I remember reading about the landlording thing when I was doing my first playthrough, and then realized that the "evil" landlord thing of raising rent to the highest level to get more money was a thing, and then I also realized that setting rent to the lowest gives you Good Boy Points, I just raised rent to the highest level on everything, went off to do something else and idled in the game, then came back, set the rent to the lowest, and sat around for an extremely short period of time as I became the most well loved ruler in the history of albion, because the game's morality system has hard caps and thus, going from -100 to 100 was exceedingly easy
Ironically in a game supposedly all about moral choices, being evil for a while then switching to good is actually the optimal way of getting the best ending.
I would do the exact same thing. Except I would play the game setting all rent to high and only lowering it once I had a good sum of money stocked up. Then I'd go to the orphanage and adopt every orphan and give each pair a extremely well paid caretaker and all other homes the lowest rent possible. :]
Ok, but have we discussed the true art that is Molyneux's vision for a game about struggling and failing to live up to the promises you made and then struggling and failing to live up to the promises he made?
Honestly, as much as I wanna knock the guy for his uhh...ceaseless over-ambition, I can't fault him for chasing a vision. That said, he does get like... emotional over the idea of haptic feedback? so idk he's a bit strange. Driven, strange, and maybe a bit lost.
My favorite part about the Fable II landlord simulator: the endgame content, your final reward for beating the game, becoming known across the lands and winning all the money? The very last step of the ultimate power fantasy? ...A sex change potion.
I like how the people with the most positive relationship to fable are the ones who barely interacted with the promotional material and didn’t know about Peter Molyneux
Yep yep yep. Fable II's trailer was included in my Xbox 360 video library, along with some interesting video about the design of brutes in Halo 3, and it ignited a burning desire to play this fabulous game. Then a friend of mine lowered my expectations on it a lot. And finally bought it used from a discount bin in a Blockbuster. I loved it, I had never heard of Peter Molyneux and actually only felt bad when I knew Lionhead studios ceased to exist. Then I played Fable III and it was disappointing, 😂. Finally I learned about Molyneux, of all the broken promises, and moved on. One day I played Fable Remastered, not expecting anything from it, and loved it. 😂
i have a distinct memory of shooting an npc in the back as they're running away from me only to get the happy "A new house is available for sale!" message in Fable 1
Played Fable 3 for the first time, MP joinable was on by default. Random guy showed up, gave me 4M gold, told me to buy houses, and left. No explanation, I didn't realize the outcome was entirely money until the end.
@@supergamergrill7734 Capitalism at work. I charged reasonable rents, saved 6.5M lives, and built that orphanage. All it took was a small loan of 4 million dollars!
Damn I've been playing Fable 3 since 2014 or 2015 and I've never experienced the Live aspect of the game, 'cause I never got how it works… only ever played co-op with my sis on the same console… makes me kinda jealous of u tbh
~27:40 Just did some math cause I can't let things go, and in order to make the 450k that the bower lake proposal gets you, from rent of a single house on the lake, you'd need 5 hours game time (just owning Timmins Towers). With more houses, it obviously pays itself off even more. I hadn't even considered that mining the lake quite actually means strangling the revenue stream of the highest domestic rents in Albion, lol.
Fable is one of the worst RPG series I’ve played but it always had a certain charm. Fable 3’s complete reliance on money really devalued the idea of it being hard to keep promises as a leader. If you do everything right, even as a good character, you can keep every promise and morally good choice without any danger or risk of breaking a promise
Yeahhhh.... Like I started this all in part to respond to (and destroy, apparently) a desire to experience the games again, and like, they're still kinda fun, but so much of a mess, and so so so full of broken or unfulfilled (I maintain there is a difference) promises.
@@Rosencreutzzz for sure. I would like to see the ideas meet their potential and there are a lot of fun ideas but it was one of those old xbox era games
The big part of criticizing idea of breaking promises, would be to have empty promises - meaning, the promises you know are impossible, in conflict with your other promises etc. if your game needs a visionary to end up at "its always one of your promises vs money" then you gotta change your visionary 🤣
Lollll okay I didn't doubt what you were saying, but it is very funny to see it for real, that he just opens with "Do you think that you're a pathological liar?"
this was exactly my problem with the game when playing it. Just laboriously buying up every property and waiting. Though I at least did it with a friend in co-op. You dismissed player trading, but you can actually just gift gold directly to your friends with no limit. That's how we got the good ending, one guy did the evil stuff including landlording, and the other was goody two shoes. Then before the end we just donated it all to the good guy.
The only thing I can remember about this game is that I owned a copy for 2 days before my mom found out there was sex in it and returned it to GameStop before I could even open it. To think I missed out on Molyneux's glorious vision.
Realistically, the monarch in such a situation should be able to raise the tax rate arbitrarily high without much opposition from the people. Because this is a state of emergency. And you never let a good crisis go to waste. So the treasury is effectively bottomless. You know what isn't bottomless? The productive capacity of Albion's arms industry and the manpower of its military. What isn't bottomless is the construction sector's ability to build city fortifications. What isn't bottomless is the food supply. You can't beat back the cosmic horror by throwing gold coins at it. But if you could, private citizens would already be doing just that, so what point is there in taking it from them? No. What we needed to see was Albion being turned into a totalitarian hellscape. Alcohol is evil? Sure it is, it prevents people from working 14 hours a day to manufacture artillery shells. So ban alcohol. Ban unions in industries deemed essential to the state. Ban meat and fruit, for grains are more efficient for feeding the masses. Ration consumer goods. If not enough volunteer, conscript people into the military. That is militarisation. It's what Albion needs to do.
That's stepping dangerously close to both being interesting and having some real-world parallels that are putting you in the shoes of people broadly considered monsters by most people.
Fable 3 honestly lived up to my expectations but I was also like 11 and hadn't been following the hype cycle. I did see how the politics fell flat so yes, even a child could tell.
Used to love this as a kid. I remember every character ended up becoming obese from eating food cause it heals you. So I had to run around everywhere, looking for celery. Also because I was a child I thought it was really cool that you could have sex in a game. Although in retrospect its really lame lol
video games will never not make me cringe with their fade-to-black voiced sex cut scenes. I remember Dragon Age Origins getting praise for being like, "sensuous and tasteful" but I also recall deep embarrassment when triggering them.
It was also really cool for me. Though I only just use the mechanic now to have as many kids as possible and cause a succession crisis in the future. One of my 20 kids will surely kill to have the throne for themselves
Strangely enough getting fat doesn't really affect anything other than the aesthetic appearance of your character... in the first game the fattest you could get barely looked noticeable; in the second it affected how attractive you were to NPCs, but could be mitigated by wearing fancy clothes, and in the third it affected literally nothing other than occasional NPC dialogue. It didn't make you slower or affect your fighting ability in any way. And healing items that made you gain weight were more effective and in higher supply than ones that caused you to lose weight or keep it the same, so... my character always ended up fat and stayed that way.
Old guy here, my memory of the game was very different. I remember it being shockingly easy to make all the good choices, own all the property in the kingdom, charge the minimum amount of rent, and still have more money than the game needs you have for anything. If I remember the move to do was like place a book against the controller so you're running in circles, then go to school or bed, come back and you're rich. Maybe not played as intended, but it still worked.
