It Ain’t Easy Being King

by Coffinshaker on January 7, 2013 at 12:00 am

FOR THE PROLETARIAT!

Sorry sorry… been playing too much Fable 3 lately.

Ok, I’ll do a proper review later, but let’s just say one of the things that bugged me and pretty much caused much rage quit half way through was the “morality/economy management” the game turned into by the last half.

Spoilers!!!

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Ok, it’s probably not so much of a spoiler, cause the game is essentially 5 hrs long and has little to no actual character development, so I can only assume that the first half was just an extended tutorial and the actual game is just managing money and doing repetitive quests.

Despite the warnings from Wowlock and many others, I went ahead and got the game (it was like $5 on sale!).  Well, turns out everyone was right.  Lacking almost any RPG elements, character building, story depth, and engaging combat/content, the game turns into a mad dash to accumulate tons of money.  That is, if you want to be good.

Before I get ahead of myself (too late), in the 2nd half of the game, you’re now the ruler, yay!  But there’s some kind of “evil” thing coming to kill you all!  So, you can either play it good and be loved or bad and be hated.  Seems simple enough, but if you choose good, then you will be in massive debt because you’ll be lowering taxes and doing humanitarian aide.  If you choose evil, then you’ll basically enslave the lower class and farm them for tax money.

Problem is, that tax money becomes important because you’ll need to use it to fund an army.  See what happened there?  If you are under funded (the good option), people die.  If you play it evil and tax everything… even the taxes… then everyone hates you but they all live.  It basically justifies being a totalitarian state.  But I guess if you’re good, you can work hard and earn the money to keep everyone alive… which is another 10hrs or so of gameplay doing rediculous fetch quests or their version of guitar hero.  Not my idea of fun.

So what did I get out of this?  Capitalism is bad because you can’t properly protect your people if you have to worry about taxes or morality.  Hell, by the end of it I started to write my “R”s backwards, gluing up portraits of Che, and grooming a nicely jutted goatee.

Anyways, I do like games with morality choices, but not when they are totally black and white with black and white consequences.  That’s not how the universe works.  And the almost cartoonishly overly stylized moral duality became so overpoweringly politicized by the end of the game… I just couldn’t continue.  It’s just really really bad, guys.  I’m sure it’s fun for some, but man it bothered the crud out of me.

Oh well… it seemed like it would have had a lot of potential.  Better luck next time.  >

 

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