The Role of Narrative in Fable III

Gamasutra offers an editorial on Fable III’s narrative, which author Emily Short criticizes for having good subject matter but being disappointingly shallow and binary.

The moral conundrum of how to rule — what are our priorities? How can we reach them? Whose suffering do we have to allow for the good of all? — exposes the foolishness of having such a simplistic good/evil rating on everything the player does.

I half expected the good and evil score to go away at that point, as though in acknowledgement that reality isn’t so simple. Or perhaps to change into something else. Good swapped for a popularity meter, say, because most of the choices the game tags as “good” are things that would earn at least temporary appreciation from the masses. Evil changed into some kind of counter of how many people your policy have hurt.

By continuing to tag expensive but sympathetic programs as “good” and the ones that offer long-term survival as “evil”, Fable III proposes a moral universe in which virtue and necessity are sometimes explicitly opposed.