Fable is a weird one. While playing, the story seems very nonsensical and confusing. Characters do things or die and the game never seems concerned with making the player feel anything about any of that. There's a scene where you kill a character that was important to you growing up, and the main character (referred to as The Boy, among other things) doesn't even have a shot of him reacting. There's very little reference to the dead character beyond that despite him being an somewhat important character to many of the people in the main cast. The game pretends that alignment is some big thing, but it doesn't even come into play in the finale moments of the game. I played a good character the entire time until the Lost Chapters post-game and then I just decided to kill people because it was easier and I was pretty bored of the game at that point. Narratively the only difference seems to be with your actions during pivotal moments, and the game seemed like it couldn't care less if I killed 0 or 1,000 innocents up to that point.
The combat here is just atrocious. It's very literally just mash X, but sometimes you hold it if all of your attacks are being blocked. Enemies can block your attacks and hit you back, and generally when an enemy attacks there isn't enough of a tell for you to block in reaction, so you'll just end up getting hit. Some enemies' attacks go through blocks anyway, so blocking rarely seemed worth it. Late into the game, it feels like Lionhead realized how awful the combat is and instead just figured players would realize that the best way to beat combat sections is to just spam X and then heal whenever your health is low with no regard to what the enemy is even doing. The combat is frankly the worst part of the game, and it's so annoying that Fable puts so much time into doing combat.
I didn't do much of the auxiliary content primarily because I was used to the way you do it in Fable 3, although I also just wasn't very interested in it in this game. There's a renown system where the more things you do the more people in the world go "Oh man The Boy is so hot and cool and good at stuff," but you get so much renown from just doing the story quests that it never felt worth it to go out of my way to do these other quests. I tried to rent out a couple of houses, but I have no idea if that even ended up working. It doesn't really matter because the only things I bought the entire time were healing items, and you get more than enough money from the Arena and other story quests later on that it doesn't even seem worth it to find other revenues for income.
The layout of the world is uninteresting and confusing, and the game encourages you to use fast travel to such an absurd degree that I could not tell you the layout of any part of this game besides that the Lookout connects pretty easy to South Bowerstone. Everything else is a blur because you rarely have to actually walk anywhere unless it's in a quest zone, and when doing that I'm just fixed on the waypoint on the map telling me where to go and where enemies are so I can avoid any combat.
Fable is such a weird game, and I don't know that I even dislike it. The entire time I was playing this, I kept thinking to myself, "man, this really makes me want to play Fable 3." I haven't played 2 yet, although I know people like that one a lot. Fable 3 just feels like it saw what Fable 1 did that people found interesting (the auxiliary content) and put more time into that, and instead made the combat power-trippy by having enemies take fewer hits. Fable 1 laid great bones for a franchise, and I'm very curious to try Fable 2, replay 3, and hopefully hear new information on 4. God bless you, Peter Molyneux.
The combat here is just atrocious. It's very literally just mash X, but sometimes you hold it if all of your attacks are being blocked. Enemies can block your attacks and hit you back, and generally when an enemy attacks there isn't enough of a tell for you to block in reaction, so you'll just end up getting hit. Some enemies' attacks go through blocks anyway, so blocking rarely seemed worth it. Late into the game, it feels like Lionhead realized how awful the combat is and instead just figured players would realize that the best way to beat combat sections is to just spam X and then heal whenever your health is low with no regard to what the enemy is even doing. The combat is frankly the worst part of the game, and it's so annoying that Fable puts so much time into doing combat.
I didn't do much of the auxiliary content primarily because I was used to the way you do it in Fable 3, although I also just wasn't very interested in it in this game. There's a renown system where the more things you do the more people in the world go "Oh man The Boy is so hot and cool and good at stuff," but you get so much renown from just doing the story quests that it never felt worth it to go out of my way to do these other quests. I tried to rent out a couple of houses, but I have no idea if that even ended up working. It doesn't really matter because the only things I bought the entire time were healing items, and you get more than enough money from the Arena and other story quests later on that it doesn't even seem worth it to find other revenues for income.
The layout of the world is uninteresting and confusing, and the game encourages you to use fast travel to such an absurd degree that I could not tell you the layout of any part of this game besides that the Lookout connects pretty easy to South Bowerstone. Everything else is a blur because you rarely have to actually walk anywhere unless it's in a quest zone, and when doing that I'm just fixed on the waypoint on the map telling me where to go and where enemies are so I can avoid any combat.
Fable is such a weird game, and I don't know that I even dislike it. The entire time I was playing this, I kept thinking to myself, "man, this really makes me want to play Fable 3." I haven't played 2 yet, although I know people like that one a lot. Fable 3 just feels like it saw what Fable 1 did that people found interesting (the auxiliary content) and put more time into that, and instead made the combat power-trippy by having enemies take fewer hits. Fable 1 laid great bones for a franchise, and I'm very curious to try Fable 2, replay 3, and hopefully hear new information on 4. God bless you, Peter Molyneux.