[For his musing, Tubatic discusses the multiple issues he had with Fable III, and how they represented the problems he saw in the gaming industry as a whole. If you want to write a musing on this month's topic too, you're running out of time! All of you who've been putting it off need to get on it now -- get over to the community blogs and share your thoughts. -- JRo]
If there was a thing that stood out in 2010 for me, it was the proliferation of busted games at varying degrees of soulcrushing disappointment. Where 2009 had me positively losing my gourd over Way of the Samurai 3, a game that over came a mountain of jank to be one of my favorite games of that year, 2010 was dotted with experiences that should and could have similarly thrilled me. Unfortunately, so many games left me wishing that they could take it all back and give it another try in 2011.
But the biggest concentration of broken disappointment for me had to be Fable III. As a huge fan of the second game, I had unquestionable confidence that the third was going to deliver and stand out as an indulgence in quality gamecraft for the end of the year. What I actually got was a mixtape of all the bad things from this year in gaming. Looking back, even though there was a good amount of stuff to enjoy, there's plenty of room to criticize Fable III and the industry for some awful moments and trends.
Broken Concept - "How is this not awesome?"
Long time detractors of Peter Molyneux are reportedly very familiar with this one. Take a concept as righteous and exciting as switching gears from adventuring to ruling a kingdom part way through your game, and most gamers will manufacture a great ideal in their head. And considering the pedigree of developer, the ceiling flies right off of what a game like this could be. Even as a fan, I don’t think its unreasonable to expect general excellence from the studio run by the guy that brought about Populous, Black and White, and Dungeon Keeper. Surely, we’re in for the best land-ruling gameplay the industry can muster, right?
Unfortunately, that gameplay change amounted to a shift in game pace and a somewhat deceptive emphasis on the passage of time. As the ruler of Albion, the moral choices come to you, as opposed to you seeking them out. You are also given a ticking clock which, if you take just a moment, to analyze the way it works, it’s an embarrassingly false construct. Your progress hinges on deciding to proceed to the next day. So who’s to stop you if you don’t? No one. Because you have complete control over the passage of time, the mechanic at work is effectively useless. What are we even doing here?! Where are my tax menus? Where are my city ordinances? Where do I tell the hill people to go forth and smash the forces of evil? Can a brother get a city building mechanic up in here?
The fairness of that criticism is certainly debatable, but its hard to deny that the concept begs to be done in the best way that it can from a gameplay point of view. Look at Dark Void which, on paper and in previews, looked like it should be outstanding. Give a man a jetpack with guns and let him run wild. That game similarly sounds great, but the execution of the concept was nothing like the best conceived games of that ilk that I had played. Tell me I’m going to fly and hover in 3D space, and I’m going to expect you to match or exceed the gamecraft found in Zone of the Enders 2. Sorry. It’s the best game that I know can be made with the concept given. Its going to be what I expect, and I’m just going to have a hard time understanding why you can’t make it work.
Broken Feature - "This wasn't broken before..."
Sometimes, developers get a feature so right that its easy to assign brilliance to the serendipity of creative luck. Similarly, some aspects of the gameplay that can’t be fine tuned simply become features. The hard reality of software development is that deadlines must be hit and work cannot continue infinitely on making the best of a feature. In that case, you ship with what you have and hope that no one takes umbrage with the existing, deadline acceptable result.
Doubly unfortunate in 2010, as patch culture has really hit its stride, the ability to take a “do over” on a feature has allowed developers to go back and “fix” features that they deemed not quite right or good enough for the last gold master sprint in the dev cycle. Very quietly and without player uproar, Canabalt for iPhone had its jump mechanic changed from a more analog jumping height to a determination of just two or three jump heights. While I eventually got used to it, the change felt unnecessary and limiting. Fable III, however, displayed the this feature fix disappointment on a grand scale.
