Microsoft Studios made the bold decision to declare that Fable III would "feature improvements such as eliminating the RPG system". What that translated into was that there is no more true RPG leveling up system, wherein you aquired XP from fallen enemies and used it to improve either your Skill, Magic, or Melee Combat attributes. What happens now is, you kill stuff, and you still collect orbs, but the orbs are only one color, and they all collect into a bank that represents your renown within the kingdom. This renown bank is also filled with XP you get from commiting good or evil deeds, as well as quests. Every so often when you gain enough renown, you are teleported to a location where you can open up various chests. Each chest requires a different amount of XP to open, and when you open it, you loose that much XP. Some chests unlock new spells and improvements to overall spell power, as well as melee power, and ranged power, up to a level of five. Other chests contain expression packs, dye packs, and oportunies to become profiecent in landownership and craft making. The downside to all this is that you can't really focus your combat skills in one particular area. Using, say magic, over firearms or swords in combat won't do anything to make you a more powerful magic user. This really waters out the whole RPG feel of the game.
According to Wikipedia some players were experiencing game breaking bugs, and that to date, Lion Head Studios haven't released a patch that fixed any of them. While I found no bugs that broke the game in any way during three play throughs, there are some bugs that are just irritating as hell. One of them is the teleportation system. The other, is the glowing trail you are supposed to follow on quests. Now that last one is broken, half the time it doesn't work, but still it's far from game breaking.
The end of the game is so lackluster I wanted to scream. And everything leading up to it feels so Microsoft it's borderline copyright infringement: Champion encounters a hive-mind species bent on eradicating all life as we know it. Champion then battles hive-mind species. Hive-mind species looses. Halo anyone?
One of my biggest gripes in the game are the weapons. You start the game with four basic weapons (rifle, pistol, hammer, sword) which were apparently left to you by the previous Hero, and will mutate according to how you use them. That's neat, but the problem is that these weapons become obsolete very quickly on. They do become more powerful, but only if you unlock chests based on the skill they require, and even then you will find weapons far more powerful even early on in the game. The net result is that the weapons will look fucking awesome eventually, but you'll do little more than stare at them, favoring the high power weapons you find and buy.
Like Fable II, Fable III has Xbox Live features, but I'll never get to use them as I have no longer have a high speed internet connection. And there are allot of features in this game that require you to be online. For instance, there are apparently a shit load of different weapons in the game, but offline you can only access a handful of them. You need to trade with other players to get the rest. All weapons (except the Heroic ones) can be powered up by fulfilling certain requirements, but many requirements are fucking stupid. I shouldn't have to be online and gift 20 Xbox live players just so a weapon becomes more powerful.
Now for the good shit. The combat system is FUCKING RIGHTEOUS. It's such an improvement over Fable II's system that it's hard to stress how great it is, considering how much an improvement Fable II's combat system was over the original Fable. Everything is better. Targeting in Fable II was, to quote Jimmy Hendrix, "a frustrating mess". But in Fable III, because you unlock everything in chests, means that you can almost right off the bat utilize better combat tequniques. Enemies don't have a glow surrounding them when they are targeted. In the third person mode, you just shoot your gun or spell, and the system just always seems to know where you wanted to fire. It's flawless. When you want to zoom in with a gun, you just hold down the left trigger and you go right into over the sholder mode, but now you can use the thumbstick to maneuver the sight over anything you want to fire at.
The magic system is brilliant. Fable III makes use of Gauntlets, gloves that the character wears to cast spells. At the beginning of the game, you just have one Gauntlet, but towards the middle you unlock Spell Weaving, enabling you to wear a gantlets on each hand, and further to combine spells. The result is mind blowing. You can cast swords made of fire, ice, and electricity, or create tornadoes of fire ect. It's just suburb. It's a shame that they did a way with some of the old spells from the first two games, but still, the magic system is awesome.
Fable III also does away with the health bar. Now as the player takes on damage, both sides of the screen become increasingly more red until the player is knocked out. You can still use potions and food during combat to avoid this, although there is now only one type of health potion and a few types of food. Also, you cannot carry more than one type of food with you, and there are only a few types of food now as opposed to the hundereds of varieties in Fable II. The Slow Time, and Raise Dead spells have been replaced with potions which do more or less the same things. The only real problem with all of this is that the game is much, much easier. Unless you are focusing on just melee combat, it's possible with enough potions to get through the entire game without ever getting knocked out.
The overall graphics and animations are much more smooth in Fable III than any of the other games, even Fable II. I don't know if it's because they had more time to utilize the 360 hardware or not, but everything just looks allot better. Even the Heros. In Fable II one of my gripes was that my chick character failed to look like a chick. Or at least one that I would want to have sex with. So I guess what I'm saying is that my chick character in Fable III is more fuckable. Also, all the humor from the series is present in Fable III, but now they've really cranked it up by having a great cast of voice actors such as John Cleese and Simon Pegg.
One of my favorite improvements to the series is the landowning system in Fable III. Buying and renting land was dogshit in Fable II, but now it's totally worth it, and depending on your morality, kind of crucial in the latter part of the main quest. One of the best things though, is how you can actually see your money. There's a room in the Sanctuary (an area that acts as your "super secret base") that consists of a giant dome. Your money, as it amasses, literally becomes a mountain that you can climb. It's just like Duck Tales.
Still, Fable III is too much like Fable II and Fable I in that the main quest is rather short, and the replay value is quite low. In all three games, you basically play your first time as one morality alignment, then try it again on the other. Fable III does have more meat on it's bones, so to speak, but eventually you'll get to a point where it's all been done before. This is really true for almost any game, but the difference to me is how long it takes you to reach the point of no return. Quality wise, Fable III should at this point be placed in the upper echelon of games, a place where such greats as the Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age series, as well as titles such as Borderlands and Morrowind (but not Oblivion) reside. But as an overall game it falls short. It is still the best in the series, but you will tire of it very quickly, and that is a shame. If you are a fan of the series, it is worth it, but buy it used, because the charm wears off very quickly.