Ok about the intro though. The first fable game was so good because the incentives for being a bad person are actually pretty fun imo. Some of them can be basic like “raid or attack” orchard farm with the evil option paying a bit more, but giving me the option to kill other heroes like whisper, thunder, and briar rose are interesting and since they’re all so arrogant, I found it kinda interesting to kill them. Same thing with that boy trapped by the nymph. I had the option to sacrifice the treasure hunter I found and felt compelled to. I even turned on the nymph choosing to sacrifice him just to lower her guard then getting the first shot off.
Great video! I was probably the target Fable customer at just the right age when it came out but I never picked it up for whatever reason. Soon after, it (and Molyneux) got its reputation and I never thought to give it a tumble. So, I thought it was really interesting to see what the Choices Matter™ stuff was all about in F3. This does make me think there's probably at least one lunatic who paid for the good ending solely with pie making though. That's gotta be on video somewhere
I think an interesting direction fable 3 couldve take. Is if when you learn why your brother was doing what he was, you had a choice to become his advisor, keeping him on the throne while your “rebellion” grows leading to an outcome where you can do all the evils under your brothers name, and then revolt in the end to use him as a sacrificial pawn. That’s make it feel more evil I think
Yep, that’s what I did. Make pies at the start so I could buy some property when it became unlocked and it snowballed from there. It was slow since I did pirate on pc and I don’t get money by being offline so I had to work harder/ Wait longer but thang is it easy if you just have patience
Me, every time someone mentions Peter Mollinyuhhhh (blame Yahtzee, that's how I hear it in my head and shall do forever): "Oh I wonder what he's up to these days" *Reads any 5 reviews from GODUS* "Ah."
Absolutely a huge fan of this. I love that you take a game that's kind of dumb, but instead of just writing it off entirely, you engage with it on its level and examine it the way you would examine a more "serious" piece of media.
I've been routing a good% Speedrun for awhile now and it's been an absolute treat watching you explain how little money you make doing anything but real estate lol
I genuinely can't tell if you're implying that there are tons of ways to earn easy money that I missed or if you're saying that it's hard to route because there aren't any, interesting to think about the speedrun angle of this all the same. I watched a Fable 1 one like two days ago, and they used the "buy all a shop's item and sell them back for profit" glitch and I was like "yea! 12 year old me did Speedrun Strats™"
@@Rosencreutzzz oh I meant that it was cathartic to see it all laid out that there's absolutely no other feasible means of making money lol Sorry if I came off snarky... Really enjoying your channel!
Because even using DLC to cheat a max level treasure hunting dog, opening all the treasure chests, opening all five silver chests with money, and getting the Demon Door for being king nets you.... 1.25 million, fixed, plus maybe an extra 100k if you're REALLY lucky and only dig up gems... Pain in my ass, I tell ya.
I was pretty sure it wasn't snark, and I wasn't offended if it was, just genuinely curious if there was some big thing. Wild to hear it's largely down to luck with the dog, lol.
@@Rosencreutzzz even with the best of luck with the dog, the three pawnbrokers in ALL of Albion have a finite amount of money at any given time, so it's not really super practical to go there and vend your valuables either lmao
I liked the morality system in Mass Effect games. It wasn't as much about being good or bad, as it was about being a hero (helping everyone and their mother) versus being ruthless but effective (sacrificing others for your own benefit in pursuit of the greater cause).
I love thd Renegade route, but as ME trilogy progresses, pragmatitism slowly becomes cruel for cruel sake a bit too much sometimes. A bit of flandarization.
@@cyncynshopdoesn't help that, comparatively speaking, the Paragon route gains wayyyy more war assets than the Renegade route in the end, and a fair few "ideal" resolutions to certain scenarios are more easily achieved by being Paragon than Renegade. Also doesn't help that Renegade Shepard is notably racist, which is more of a minor quirk that, if nothing else, does add some characterization to him (or her), but it might not sit well with some players, specially when the games have something of a recurring theme that unity tends to bring about better results than being a hardass.
I have great memories of playing the Fable games, but I definitely got a "Guys, did you know you can put a morality system into video games?!" vibe from them :D
Yeah I think the moment it sort of washed over me that the morality was kinda bland was realizing how little murder was. And then I played Fallout New Vegas and while that game is really imperfect in its system of "morality" the morality system was largely replaced by reputation and that felt so much better and I realized I liked that more than "i can be ur angle or ur devil" stuff.
@@Rosencreutzzz New Vegas' karma system was an interesting shift for me, coming from fallout 3. The first time I played it, I remember I snuck into a house in goodsprings and when I was sure no one was around, I started looting the place, as one does. Only to quickly realize that whatever arbiter was at play here was omniscient and didn't require someone to see me do something to smack my karma in the head. It turned me off from the game for a bit, but I came back after a while and gave it a fair shake, and now I appreciate that system. It's now one of my favorite deterents to looting literally everything. Sure, you will still take what you need, since it doesn't make that big of a difference to take a stimpack here, or a magazine there, but unless you just really want bad karma, you won't go out stealing literally everything that isn't nailed down and get away with it, just because no one saw you do it.
@@Gitshiverthe thing that put me off for a while was the fact that stealing from a dead persons home was still considered bad, even if it was considered good that you killed them. Like who still owns that stimpack, a corpse? Of course same thing in elder scrolls.
You know what woulda been real nice in fable 3? The option to repair all of your properties with one button… I swear to god I lost my mind switching between maps making sure I repaired every single house *GAMEPLAY*
@@Rosencreutzzz Dude that’s so fucking scuffed, I had no idea the PC version had that, I’m so confused as to why they wouldn’t include such an obvious quality of life feature across all platforms.
If one wants to play a game where you can (optionally) start from the bottom(ish) and rise to the top via wheeling-and-dealing, followed by managing a large kingdom while having to make actual meaningful choices that can make or ruin you, and at the same time having some wacky adventures on the side, just play Crusader Kings.
Bannerlord (and older Mount and Blade iterations, and mods) kinda suits that desire, but the gameplay doesn't fundamentally change much once a lord, and I think they should make the parts about having a family, sovereign nation, diplomacy, all that should be fleshed out a lot, and then it would really feel like rising from obscurity and shift in experience. That said, being a count inside a realm in CK and being the sovereign of a realm are very different experiences that border on different games, in a sense, and I love it.
I got here from the Vic3 videos, and i am happy that you did them so i found your other videos! Keep it up, your doing great man. Good content makes the people come! Will recommend. 10/10 Räkmackor
It always pissed me off that in fable 2 with the pure-corrupt good-evil 2 axis morality system that had names for the 4 combos didn't call you "pure evil" if you were a serial killer landlord who didn't charge any money for rent 😤😤😤
28:45 when you mentioned that pond I was also thinking when the work was done it could easily be filled back in and restored. Albion is a land of magic and it has shown its ability for nature to recover. Look up silver islet mine As an example of what they could have done to restore the lake later on. And there's another interesting choice they could have added depth to the game What if you had the option of still keeping your promises or trying to repair the damage after the invasion
Hehe, I'm doing a good playthrough as a prince-turns-socialist first among equals sort. I am acquiring their homes for the State and charge them rent for maintenance, public works, and national defense. I am a most beneficent El Presidente, ¡Viva l Trop... I mean, ¡Viva la Albion!