Fable II allowed your hero to emote in the general direction of an NPC, displaying that emote to every other NPC in the surrounding area. Effectively, what you did in public, created a public opinion of you. The end result for likeable characters was a trail of fans and stalkers, but it worked because hey - you’re a Hero. They tend to be quite popular. Turn then to Fable III, and all interaction is drawn very close in. You have to “work” for each acquaintance, let alone friends and lovers, with very straightforward, time-consuming errand quests. It’s not enough to merely have a persona. You need to campaign for your reputation on an individual level. And further, functionally, this creates an instance of every interaction. The screen fades to black to and from each emote you select. And, most baffling of all, emotes have been distilled to “Good”, “Vulgar”, “Evil”, etc. Gone are a couple dozen different and specific actions you can choose and in their place, a system where an arbitrary act is thrown out at the game’s discretion.
What is going on here?! Why change this? My only excuse as a person that believes there are reasonable people working at Lionhead is that something about the old method was causing serious damage to the game as a whole. Even then, that’s a monster of a “fix”! Considering how well the previous iteration executed this, its just all the more frustrating as a player.
Broken Code- "This is just busted."
The pinnacle of frustration, however, goes to Fable III for its segments of game that were broken on the most basic level of functionality. Bugs simply exist in any big game, and teams of people work presumably hard to mitigate both the appearance and damage that they cause. But, in 2010, maybe more than any other year in AAA console gaming, nearly every big release shipped with a nasty, potentially gamebreaking bug. From Other M’s save game issues, to Red Dead’s immersion breaking visual glitches, to the rogue’s gallery of issues found in Fallout New Vegas, some of the worst problems imaginable blossomed in otherwise commendable experience. Fable III, however, takes the prize for the last year.
Worst among the many was one bug in particular that made one of the key characters of the game, Jasper (voice by John “Freaking” Cleese), unable to speak any lines of dialogue after a certain point in the game. Up to the point of the bug, Jasper provides commentary on most every event and piece of content in the game. I came to really enjoy the deluge of dry wit and withering snootiness. And then one day, nothin’. Here’s this silent boring butler standing in every room, having nothing good or bad to say about anything I was doing anymore. Lionhead had blown what I can only imagine to be a significant chunk of its voice-acting production budget on a name check and a woefully and notoriously busted feature. The only solace was a pending patch, with no announced ship date. Ugh!
I tried to play through it, but ultimately, I just stopped playing the game hardcore for the month or so it took to get the issue updated. For all the hype and hope I had built up for the game, and all the consumer trust I had built up for Lionhead from the previous games in the series, I couldn’t enjoy this level of broken functionality.
A patch eventually came out to fix the truly broken issues and I was able to complete the game, almost as it was intended. But, by the end of the full experience, I was left with this really flat feeling about the game as a whole. Not good enough to be great, just broken enough to be OK, and a story that maybe deserves its own study in ineffective plot devices and story-gaming mechanics. While by no means the worst game I played this past year (Dark Void, I think you locked that one pretty early), Fable III added up to be a game that thoroughly under-delivered in a year of under-delivery.
Contest:
7:00 PM on 01.27.2011 | 
Combat has some cool changes and the art direction (sound, level design, general look) is in top form. Also, this is as Fable a game you're going to get if you really dig the world of Albion and its humor. But the rest of the package just fails to impress compared to Fable II.
Awesome blog!!
I read about the whole "illusion of time" thing related to the King stage, and that just smacks of dickery on the devs' part. Sure, it's unrealistic to say "Well, you have like six days before the cataclysm" but even less realistic is to say you have X amount of time when in reality, you have Y time because X is decreased by Z every time you go to the throne room. Sure, you technically have control of this skewed sense of time by not going to the throne room so you can bank some money, but try to think about this.
You're the King.
Kings do their work from the throne room.
In order to accumulate money (without already preparing a nest egg from the start of the game), you have to stay out of the throne room.
