Fable III: The Good, The Bad, and The Surprising

In a new opinion piece, Gamasutra breaks down many of the same strengths and weaknesses we’ve seen pointed out for Fable III since the sequel’s release a couple of months ago. I was never a huge fan of the Fable series to begin with, and the third installment took some serious turns for the worse:

You can’t give gifts to people for no reason in Fable III, you can only give someone a gift if they ask for it someone you’re courting may ask for flowers or jewelry, for example. By the end of my game, I could have filled a warehouse with the amount of unused gifts I had lying around.

I fondly remember the many times the original Fable had a room full of people laughing hysterically. We would often get wasted in town and generally cause a ruckus you know, because we could. Breaking into someone’s house to give them some chocolate, then paying off the guard just before belching in his face that sort of absurdity is what Fable is famous for.

Now, you can’t use food or drink items unless you are injured, and that includes alcohol. That’s right: You cannot get drunk unless you’re in the middle of a fight, which is a rather inconvenient time to do so. Alternatively, you cannot eat all the blueberry pies in Albion until you are a corpulent mess just because you feel like it or because a Demon Door wants to challenge popular notions of beauty.

One of the most unbelievable and unexpected changes is how your morality is manifested physically on your character, or rather, how it is not. In both previous games if you become evil you got to sport big gnarly horns, your skin grew pale and gross, your hair turned black, and you went bald you generally looked like a pretty bad dude, which is probably what you were going for.

On the other hand, if you became a goody-two-shoes heroic type, you started to glow with a golden light and looked pretty dashing and radiant and healthy, and eventually you got your very own angelic halo. In III there are very few visually apparent changes that take place due to your morality. Where’s my halo?