Honestly, considering you ARE the state in the game, and you are collecting rent for the sake of fighting against a world-ending threat, you could almost say this isn't libertarian landlordism, but some kind of command economy
That sound track in the first 10 seconds of the video from fable 1 main menu screen always makes me wanna tear up a little. It gets me so emotional because Fable 1 was such a giant piece of my early childhood. It was one of the first Xbox games I played and I still go back and play through the series to this day (20 years later). I wish I could have a time portal and just go play it for the first time again with my twin sister beside me. I remember she was just as intrigued by it watching me play it. The game world and characters were so odd and somewhat scary in their mannerisms but the setting was so damn charming. I'm gonna show my step son this series asap. All he talks about is Minecraft and I wanna show him what Xbox gaming is truly about lol or was at one point.
I remember this game from childhood in two ways. Firstly the vague idea of the game, the imagery, the rough story and the impact choices were supposed to have. Secondly, changing the clock on my PC to crank out rent, buying the entire kingdom, dropping rent to be "nice", and comfortably finishing the game with enough bank to ignore any financial threats. Ultimately, I became an otherworldly entity, capable of time manipulation, to defeat the shadowy evil otherworldly entity.
I much preferred the combat in fable 1 The way they just turned combat into like one button just ruined it. I couldn’t believe combat became horrible on fable 3 compared to fable 2.
Oh god, Fable... I do genuinely have fond memories of the series but it really is all about disappointment. And Fable 3 especially so. I remember Fable 2 being the best one, although that might be just my personal preference, but it has the most memorable moments to me (especially rediscovering Oakvale, that still lives in my head rent free) and altho I don't remember much about the story, I liked the player character (Sparrow) in Fable 2 the most. It also had the strongest sense of history and the references to the first game worked surprisingly well. And the mood just really worked for me, especially the moments of just exploring with my dog. The only real annoyance I remember was the stupid breadcrumb trail and the morality system, which I just chose to ignore as much as possible. I don't know how well it would live up to my memories, maybe I just liked it more because I already knew to lower my expectations after being disappointed with the first game, but I keep wanting to play it again, unfortunately I just haven't figured out how. I don't have an xBox, I only ever played on my brother's. Fable 3 on the other hand... I don't think I'd ever been as mad at a video game as I was at Fable 3 after the first and only time I played it
You forgot one facet on the trade option: you can artificially inflate the pawnbroker prices by stack-buying all of a given trade good and waiting an in-game day or so before coming back and re-dumping that stock to the pawn shop for a large "shortage" price bonus
I can't remember the last time i played Fable 3 sober. It's a great game because it's just challenging enough to be playable if you've got a 4.0 BAC debuff IRL, and simple and humorous ebough to keep you interested
Hey RC! New subscriber to your content, I love your dialectics and as a big Paradox fan it's refreshing to see genuine dissection of these games I love so much. Can't wait to see what you do next!
I remember playing this game! I thought, perhaps, there was a thematic twist at the end if you kept all your promises. You see, in the beginning of the game, you make these promises to make life better, and because of those promises, the various groups assist you in the revolution without expecting direct, monetary payment. So pardon my naïveté in thinking that, if I *kept* all those promises, perhaps everyone would assist their beloved benevolent monarch without expecting direct, monetary payment, and rather because 1) they trust my leadership and expect me to continue bettering Albion and 2) they don't want to get murderified by the... whatever it was. I never finished the game; I enjoyed the revolution phase well enough to finish that, but the leadership phase wore on my patience until I decided my character had tragically cracked under the pressure and disappeared into the mountains, never to be seen again.
Kotor 2? Oh for sure. But...then again. There's a decently large eternally occurring discussion in the Kotor2 fanbase about if the game encourages grayness, if it did so in opposition of general starwars vibes, and how there's a strong absence of any kind of reward to gray. Kreia consistently pushes the player to think in shades of gray, but then there's stuff like prestige classes being locked behind being deep into one alignment. Some people take the whole "Apathy is Death" segment to mean that gray neutrality is not actually an option, and that the game is exploring grayness only to conclude that there can be no such thing. This is definitely something I've spent too much time thinking about and will probably make a video on.
Just found this channel and it is such a fantastic level of quality and analysis from a leftist perspective that is lacking on UA-cam at the moment. There's no rhetoric or pandering, just deep and level-headed thoughts.
So long as you start early you can literally buy your way through the Albion real estate market from the get-go and literally just minmax every house by giving it one good repair cycle and then move on. Don't mess with any of the sliders, don't increase the rent, and especially do not reduce the rent. And you will get the perfect ending to the game every time win just the slightest bit of patience added.
To me this game only interesting thing about this game was the different ways that your weapons changed. But that wasn't enough. Your criticisms are totally correct on this part.
You CAN be a benevolent ruler AND save all your subjects if you raise prices on all large establishments to the highest, raise Millfields rent to the highest, and put all other housing to the lowest rent. The 'evil' moral points gets nullified by the good moral points, some villagers will hate you, most will like you. Now you just gotta grind the weapon upgrades, hunt silver/golden keys, open all demon doors, etc etc.
26:08 That was something I really liked in the original Fable was there were two signs outside every house one for selling/renting a house And another for upgrading the furniture. Fable 2 was a pain with upgrading because you could only buy one of any given type furniture and sometimes a shop would only occasionally get one of those furniture items so furnishing a single house with all five star furniture for example was ridiculously tedious. I never even focused on it in Fable 3 but I imagine it's as much or more tedious
it's really funny that mr molyneux and the team executed a decent concept so poorly they made something that *feels* like it effectively reverse engineered pay to win game mechanics, without any financial incentive
Might and Magic 6 also had a good vs evil point system connected to player choice (but it was very simplistic because the game was more of an open-air dungeon crawler than a narrative driven RPG)
Black & White from the same dev of Fable , Lionhead studios had an even earlier karma system than Star Wars. They were merely refining or simplifying it by the time Fable rolled around.
I always thought it was weird that the people of albion didn't mind that theier king had stockpiled the gold they need for defense all in his special pocket dimension.
I love the fable games all of them are big part of my childhood with fable 2 still being my fav but i am never going to debt or fight with people who point out they have alot of problems
Better stories that have an existential threat like this tend to have them tied into the theme, like maybe the shadow monster only came into existence because of industrial exploitation or something.
Yeah the way Fable 3 is like halfway there to 3 or 4 different themes and connects none of them to the end is really something. It's disconnected enough it feels like the inverse of a Deus Ex Machina moment, in that it's the antithesis of sudden (and certainly seems planned from the start in some way) but somehow still comes out of nowhere as a game pivot...and I suspect this is a further symptom of the game being very rushed.
It 100% is. The first thing i did was play to music mini game until i could buy a fruit stand then another stand and then another and another. I owned everything before i became king and transfered all my money to the treasury for the army.
The decision was easy for me: a kingdom enslaved even more than the baseline monarchy is a kingdom not worth saving. So I bankrupted Albion and most people died. This of course isn’t how real life works because money is a social construct and people don’t die because the treasury is empty.
For those wondering having every house and business at max prices gives you about 4m every 5 minutes and you can get good boy points for donations to the vault and bad boy points for taking money so if you just screw around for about a hour with maxed passive income you can just max deposit for max good boy and vice versra
Not that i disagree with your take, BUT, the moral perspectives the game presents better fits the era. People were not questioning the kings right to ownership of land so much as they might question specific acts and policies the king picks.
Great video, your insight on this matter was really good! This seems like one of those unfortunate evens where dev teams wouldn't or couldn't properly cooperate. Making choices and morality matter sounds like a narrative department's job, which might've hit a brick wall with the gameplay department due to the complexity of the desired systems. It can also be a budgetary or scheduling issue; the narrative might've come far after most of the systems were set in stone.