And you're King? D:
My friend mentioned the woes of having to accumulate money, and I mentioned the Guile trick from Fable 1 (raise Guile a bit, buy items in bulk, and resell in bulk for massive profits), and he told me that F3 did away with Strength/Skill/Will. "The only thing is the number on your weapon." What. I was even told that (to him), the first game was the best. I still want to try the other two to see why. :(
I fully agree with you on the patch culture we live in today, too. I don't know why it's such a big thing. Laziness? Corner-cutting? Deadline-making? I've not really been hit by unfinished/bug-ridden games, but some games have so many problems, I can't help but wonder if whatever dev has a QA department at all. The ability to patch games is great for console gamers, since that means an overall better experience is possible, and yet...there's stuff like Blops PS3 which makes me think people are getting lazy and relying on the fact that "we can fix it later" to solve all of these problems. And some don't even bother with that. :|
Thanks!
Nintendo 1st party tends to be the exception to the rule. For as much null attention as they get (don't get?), they're probably still the best game makers in the industry today. But on the other hand, they' ve never done a game a sprawling as Fallout or network intense as CoD.
@DF
In alot of ways, Fable I has the deepest set of systems without being a bit too simple. The positive wayto say that is that Fable II/III "streamlined" those systems, but in some ways things like gaining will or affecting NPC opinions have become arguably too simple.
I would suggest that your friend invest in shops and idle around for a few hours. Nothing stops you from gaming the system that way, though it's kind of a drag to break the "immersion" that way.
From my personal experience in development, deadlines are a big chunk of the issue. Regardless of your QA tram's skill, if there isn't enough time, you haveto start discussing what bug will be fixed and what you'll just have Ti ship with. No one will really go I to detail about it, i think, but I'm certain that a majority of the bugs people find in these AAA titles are documented at the time of release. Unfortuantely, there was just not enough time to address it. So much work goes into advertising timing and just raw production, that if you can't start making your money back at the best possible time, you're putting studio livelihood at risk. :/
Hard decisions all around. I personally hope the industry is learning from last year and creating better timelines. But when a broken game can sell in the millions of units on hype, pedigree and release timing, what's the incentive to really change?
Say what!? Ugh that's crazy! Never did that never saw it. WOW!
1 was a decent action adventure title that was supposed to be an open world game in a world of non-open world games, and didn't really stray too far from any given pre-established formula - it just had British voices, which was new-y, I guess.
2 was more of the same, but had an awful narrative, and multiple game breaking glitches, then decided to insert it's head in it's ass and provided one of the most pretentious, bad endings to an action game ever. Also, I call the "streamlining" dumbing it down. Fable 1 was already, IMO, pretty dumbed down, but 2 made a lot of choices I just didn't get - and the dog was literally useless - oh, it has a *chance* to maul enemies you knock down, after doing all the legwork - sweet!
3...ugh. It was like, as you said somewhat, they took a syringe, and took everything that made Fable out of Fable. Then they added more glitches, and a pretty bad kingship simulator.
I still play 1 occasionally to this day for 100% completion, but I can't bring myself to ever play 2 or 3 again.
@Elsa
Don't listen to the New Vegas hate. The PC has patches (fan made) to fix EVERYTHING, and it's MUCH more than an expansion pack - that's a pretty ill informed opinion you're getting.
The writing, design, and questlines are much more robust and hard hitting - overall it's leaps and bounds better than Fallout 3 in every way imaginable. Even on 360 I've managed to beat the game 4 times without any game breaking glitches, after a series of contemporary patches. I'd look into it, or rent it.
My wife agreed, smiled and even clapped at one point.
Totally agree about the stupid fetch quests for people. I believe I only had 2 friends in the entire game because it was just too cumbersome to envolve myself that richly in each and every persons life. People that get the 20 friends achievement get my respect as that's just too much time to be wasting on such a meaningless part of the game.
also, wasn't there a city building part with the hippie camp? It wasn't fleshed out in the slightest, but you can build up a camp of 6 huts to an island village.
Great post.
Controller vibrates and (A) is released.
He's quite a visionary in some sense but I can't actually imagine him playing and enjoying his own games. I'd actually love to see him, hidden cameras or something, just playing through Fable III or Black and White and see what he makes of them when he's turned the HYPE THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYTHING NEAR TO YOU part of his brain off.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIZpkQU4tPA
Taped on MY iPhone, because it happened to ME. Sob.
