The Fable Series Needs A Break

With Peter Molyneux recently proclaiming the next Fable title “should amaze” gamers, Gaming Union argues the franchise needs to take a little break, mostly because the author feels the franchise has been stretched thin by the “vicious cycle” of overhyping.

Perhaps this kind of behavior is acceptable for a sequel and, certainly to an extent, every developer wants gamers to know that they have recognized the flaws and learned from their lessons, but Fable never truly does that. Fable II was supposed to, again, be the open world, non-linear, character defining experience that fans expected of the first, but somehow that didn’t quite work out as planned. Fable III ran into an equally frustrating issue, trading a little bit of open world freedom for a relatively bland experience that only truly became refined at the very end. Individually, each of these titles aren’t bad games, in fact they hold some pretty impressive scores across the board by critics. However, as a series this sort of behavior shouldn’t be supported in the slightest, and the fact that every single title takes the same sort of marketing roller coaster ride is a little upsetting.

Even now Molyneux has begun the vicious cycle for the next installment in his series, promoting potential ideas and changes for the next Fable while blasting the last game – not even a year old at this point – as being old hat. Again, perhaps these statements would be appropriate if taken in a context such as “we realize what went wrong with our old title” or “this new game will show a wide string of improvements,” but instead we seem to just get “the prior game was horrible, this new title will be perfect” act. It just doesn’t add up, and considering Fable isn’t the only series that Molyneux has done this for, it’s fair enough to call this kind of behaviour habitual. Purchasing his titles only to realize that the experience explicitly promised by such a developer simply will not be delivered is called being tricked, and of course as the old saying goes; ‘Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me’.

I’m not suggesting that fans who truly enjoy the Fable series avoid it in the future, if you can enjoy the series despite a few broken promises and blatant over-hype, then more power to you. I will say, however, that maybe it’s time we just give the series a rest. The sort of sensationalism that Lionhead Studios tends to flog around hasn’t gone over so well for any of their other associated titles such as Black and White, or even Milo (both of which fell far short comparative to promises made), yet somehow the Fable series seems to endure and spawn more sequels. In all fairness the developer has already admitted to this sort of problem, having promised us once that Lionhead, though more specifically himself, would never speak about a mechanic unless they could actually display them in the game, a rule that has been somewhat adhered to throughout the years.