I feel like I read an interview where there was some mention of the departments being forcibly compartmentalized, which I am, frankly, stunned is as common as it is, given how often that leads to the need for massive rewrites or a shoddy product, which doesn't exactly save on time or resources, but in truth, I genuinely don't know how much the narrative and gameplay designers were allowed to interact. I just have the weird promises Molyneux made, which could be their own entire video, about things like his strong fascination with haptic feedback and pressure sensitive trigger actions, like holding hands, and how that eventually seems to have been watered down into "idk hold the A button for a lonnnnnng time to complete an emote to get friend points" But even with that example, I'm still not sure "overambition" is the right answer either. It's just an odd mess in that way.
@@Rosencreutzzz Yeah, it's all speculation of course, but based on my personal experience from having worked on game projects, it's not uncommon at all for different divisions to kinda work separately.
I keep meaning to try that game, along with the Port Royale games but never get around to it/hope eternally for a more contemporary good game set in the age of piracy with that kind of scope.
I liked fable 3, I also refuse to pay attention to what molyneux says so I don't get any disappointment. It's the tone and writing in these games that I love, it's the most British, silly, monty python adjacent game series ever and I don't think there will ever be another game series this whimsical that's as large in scale. I'm just happy and amazed that these games exist
Morality in Star Wars is wild because it really depends on the writer in charge. With Lucas, it's flat - in fact, there is no 'light side' in Proper OG Star Wars. There's _The Force,_ and _The Dark Side._ The reason this is flat is because The Dark Side is conceptually a cancer in the force. Destroying the dark side restores balance, and the galaxy is saved. You flat out _cannot_ use the dark side to do good. Under Lucasian theory, Anakin fulfilled the prophecy when he killed Palpatine (and himself), destroying the darkside and bringing balance to The Force. (This is also why Palpatine is so cartoonishly evil, he's literally huffing spirit cancer.) However, different writers (and the _vast majority_ of the audience) took there to be a light side, and a dark side - and thus, any balance must be between The Light and The Dark. Knights of the Old Republic, and _especially_ it's sequel, really play with this aspect, where sometimes darksiders do good (through destructive passion), sometimes lightsiders do evil (through apathetic detachment), and the concept of a Grey Jedi is played with more explicitly (a Jedi who is True Neutral). Under this theory, Anakin fulfilled the prophecy when he enacted Order 66 and began the purge of the Jedi, until the number of light siders and darksiders in the galaxy was more even, thus bringing 'balance'. These theories are not compatible, and the fact that most people aren't even _aware_ that this is how Lucas envisioned the Force and the Jedi is actually part of why there's so much discourse surrounding the prequel films. Like, once you understand that the Jedi aren't just paranoid, the dark side is literally, actually a perversion of the natural order, and destroying it is the only correct moral choice, a lot of their fears and blindspots make more sense.
Back when I had this on 360 my brother and I found out if we disconnect the xbox from the internet and advance the system clock by a day we'd make money super fast
Right out of the gate, when you were outlining the three outcomes of the Ruling part of the game (accept all the good choices but end up in debt, accept all the evil choices but donate to the treasury (and weirdly still end up in debt), or accept all evil choices but pocket the money) it made me realize that Fable 3 actually dumbed down the morality system even more than it already was. Because while Fable 2 was still pretty dichotomous in terms of player choice, there was at least the acknowledgement of a third option: neutrality. Or Fable's version of morally gray. It's actually kind of glaring when I think about it considering how important the number 3 is in Fable (3 Heroes each representing 3 Heroic disciplines each representing 3 spokes of its morality wheel). This would be the game to bring moral neutral to the forefront considering the complexity of the choices and moral dilemmas that come up during the ruling system. Heck, at least making the "evil" choice of running the country harder if not as hard as Logan but funneling it to the treasury the moral neutral choice. It's not a perfect solution but it would signal a better understanding on the part of the game that moral neutral is the most important facet here.
I remember being like 8 and the mining thing came up and I thought "Oh that sounds like a good thing I'll do that!" and then my morality went down and I asked my dad because I was extremely confused why that was bad. So, can confirm a child would find the morality in this game weird. (Also I stopped preordering games after Fable 3... still love 2 though)
I seem to recall that I was so fabulously wealthy by the second half that I didn't need to worry about money at all. I nationalized (bought) the whole kingdom, minimized all rents (I would have made them free if it let me), and paid for all the promises mostly just to spite whatshisname because I was still mad at him from Fable 2. I don't remember how I got so much money but it may have involved spending a huge amount of time on minigames, including the gambling demo that released before the game and let you carry over your money.
I remember reading about the landlording thing when I was doing my first playthrough, and then realized that the "evil" landlord thing of raising rent to the highest level to get more money was a thing, and then I also realized that setting rent to the lowest gives you Good Boy Points, I just raised rent to the highest level on everything, went off to do something else and idled in the game, then came back, set the rent to the lowest, and sat around for an extremely short period of time as I became the most well loved ruler in the history of albion, because the game's morality system has hard caps and thus, going from -100 to 100 was exceedingly easy
thats how you beat the game too :)
Ironically in a game supposedly all about moral choices, being evil for a while then switching to good is actually the optimal way of getting the best ending.
I would do the exact same thing. Except I would play the game setting all rent to high and only lowering it once I had a good sum of money stocked up. Then I'd go to the orphanage and adopt every orphan and give each pair a extremely well paid caretaker and all other homes the lowest rent possible. :]
That's so unrealistic, the public would never have such short memories. Oh wait.
A good, heroic landlord empire? Yep, sure sounds like a fable to me.
yeah, fantasy is better than real life
hey big ups, this is an amazing joke, thank you so much for making it, i laughed and i rlly needed it today
Singapore.
Reality is often dissaponting
Ok, but have we discussed the true art that is Molyneux's vision for a game about struggling and failing to live up to the promises you made and then struggling and failing to live up to the promises he made?
I had to fight the urge to make some faux-deranged spiral of a thought about how the game is actually meta art because of the broken promise thing.
It's metacontextually very fitting, but being accidental makes it ironic.
peter molyneux's been trying to make the same landlord game his entire life, it's so funny
Honestly, as much as I wanna knock the guy for his uhh...ceaseless over-ambition, I can't fault him for chasing a vision. That said, he does get like... emotional over the idea of haptic feedback? so idk he's a bit strange. Driven, strange, and maybe a bit lost.
Syndicate is my favourite landlord game.
It’s simply a reflection of his desires, all Moly boy wants is land, money, and maidens
it's so based
I think they should make another fable game I loved 2 and 3
My favorite part about the Fable II landlord simulator: the endgame content, your final reward for beating the game, becoming known across the lands and winning all the money? The very last step of the ultimate power fantasy?
...A sex change potion.
The lengths one has to go through just to get HRT in England is truly astonishing.
I like how the people with the most positive relationship to fable are the ones who barely interacted with the promotional material and didn’t know about Peter Molyneux
as one of those people, I can confirm
Fable, Black & White, it was good times...