Basically, if you use a specific node on the fast travel system before you let Machiavelli introduce you to the concept of fast travel, the game gets stuck in an infinite loop where you die as soon as you exit the fast travel thing. Wouldn't be a problem, but it saves every time you fast travel. Before you're done fast traveling. And you have to restart the game.
Ugh.
I heard a patch was coming, but that just completely murdered my interest in the game. I'll get back to it at some point, I'm sure, but I'm still angry at the devs for fucking me like that.
Funny thing about the Jasper glitch is that once it was finally patched well after I'd already beaten the game, I had minutes of random Cleese dialog just spouted out over and over until he had finally caught up with everything he should've said.
Seriously, it had some of the worst combat and design ever. A lot of the game was incredibly linear, to the point where dungeons had an entrance and exit and were connected by a single passage. The enemies were mostly the same, most of the spells were just palette swaps, etc. The only parts that I felt were remotely redeemable were the tournament, spire, and ending sequence.
To hear that Fable III is worse truly astounds me.
right, because the Fable series, notorious for its issues and broken promises isn't enjoyable by the writer of this blog because he has "personal issues in life that he takes out on videogames"
riiiiiiight.
That was kind of great. Just minutes of John Cleese catching up on past events.
@mattrodroid
You know, there's a bunch still to enjoy about Fable III, so barring the grievances, I can almost agree with you! The music is gorgeous. Rounding the corner into Bowerstone Industrial for the first time was an awesome moment. Catching up on the lore between the last game and this one was a really great part of the time I was able to enjoy. Spot on Voice Acting with what they had to work with and some of the "evil" end effects of the endgame were stunning to experience. And spellweaving? Really enjoyed the updated magic system!
But, even with all this cool stuff, Fable III was an overall busted experience, for me at least.
IMO, IMO, IMO
I wipe my arse with you and every other grumpy bastards fucking god damn opinions. Where are all the real gamers nowadays?
Todays gamers all live in a world where they all think they're the next Roger ebert. Fanboy, imo, imo pissing imo. Im just sick of it.
Give me a break.
I finally got around to playing it a few weeks ago. Holy shit I freaking loved the game. At first I wasn't quite sure. But eventually I got into it and found it incredibly fun, and didn't want to put it down. But one of my major complaints with the game is one that was stated in here. The freaking emote system. In Fable II it was easy to please multiple people. But with Fable III you had to do emotes to EACH INDIVIDUAL PERSON. Get their "like" meter up far enough and you'll be sent on a stupid fetch quest in the next zone over or so. It's dumb, annoying, and the quests just seem stupid. Plus the whole Good/Evil emote system was stupid. Why do I learn new ones if I can't even really select them? Now interacting with people isn't incredibly important in the long run (unless you're going for a cheevo or guild seals), it's still part of the game. They should have just left the Fable II system in tact, and then has the people who liked you enough send you on the quests if you wanted to do them at that time.
There were a few other minor things, but that was my biggest complaint with Fable III. Overall I loved it. Now I just need to play the first Fable one of these days.
I'm not touching another Bethesda game on a console, especially New Vegas.
Oh, and super mario galaxy saved 2010 from disappointment IMO
Still, I might cop that shit.
But if that sweet Audi is broken as a car on a fundamental "cars work like this" level, shouldn't I, at the very least, be disappointed?
Let alone wanting my money back or a tradein for a car that works...
We accept alot as gamers so far as busted things go. Shouldn't we at least be voicing our concerns as consumers? Some of you are suggesting that we should just be content with broken product. Someone, please, explain why we shouldn't expect better, when a choice few developers are able to present games that are detrimentally broken?
Maybe instead of blatant ranting you could actually break down the systems that don't function the way you would like and tell how they could be improved. That's what I mean by constructive feedback.
@Magnalon && ZombiePlatypus - lol @ a couple fire starters..... nice try
If Lionhead is interested, I would be happy to exhaustively study and critique their work, as a member of their staff. Very happy!
