sell all of them at once. Then buy them back for less than you sold them for. Repeat as necessary. Ultimately, you need about 50 potions for this to make any serious headway, but you can get that many pretty quickly. The more potions you have, the faster your money goes up. This can be used with any commodity in the world, although jewels are ultimately the way to go - there's one merchant at which you can make a million plus a trade, over and over again, just for selling a jewel he carries in lots of 50.
There are, however, tons of interesting touches to offset this kind of goofiness. For example, you can buy businesses and houses, and rent them out. Unfortunately, this is ALSO a feature the devs didn't feel like showing off, so they only put in a few places where you can buy either houses or businesses in the entire game. As a result, if you want to buy a bar, for example, the best way to go about it is to pick one, and kill everyone in it. If your reputation is good, or at least you're wearing "Good Guy" armor, you can pay the guards to leave you alone - in fact, the morality system and its consequences are so profound in their effects upon the game world that you can usually tell the town guards "I'm Sorry," (there's an in-game emote for it, and you can hotkey it,) and have them totally forgive your brutal murder of dozens of people.
Wait, that's more goofiness.
Well, you can customize your weapons, and your character. Um, like, with haircuts, beards, tattoos, and different clothing. The tattoos and clothing can even make you more evil or good!
Wait, that's goofy, too.
Dammit.
See, this is the problem with Fable: it's not a bad game, it's just that although the devs came up with any number of really interesting ideas, they didn't bother to think them all the way through. Logical Consequences = interesting game world, if and only if you bother to actually HAVE consequences, and stuff. Saying "I'm Sorry," after murdering 25 people should not get you of the hook, no matter HOW good your reputation is.
All in all, this is an interesting game, and certainly worth playing, but I really hope that in the inevitable sequel, the devs at Lionhead Studios manage to convince themselves to carry things through, and to avoid the screamingly annoying exploitive nature of the current setup. Honestly, make money easier to make honestly, and players won't have to invent elaborate ways to defraud your merchants. Leaving loopholes to allow players to defraud your merchants so that you don't have to actually create a working economy is just lazy.
Oh, and since I haven't mentioned it yet: welcome back to Xeno's Guide!