Bang on. I just rented fable 1 from the video store having never heard of it and adored it
I got into the games years after their release so to me, Fable 1 is my favourite game of all time. Fable 2 is in my top 10
Yep yep yep. Fable II's trailer was included in my Xbox 360 video library, along with some interesting video about the design of brutes in Halo 3, and it ignited a burning desire to play this fabulous game. Then a friend of mine lowered my expectations on it a lot. And finally bought it used from a discount bin in a Blockbuster. I loved it, I had never heard of Peter Molyneux and actually only felt bad when I knew Lionhead studios ceased to exist. Then I played Fable III and it was disappointing, 😂. Finally I learned about Molyneux, of all the broken promises, and moved on. One day I played Fable Remastered, not expecting anything from it, and loved it. 😂
My favorite part of being a benevolent landlord: Killing NPC's lets you buy their homes.
i have a distinct memory of shooting an npc in the back as they're running away from me only to get the happy "A new house is available for sale!" message in Fable 1
Played Fable 3 for the first time, MP joinable was on by default. Random guy showed up, gave me 4M gold, told me to buy houses, and left. No explanation, I didn't realize the outcome was entirely money until the end.
Random guy just shows up, causally drops 4M in your pocket and tells you to become a landlord.
Got that’s inspirational.
@@supergamergrill7734 Capitalism at work. I charged reasonable rents, saved 6.5M lives, and built that orphanage. All it took was a small loan of 4 million dollars!
Damn I've been playing Fable 3 since 2014 or 2015 and I've never experienced the Live aspect of the game, 'cause I never got how it works… only ever played co-op with my sis on the same console… makes me kinda jealous of u tbh
@@kai9137Is couch coop good? I was wondering about buying it for my sister
Peter Molyneux wanted us to feel the sting of making and breaking promises to accomplish your dreams because that was his lifestyle.
~27:40 Just did some math cause I can't let things go, and in order to make the 450k that the bower lake proposal gets you, from rent of a single house on the lake, you'd need 5 hours game time (just owning Timmins Towers). With more houses, it obviously pays itself off even more. I hadn't even considered that mining the lake quite actually means strangling the revenue stream of the highest domestic rents in Albion, lol.
Yeah even if you're being purely pragmatic, preserving the lake is the better option in the long term. So not really a moral choice at all.
Fable is one of the worst RPG series I’ve played but it always had a certain charm. Fable 3’s complete reliance on money really devalued the idea of it being hard to keep promises as a leader. If you do everything right, even as a good character, you can keep every promise and morally good choice without any danger or risk of breaking a promise
Yeahhhh.... Like I started this all in part to respond to (and destroy, apparently) a desire to experience the games again, and like, they're still kinda fun, but so much of a mess, and so so so full of broken or unfulfilled (I maintain there is a difference) promises.
@@Rosencreutzzz for sure. I would like to see the ideas meet their potential and there are a lot of fun ideas but it was one of those old xbox era games
The big part of criticizing idea of breaking promises, would be to have empty promises - meaning, the promises you know are impossible, in conflict with your other promises etc. if your game needs a visionary to end up at "its always one of your promises vs money" then you gotta change your visionary 🤣
I wouldn't say it's THE worst, but... it's definitely the worst RPG series I still enjoyed playing.
8:04 I recommend the 2015 Rock Paper Shotgun article where John Walker starts the interview by bluntly asking him if he's a pathological liar.
Lollll okay I didn't doubt what you were saying, but it is very funny to see it for real, that he just opens with "Do you think that you're a pathological liar?"
"No", said Molineux with a devilish smile
Also fallout 1 came out in 1997 and had an explicit number you could see on your character screen labeled "karma"
The Ultima games also come to mind
this was exactly my problem with the game when playing it. Just laboriously buying up every property and waiting. Though I at least did it with a friend in co-op. You dismissed player trading, but you can actually just gift gold directly to your friends with no limit. That's how we got the good ending, one guy did the evil stuff including landlording, and the other was goody two shoes. Then before the end we just donated it all to the good guy.
The only thing I can remember about this game is that I owned a copy for 2 days before my mom found out there was sex in it and returned it to GameStop before I could even open it. To think I missed out on Molyneux's glorious vision.
Realistically, the monarch in such a situation should be able to raise the tax rate arbitrarily high without much opposition from the people. Because this is a state of emergency. And you never let a good crisis go to waste. So the treasury is effectively bottomless. You know what isn't bottomless? The productive capacity of Albion's arms industry and the manpower of its military. What isn't bottomless is the construction sector's ability to build city fortifications. What isn't bottomless is the food supply. You can't beat back the cosmic horror by throwing gold coins at it. But if you could, private citizens would already be doing just that, so what point is there in taking it from them? No. What we needed to see was Albion being turned into a totalitarian hellscape. Alcohol is evil? Sure it is, it prevents people from working 14 hours a day to manufacture artillery shells. So ban alcohol. Ban unions in industries deemed essential to the state. Ban meat and fruit, for grains are more efficient for feeding the masses. Ration consumer goods. If not enough volunteer, conscript people into the military. That is militarisation. It's what Albion needs to do.
"You can't beat back the cosmic horror by throwing gold coins at it."
Just not throwing hard enough.
live v1 ultrakill reaction
So kind of what Mistborn's Lord Ruler was doing, essentially?
Bluds finna dictate
That's stepping dangerously close to both being interesting and having some real-world parallels that are putting you in the shoes of people broadly considered monsters by most people.
Fable 3 honestly lived up to my expectations but I was also like 11 and hadn't been following the hype cycle. I did see how the politics fell flat so yes, even a child could tell.
I thought it was fun lol
Used to love this as a kid. I remember every character ended up becoming obese from eating food cause it heals you. So I had to run around everywhere, looking for celery. Also because I was a child I thought it was really cool that you could have sex in a game. Although in retrospect its really lame lol
video games will never not make me cringe with their fade-to-black voiced sex cut scenes. I remember Dragon Age Origins getting praise for being like, "sensuous and tasteful" but I also recall deep embarrassment when triggering them.
It was also really cool for me. Though I only just use the mechanic now to have as many kids as possible and cause a succession crisis in the future.
One of my 20 kids will surely kill to have the throne for themselves
Strangely enough getting fat doesn't really affect anything other than the aesthetic appearance of your character... in the first game the fattest you could get barely looked noticeable; in the second it affected how attractive you were to NPCs, but could be mitigated by wearing fancy clothes, and in the third it affected literally nothing other than occasional NPC dialogue. It didn't make you slower or affect your fighting ability in any way. And healing items that made you gain weight were more effective and in higher supply than ones that caused you to lose weight or keep it the same, so... my character always ended up fat and stayed that way.
And then I have a damn weapon that to upgrade I need to do it with like 4 people at once, I don't even know how you do that
Old guy here, my memory of the game was very different. I remember it being shockingly easy to make all the good choices, own all the property in the kingdom, charge the minimum amount of rent, and still have more money than the game needs you have for anything. If I remember the move to do was like place a book against the controller so you're running in circles, then go to school or bed, come back and you're rich. Maybe not played as intended, but it still worked.
Ok about the intro though. The first fable game was so good because the incentives for being a bad person are actually pretty fun imo. Some of them can be basic like “raid or attack” orchard farm with the evil option paying a bit more, but giving me the option to kill other heroes like whisper, thunder, and briar rose are interesting and since they’re all so arrogant, I found it kinda interesting to kill them. Same thing with that boy trapped by the nymph. I had the option to sacrifice the treasure hunter I found and felt compelled to. I even turned on the nymph choosing to sacrifice him just to lower her guard then getting the first shot off.
Great video! I was probably the target Fable customer at just the right age when it came out but I never picked it up for whatever reason. Soon after, it (and Molyneux) got its reputation and I never thought to give it a tumble. So, I thought it was really interesting to see what the Choices Matter™ stuff was all about in F3. This does make me think there's probably at least one lunatic who paid for the good ending solely with pie making though. That's gotta be on video somewhere
I mean it *is* possible…
Hello I'm that person, don't have any video proof though.