@"why so negative" crowd
I'm usually the last guy to have something negative to say about games And franchises I enjoy. But, I also love talking and writing about games in general.
In case you hadn't noticed "2010 sucked" is this month's Monthly Musing topic. "Go Negative" basically. If you're interested in positivity on Dtoid, I'd suggest sticking around and reading the C-Blogs. (on the right if te main page there). People love things, and sometimes write about them, myself included! Or, you can write something sufficiently interesting, positive and topical for yourself. I would love to hear what you guys think is so great about Fable III as to warrant giving Lionhead a pandering pat on the head for breaking their game.
Sincerely.
I'm wonder what else you'd have me say.
The kingly section is thin. I say spend more time on it and flesh it out with parts of old games that they did and didn't make.
The emotes don't work like they did in Fable II. Do that. :)
Jasper became completely broken. ??? What would you have me tell a professional group of people with more experience than I am old regarding how to fix this that they don't already know?
I'm very pro developer, and I know they sometimes have to make tough decisions. For my part as a consumer, I can tell them how those decisions affected my experience with their product, which I did, yeah?
@BIMPtacular and the other "Why so negative?" posts
The Monthly Musing theme is inherently negative in nature. We had a month of what made 2010 awesome and now we're having a month of what brought it down. It's not to say that literally everything sucked or to be negative with the intent of being negative. The entire point is to air grievances per se. The Dtoid editors assigned the community to write on the theme "2010 Sucked" and I'm sorry if you don't like the theme but I think it is extremely unfair to go and call us out, the guys who are writing on that theme, for being overly negative when we're only magnifying an extremely small grievance NOT with the intent of making it seem larger than it really is but rather to focus in on it and isolate and dissect it.
And at the same time it isn't right to go and criticize the editors who assigned this theme because it is one out of tons of Monthly Musing themes and rarely are they as negative as this one. But because we did have a month of the good it seemed both interesting and productive to take a look at the bad as well.
It just boggles and bothers me that this whole month people are getting shot down and called names for being negative as if that's all we do. We point out one game or one moment that we the writers felt was a stain on the year and suddenly we're self-glorified assholes trying to tell people how to have fun. By that logic reviews, previews, and opinion pieces like the ones that have been featured this month shouldn't even exist.
And it's only been on the frontpage, where people apparently just seem to have missed the memo that said this is just a one month theme for the community to write in on. I don't see this post against Super Mario Galaxy 2, this awful post ragging on 2011 which has barely begun, or this post discussing the downside of retro gaming in 2010 being met with nearly the same types of criticism because it's pretty understood back in the blogs where these posts are being writter that none of us are taking these minute complaints to heart and proclaiming them to be the sole thing wrong with the industry.
I thought Red Dead Redemption was a terribly mediocre game, but I thought 2010 was fucking fantastic and I think the industry as a whole has peaked immensely. With the wide ranges of games for such a grand audience, the quality these ALL games are getting right from the indie titles and up, and the exposure from Eastern games, to big budget AAA titles, to indie games, I personally truly and honestly believe we are living in what we'll look back in 10 years and consider to be a golden era. Just because I write a blog saying I think that RDR getting so many GOTY awards is bullshit doesn't dispute the fact that I found more games I wanted play in 2010 than I ever have in this entire generation AND I enjoyed most of them, and the ones I didn't enjoy weren't even bad. Just not great.
And more or less, I know all of the members who have been featured on the frontpage this month and they are all by far some of the most fun and most intelligent people on this site. They are not overly negative, they do no sit around n a circle and find shit to complain about, if nothing else they know how to turn a bad situation or event and make something entertaining out of it. Just because the industry has issues, doesn't mean the industry is an issue. We are all here with the intent of kicking the ball around and having fun. I can assure you if you're looking for some kind of "needless 'internal' negativity," you can find far larger and more potent sources than the community blogs. Go spend a few minutes on Kotaku where they're trying to argue that videogame composers are useless or on IGN where they put indie games for not having big budgets. Dtoid is no bastion of great perfection, I'll be the first to admit I roll my eyes daily at this site and I'm an active member and mod, but even still these are not the posts you see all the time. It's just a theme.
