Fable III PC Review
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For as many good ideas as Fable III has, it simply fails to execute on so many of them. The cracks begin to show even five minutes into the game, and they rarely let up throughout its course. The first major choice in the game, between having the player's lover or the protestors executed, is meant to test the player's emotional ties and commitment, the personal versus the common good, but the decision falls completely flat because neither the protestors or the lover are given sufficient development one is someone we're assumed to care about by the game because it's a cute girl or guy, and the others are a vague construction of the innocent citizen being persecuted for simply speaking up. Such a decision doesn't test the emotions or morality, it only baffles, and many of Fable III's choices later in the game fall flat for similar reasons. For such a big part of the game, it's a shame that ultimately the decisions come down to either completely arbitrary ones for characters who are given little to no development, or to binary good/evil choices which end up being trivialised by the game's mechanics. This problem is only nagging in the early stages of the game, where some railroading is to be expected in order to get things going, but during the second half of the game it becomes nearly intolerable. During this period, the player must rule the land of Albion and raise money for an army to repel an impending invasion; don't have enough money by the time the invasion comes and civilians might die. Unfortunately, as King or Queen, every single decision you are called on to make boils down to either paying money out of the treasury to improve quality of life for citizens, or doing something horrible in order to fill the treasury; some of the choices you're given are so abhorrent as to be comical, like the option to turn an orphanage into a brothel, or instate child labour. There is never any moral ambiguity in any of these choices you're either a reasonable, benevolent ruler or a horrible dictator that everyone hates, and if you try to take the moderate route you'll have people alternately cursing and praising you as you walk the streets, as the game clearly isn't well equipped to handle a moderate ruler. It doesn't help that the game goes out of its way by highlighting just which choices are (good) and which are (bad) by labeling the options in either blue sparkles or red flames, just in case you might be confused as to whether turning a national wonder into a strip mine is going to be frowned upon.
What's worse, these decisions completely boil down to money, which is available in abundance. As with previous Fable games, copious amounts can be made by grinding mini-games or by simply buying up and renting out all property in the world, which poses a very brief initial challenge but soon becomes trivial as you make far, far more money than your expenses can ever incur. For all the fuss the game makes about the need to be thrifty and how you'll have to contribute to the treasury out of your own pocket, it becomes both hilarious and rather sad to see your finances constantly going up far in excess of what the costs of a good life and security for the entire nation incur. It also creates an absurd gameplay-story divide, whereby the clock is supposedly constantly ticking down but only advances at set plot intervals, yet your funds increase in real-time (about every five minutes), so it's possible to stand in the throne room for weeks on end and build up millions of dollars even though the plot states that destruction is knocking at the city gates. If there had actually been a true race against the clock, or the player's bank balance only went up based on plot progress, this problem would have been mitigated and the challenge of raising money could have been much more involving. Better yet, rather than reducing the impact of decisions down to money, the consequences could be more specific - for instance, perhaps your preservation of a certain forest would lead to under-equipped soldiers and thus more casualties, or removing prohibition would lead to lazier workers and thus shoddily-constructed defenses. Instead of being put in tough decisions where you may have to betray your word to the rebels you promised the world to for the greater good, this divide never means more than setting you back another twenty minutes' income. Perhaps this was done to make the game more accessible to mainstream and casual players, but the damage done to the second half of the game ends up being fairly irredeemable when ruling Albion was supposed to be such a key feature of the game in the first place.