I came damn close, to be fair
I think an interesting direction fable 3 couldve take. Is if when you learn why your brother was doing what he was, you had a choice to become his advisor, keeping him on the throne while your “rebellion” grows leading to an outcome where you can do all the evils under your brothers name, and then revolt in the end to use him as a sacrificial pawn. That’s make it feel more evil I think
>Be a monarch
>Can't just raise taxes, conscript people, or money printer go breeder to make what you want happen.
Lol raising taxes is your first decision as a king smh
@@stinhuffine4422A good first decision
This is the world if Keynesian economics dont exist 😢
@@petersmythe6462 bro spoiler alert: when you become a king your first choice is to
A. Raise taxes
B. Lower taxes
C. Keep the same taxes
@@stinhuffine4422 I assume the point is "can't raise them enough to cover the costs needed" not that you can't do it at all.
I remember making a million pies in the beggining of the game so I can buy houses. So no matter what my choices, everyone survives.
Yep, that’s what I did. Make pies at the start so I could buy some property when it became unlocked and it snowballed from there.
It was slow since I did pirate on pc and I don’t get money by being offline so I had to work harder/ Wait longer but thang is it easy if you just have patience
Being a landlord is the most moral endeavor one can undertake.
Me, every time someone mentions Peter Mollinyuhhhh (blame Yahtzee, that's how I hear it in my head and shall do forever): "Oh I wonder what he's up to these days"
*Reads any 5 reviews from GODUS*
"Ah."
Absolutely a huge fan of this. I love that you take a game that's kind of dumb, but instead of just writing it off entirely, you engage with it on its level and examine it the way you would examine a more "serious" piece of media.
Always warms my memelord heart to see a youtuber of pure passion. Keep being awesome!
I've been routing a good% Speedrun for awhile now and it's been an absolute treat watching you explain how little money you make doing anything but real estate lol
I genuinely can't tell if you're implying that there are tons of ways to earn easy money that I missed or if you're saying that it's hard to route because there aren't any, interesting to think about the speedrun angle of this all the same. I watched a Fable 1 one like two days ago, and they used the "buy all a shop's item and sell them back for profit" glitch and I was like "yea! 12 year old me did Speedrun Strats™"
@@Rosencreutzzz oh I meant that it was cathartic to see it all laid out that there's absolutely no other feasible means of making money lol
Sorry if I came off snarky... Really enjoying your channel!
Because even using DLC to cheat a max level treasure hunting dog, opening all the treasure chests, opening all five silver chests with money, and getting the Demon Door for being king nets you.... 1.25 million, fixed, plus maybe an extra 100k if you're REALLY lucky and only dig up gems...
Pain in my ass, I tell ya.
I was pretty sure it wasn't snark, and I wasn't offended if it was, just genuinely curious if there was some big thing. Wild to hear it's largely down to luck with the dog, lol.
@@Rosencreutzzz even with the best of luck with the dog, the three pawnbrokers in ALL of Albion have a finite amount of money at any given time, so it's not really super practical to go there and vend your valuables either lmao
I liked the morality system in Mass Effect games. It wasn't as much about being good or bad, as it was about being a hero (helping everyone and their mother) versus being ruthless but effective (sacrificing others for your own benefit in pursuit of the greater cause).
I love thd Renegade route, but as ME trilogy progresses, pragmatitism slowly becomes cruel for cruel sake a bit too much sometimes. A bit of flandarization.
@@cyncynshopdoesn't help that, comparatively speaking, the Paragon route gains wayyyy more war assets than the Renegade route in the end, and a fair few "ideal" resolutions to certain scenarios are more easily achieved by being Paragon than Renegade. Also doesn't help that Renegade Shepard is notably racist, which is more of a minor quirk that, if nothing else, does add some characterization to him (or her), but it might not sit well with some players, specially when the games have something of a recurring theme that unity tends to bring about better results than being a hardass.
I have great memories of playing the Fable games, but I definitely got a "Guys, did you know you can put a morality system into video games?!" vibe from them :D
Yeah I think the moment it sort of washed over me that the morality was kinda bland was realizing how little murder was. And then I played Fallout New Vegas and while that game is really imperfect in its system of "morality" the morality system was largely replaced by reputation and that felt so much better and I realized I liked that more than "i can be ur angle or ur devil" stuff.
@@Rosencreutzzz New Vegas' karma system was an interesting shift for me, coming from fallout 3. The first time I played it, I remember I snuck into a house in goodsprings and when I was sure no one was around, I started looting the place, as one does. Only to quickly realize that whatever arbiter was at play here was omniscient and didn't require someone to see me do something to smack my karma in the head. It turned me off from the game for a bit, but I came back after a while and gave it a fair shake, and now I appreciate that system. It's now one of my favorite deterents to looting literally everything. Sure, you will still take what you need, since it doesn't make that big of a difference to take a stimpack here, or a magazine there, but unless you just really want bad karma, you won't go out stealing literally everything that isn't nailed down and get away with it, just because no one saw you do it.
@@Gitshiverthe thing that put me off for a while was the fact that stealing from a dead persons home was still considered bad, even if it was considered good that you killed them. Like who still owns that stimpack, a corpse?
Of course same thing in elder scrolls.
@@sirjmo Their next of kin
You know what woulda been real nice in fable 3? The option to repair all of your properties with one button… I swear to god I lost my mind switching between maps making sure I repaired every single house
*GAMEPLAY*
Do I have news for you about yet another quality of life feature the PC got that the console did not…
@@Rosencreutzzz Dude that’s so fucking scuffed, I had no idea the PC version had that, I’m so confused as to why they wouldn’t include such an obvious quality of life feature across all platforms.
If one wants to play a game where you can (optionally) start from the bottom(ish) and rise to the top via wheeling-and-dealing, followed by managing a large kingdom while having to make actual meaningful choices that can make or ruin you, and at the same time having some wacky adventures on the side, just play Crusader Kings.
Bannerlord (and older Mount and Blade iterations, and mods) kinda suits that desire, but the gameplay doesn't fundamentally change much once a lord, and I think they should make the parts about having a family, sovereign nation, diplomacy, all that should be fleshed out a lot, and then it would really feel like rising from obscurity and shift in experience.
That said, being a count inside a realm in CK and being the sovereign of a realm are very different experiences that border on different games, in a sense, and I love it.
God bless you for actually leaving that paragraph long enough on the screen to read without pausing. You're amazing for that!
Fable: a series best played in reverse for features. Fable 4 is shaping up nicely in that regard. We might not even have fun available in that one.
2:08 as someone who's been playing fable my entire life, I felt that in my soul
I got here from the Vic3 videos, and i am happy that you did them so i found your other videos! Keep it up, your doing great man. Good content makes the people come! Will recommend. 10/10 Räkmackor
Fable 3 is a medieval society right? Owning land was the way you made money in medieval Europe if you weren't a banker or the Pope. Seems realistic.
It always pissed me off that in fable 2 with the pure-corrupt good-evil 2 axis morality system that had names for the 4 combos didn't call you "pure evil" if you were a serial killer landlord who didn't charge any money for rent 😤😤😤
Absolutely adored Fable 3 as a teenager. Played it again in my mid 20's and it's such a bewildering experience.
28:45 when you mentioned that pond I was also thinking when the work was done it could easily be filled back in and restored. Albion is a land of magic and it has shown its ability for nature to recover. Look up silver islet mine As an example of what they could have done to restore the lake later on.