The theme of the month is what sucked in 2010. I don't mean to be a prick but I really can not fathom why this theme has been met over the last few weeks (since Ross and the gang started promoting posts basically) why this theme has put so many off. I don't know if it's the games that disappointed us, the negativity, or what but I do kind of wish people wouldn't take it so close to heart. It's the theme, it's the last week of the theme, and frankly I've been enjoying it. I can go anywhere to hear the same bullet points about what made 2010 awesome, and frankly the majority of us had a really hard time trying to find something we didn't like about 2010 (notice how most post begin with something like "Well I really liked 2010 but this one thing...."), but we all found something and we shared it. Geez.
Using Kotaku as a scapegoat is not the best of ideas, as I don't get any news or reviews from there.
And somehow BIMPtacular still doesn't know what's going on.
I can't actually explain why this happened. I spent a good amount of my play experiences complaining to friends about aspects of the game I felt had fallen short, or frustrating little bugs that would sometimes force me to restart my game. Yet, overall, I had a pleasant experience and couldn't get enough of the game for a while. It's strange -- maybe even masochistic. The same happened for me and Gran Turismo 5 in 2010. For a while, I even wanted to like Final Fantasy XIII and XIV, but it took me less than a week each to drop those games all-together and just declare that I did not like them.
I haven't a clue why in 2010 I made such an effort to enjoy several of the year's worst sequels. With Fable III and GT5, I suppose the experience was largely favorable... But I did spend far more time criticizing and complaining than praising.
Because you're criticizing the wrong people. We are the community. Destructoid the site posted a theme for the month and we, the community, wrote in based on that theme. We, the community, had no hand in choosing that theme nor did we have any hand in choosing what post went to the frontpage or not.
I'm not taking your logic and twisting, what I'm trying to point out it sounds to me like you're criticizing people for being negative when the theme that we're writing on, the theme none of us had any business in choosing, is inherently negative. Pardon me, but I do get a little defensive when I see unfairness and I do think that that's a little unfair.
And just as well as I can take criticism I can challenge it and I don't think your criticism is warranted. If it is aimed at the site and just happens to fall into the post of a mere user just like you and I than I apologize but from what I can tell from reading your post it looks to me like you're criticizing everyone who has had their "negative feedback" on the frontpage. When our "negative feedback" is not wholly original and just there because we felt like bitching. It is the topic of the conversation, one that is not the norm, and one that is totally temporary.
Doesn't that seem just a little unfair? That when we, the community, write in content based on a theme we had no business in choosing that suddenly we become the bad guys?
Again, I respect your opinion in that perhaps you did intend for this criticism to be directed at the site and the people running it but I feel like from reading thread it's ended up hitting innocent users who are doing nothing but trying to participate.
And lastly I do sincerely apologize if I took your logic, argument, or opinion out of context but hopefully you can understand my perspective when I say that none of the authors of the "2010 Sucked" articles actually had any hand in choosing the theme. So from my perspective I see an unfair criticism and, no, I don't take unfair criticism well.
I am not criticizing the people writing these posts, but the people who chose to put them on the front page of Destructoid. This is the reason I said I am not attacking anyone personally. I apologize if my text read that way, to all I may have offended. I'm just trying to find the logic behind such negativity in a "theme of the month". Again, I apologize if my context was unclear in the point I was trying to get across. I liked 2010 and hope that 2011 is half as good, and thought that we got some awesome games!
One more thing: I just finished replaying Final Fantasy 9 LAST SUNDAY after taking about 2 months to beat it. Do the math... I beat Fable 3 in less than a week! And I'm in law school; it's not like I have time to sit around playing all day! I took my time getting the 9 million before being crowned and everything. After enjoying such a rich experience with a nice long Squaresoft classic, Fable 3 was a blur in comparison. A very aesthetically pleasing blur, but a blur nonetheless :/