And there's another interesting choice they could have added depth to the game What if you had the option of still keeping your promises or trying to repair the damage after the invasion
It’s funny that the game paints what is a war of succession as a “revolution.” It’s more accurately a rebellion between two monarchists.
Hehe, I'm doing a good playthrough as a prince-turns-socialist first among equals sort. I am acquiring their homes for the State and charge them rent for maintenance, public works, and national defense. I am a most beneficent El Presidente, ¡Viva l Trop... I mean, ¡Viva la Albion!
This was a good yap sesh glad I could be here
Indeed
Honestly, considering you ARE the state in the game, and you are collecting rent for the sake of fighting against a world-ending threat, you could almost say this isn't libertarian landlordism, but some kind of command economy
That sound track in the first 10 seconds of the video from fable 1 main menu screen always makes me wanna tear up a little. It gets me so emotional because Fable 1 was such a giant piece of my early childhood. It was one of the first Xbox games I played and I still go back and play through the series to this day (20 years later). I wish I could have a time portal and just go play it for the first time again with my twin sister beside me. I remember she was just as intrigued by it watching me play it. The game world and characters were so odd and somewhat scary in their mannerisms but the setting was so damn charming. I'm gonna show my step son this series asap. All he talks about is Minecraft and I wanna show him what Xbox gaming is truly about lol or was at one point.
I think I missed the second half of this game cause I don't remember any landlord mechanics
I miss fable, it had such a unique feeling and style.
I remember this game from childhood in two ways. Firstly the vague idea of the game, the imagery, the rough story and the impact choices were supposed to have. Secondly, changing the clock on my PC to crank out rent, buying the entire kingdom, dropping rent to be "nice", and comfortably finishing the game with enough bank to ignore any financial threats. Ultimately, I became an otherworldly entity, capable of time manipulation, to defeat the shadowy evil otherworldly entity.
I much preferred the combat in fable 1
The way they just turned combat into like one button just ruined it.
I couldn’t believe combat became horrible on fable 3 compared to fable 2.
3 was so fun for some reason. Gotta say he made a fun game.
I had a roommate play Fable 3. He did landlord gimmick, had the money, backstabbed the gypsies anyway.
Oh god, Fable... I do genuinely have fond memories of the series but it really is all about disappointment. And Fable 3 especially so. I remember Fable 2 being the best one, although that might be just my personal preference, but it has the most memorable moments to me (especially rediscovering Oakvale, that still lives in my head rent free) and altho I don't remember much about the story, I liked the player character (Sparrow) in Fable 2 the most. It also had the strongest sense of history and the references to the first game worked surprisingly well. And the mood just really worked for me, especially the moments of just exploring with my dog. The only real annoyance I remember was the stupid breadcrumb trail and the morality system, which I just chose to ignore as much as possible.
I don't know how well it would live up to my memories, maybe I just liked it more because I already knew to lower my expectations after being disappointed with the first game, but I keep wanting to play it again, unfortunately I just haven't figured out how. I don't have an xBox, I only ever played on my brother's.
Fable 3 on the other hand... I don't think I'd ever been as mad at a video game as I was at Fable 3 after the first and only time I played it
You forgot one facet on the trade option: you can artificially inflate the pawnbroker prices by stack-buying all of a given trade good and waiting an in-game day or so before coming back and re-dumping that stock to the pawn shop for a large "shortage" price bonus
Isn't that more of a Fable 1 thing?
@@brandonlyon730 it is, and you don't even need to wait a day to do it once your bartering skill is high enough
I can't remember the last time i played Fable 3 sober. It's a great game because it's just challenging enough to be playable if you've got a 4.0 BAC debuff IRL, and simple and humorous ebough to keep you interested
Hey RC! New subscriber to your content, I love your dialectics and as a big Paradox fan it's refreshing to see genuine dissection of these games I love so much. Can't wait to see what you do next!
Flawed as it was Fable is still the best overall statecraft and landlording sim to date. I’m still chasing that dragon..
Somehow this is one of my favorite games of all time. Never played the first two. I think I just love the setting and overlooked the gameplay
I remember playing this game! I thought, perhaps, there was a thematic twist at the end if you kept all your promises. You see, in the beginning of the game, you make these promises to make life better, and because of those promises, the various groups assist you in the revolution without expecting direct, monetary payment. So pardon my naïveté in thinking that, if I *kept* all those promises, perhaps everyone would assist their beloved benevolent monarch without expecting direct, monetary payment, and rather because 1) they trust my leadership and expect me to continue bettering Albion and 2) they don't want to get murderified by the... whatever it was.
I never finished the game; I enjoyed the revolution phase well enough to finish that, but the leadership phase wore on my patience until I decided my character had tragically cracked under the pressure and disappeared into the mountains, never to be seen again.
0:52 I think that's pretty true of the first game but the second game made stuff a bit more gray
Kotor 2? Oh for sure. But...then again. There's a decently large eternally occurring discussion in the Kotor2 fanbase about if the game encourages grayness, if it did so in opposition of general starwars vibes, and how there's a strong absence of any kind of reward to gray. Kreia consistently pushes the player to think in shades of gray, but then there's stuff like prestige classes being locked behind being deep into one alignment. Some people take the whole "Apathy is Death" segment to mean that gray neutrality is not actually an option, and that the game is exploring grayness only to conclude that there can be no such thing.
This is definitely something I've spent too much time thinking about and will probably make a video on.
@@Rosencreutzzz Leftist KOTOR II analysis? God, yes, please.
Just found this channel and it is such a fantastic level of quality and analysis from a leftist perspective that is lacking on UA-cam at the moment. There's no rhetoric or pandering, just deep and level-headed thoughts.
We need a Fable-like genre
So long as you start early you can literally buy your way through the Albion real estate market from the get-go and literally just minmax every house by giving it one good repair cycle and then move on. Don't mess with any of the sliders, don't increase the rent, and especially do not reduce the rent. And you will get the perfect ending to the game every time win just the slightest bit of patience added.
This was hilarious but nostalgic...i do remember the burgeoning importance of home ownership in the game lol.
I landlorded every fable game.
You can max out every rent rate if you keep the poorest houses free and you never have to worry about karma
The one thing which didn't fail across the original three games (although 3 borrowed quite a bit) is the music. Still fantastic, to this day.
Fable was the game where you could become known as the "chicken-kicker", wasn't it
8:05 considering that quote of his you just read, that’s incredibly funny
Sseth's video on fable has the best description I've seen of Fable's morality System, highly recommended. Also, HEY HEY PEOPLE!
To me this game only interesting thing about this game was the different ways that your weapons changed. But that wasn't enough. Your criticisms are totally correct on this part.
Steve wanting to make a game so we could experience promises not getting kept was a choice, he was 2 games late to his own party
You CAN be a benevolent ruler AND save all your subjects if you raise prices on all large establishments to the highest, raise Millfields rent to the highest, and put all other housing to the lowest rent.
The 'evil' moral points gets nullified by the good moral points, some villagers will hate you, most will like you.
Now you just gotta grind the weapon upgrades, hunt silver/golden keys, open all demon doors, etc etc.
The fable series is one of the best game series ever made. Of course it has flaws but the positive greatly out way them.
26:08 That was something I really liked in the original Fable was there were two signs outside every house one for selling/renting a house And another for upgrading the furniture.
Fable 2 was a pain with upgrading because you could only buy one of any given type furniture and sometimes a shop would only occasionally get one of those furniture items so furnishing a single house with all five star furniture for example was ridiculously tedious. I never even focused on it in Fable 3 but I imagine it's as much or more tedious
it's really funny that mr molyneux and the team executed a decent concept so poorly they made something that *feels* like it effectively reverse engineered pay to win game mechanics, without any financial incentive
15:08 literally looks like a mobile game ad from the last few years
and the cutscenes are like if you combined the artstyles of Foodfight and the first witcher game
Might and Magic 6 also had a good vs evil point system connected to player choice (but it was very simplistic because the game was more of an open-air dungeon crawler than a narrative driven RPG)
Black & White from the same dev of Fable , Lionhead studios had an even earlier karma system than Star Wars. They were merely refining or simplifying it by the time Fable rolled around.
When I played I sat there and played the lute for a solid 24 hours straight.
I always thought it was weird that the people of albion didn't mind that theier king had stockpiled the gold they need for defense all in his special pocket dimension.
It’s good to see the thumbnail and have done that
I love the fable games all of them are big part of my childhood
with fable 2 still being my fav
but i am never going to debt or fight with people who point out they have alot of problems
Better stories that have an existential threat like this tend to have them tied into the theme, like maybe the shadow monster only came into existence because of industrial exploitation or something.
Yeah the way Fable 3 is like halfway there to 3 or 4 different themes and connects none of them to the end is really something. It's disconnected enough it feels like the inverse of a Deus Ex Machina moment, in that it's the antithesis of sudden (and certainly seems planned from the start in some way) but somehow still comes out of nowhere as a game pivot...and I suspect this is a further symptom of the game being very rushed.
It 100% is. The first thing i did was play to music mini game until i could buy a fruit stand then another stand and then another and another. I owned everything before i became king and transfered all my money to the treasury for the army.
The decision was easy for me: a kingdom enslaved even more than the baseline monarchy is a kingdom not worth saving. So I bankrupted Albion and most people died. This of course isn’t how real life works because money is a social construct and people don’t die because the treasury is empty.
Reddit brought me here. Nice video. I love the 3 games 🤘❤️
For those wondering having every house and business at max prices gives you about 4m every 5 minutes and you can get good boy points for donations to the vault and bad boy points for taking money so if you just screw around for about a hour with maxed passive income you can just max deposit for max good boy and vice versra
I remembered my first playthrough... the kingdom was EMPTY after my good king and no realty fund my kingdom
the only thing i remember about falble 3 is the zero punctuation review
Not that i disagree with your take, BUT, the moral perspectives the game presents better fits the era. People were not questioning the kings right to ownership of land so much as they might question specific acts and policies the king picks.
Great video, your insight on this matter was really good! This seems like one of those unfortunate evens where dev teams wouldn't or couldn't properly cooperate. Making choices and morality matter sounds like a narrative department's job, which might've hit a brick wall with the gameplay department due to the complexity of the desired systems. It can also be a budgetary or scheduling issue; the narrative might've come far after most of the systems were set in stone.
I feel like I read an interview where there was some mention of the departments being forcibly compartmentalized, which I am, frankly, stunned is as common as it is, given how often that leads to the need for massive rewrites or a shoddy product, which doesn't exactly save on time or resources, but in truth, I genuinely don't know how much the narrative and gameplay designers were allowed to interact. I just have the weird promises Molyneux made, which could be their own entire video, about things like his strong fascination with haptic feedback and pressure sensitive trigger actions, like holding hands, and how that eventually seems to have been watered down into "idk hold the A button for a lonnnnnng time to complete an emote to get friend points"
But even with that example, I'm still not sure "overambition" is the right answer either. It's just an odd mess in that way.
@@Rosencreutzzz Yeah, it's all speculation of course, but based on my personal experience from having worked on game projects, it's not uncommon at all for different divisions to kinda work separately.
Trade is good in Sid Mier's Pirates!
I keep meaning to try that game, along with the Port Royale games but never get around to it/hope eternally for a more contemporary good game set in the age of piracy with that kind of scope.
I liked fable 3, I also refuse to pay attention to what molyneux says so I don't get any disappointment. It's the tone and writing in these games that I love, it's the most British, silly, monty python adjacent game series ever and I don't think there will ever be another game series this whimsical that's as large in scale. I'm just happy and amazed that these games exist
Yahtzee had a very similar experience with the random 121 day jump when he reviewed the game a decade ago.
Love the video, you CANNOT keep saying "IDK" out loud, please😂
Morality in Star Wars is wild because it really depends on the writer in charge.
With Lucas, it's flat - in fact, there is no 'light side' in Proper OG Star Wars. There's _The Force,_ and _The Dark Side._ The reason this is flat is because The Dark Side is conceptually a cancer in the force. Destroying the dark side restores balance, and the galaxy is saved. You flat out _cannot_ use the dark side to do good. Under Lucasian theory, Anakin fulfilled the prophecy when he killed Palpatine (and himself), destroying the darkside and bringing balance to The Force. (This is also why Palpatine is so cartoonishly evil, he's literally huffing spirit cancer.)
However, different writers (and the _vast majority_ of the audience) took there to be a light side, and a dark side - and thus, any balance must be between The Light and The Dark. Knights of the Old Republic, and _especially_ it's sequel, really play with this aspect, where sometimes darksiders do good (through destructive passion), sometimes lightsiders do evil (through apathetic detachment), and the concept of a Grey Jedi is played with more explicitly (a Jedi who is True Neutral). Under this theory, Anakin fulfilled the prophecy when he enacted Order 66 and began the purge of the Jedi, until the number of light siders and darksiders in the galaxy was more even, thus bringing 'balance'.
These theories are not compatible, and the fact that most people aren't even _aware_ that this is how Lucas envisioned the Force and the Jedi is actually part of why there's so much discourse surrounding the prequel films. Like, once you understand that the Jedi aren't just paranoid, the dark side is literally, actually a perversion of the natural order, and destroying it is the only correct moral choice, a lot of their fears and blindspots make more sense.
In fable 2 I got megarich by being landlord. It was fun game, bit limited, but still fun and I liked it's visuals a lot.
Back when I had this on 360 my brother and I found out if we disconnect the xbox from the internet and advance the system clock by a day we'd make money super fast
Right out of the gate, when you were outlining the three outcomes of the Ruling part of the game (accept all the good choices but end up in debt, accept all the evil choices but donate to the treasury (and weirdly still end up in debt), or accept all evil choices but pocket the money) it made me realize that Fable 3 actually dumbed down the morality system even more than it already was.
Because while Fable 2 was still pretty dichotomous in terms of player choice, there was at least the acknowledgement of a third option: neutrality. Or Fable's version of morally gray.
It's actually kind of glaring when I think about it considering how important the number 3 is in Fable (3 Heroes each representing 3 Heroic disciplines each representing 3 spokes of its morality wheel). This would be the game to bring moral neutral to the forefront considering the complexity of the choices and moral dilemmas that come up during the ruling system. Heck, at least making the "evil" choice of running the country harder if not as hard as Logan but funneling it to the treasury the moral neutral choice. It's not a perfect solution but it would signal a better understanding on the part of the game that moral neutral is the most important facet here.
I remember being like 8 and the mining thing came up and I thought "Oh that sounds like a good thing I'll do that!" and then my morality went down and I asked my dad because I was extremely confused why that was bad. So, can confirm a child would find the morality in this game weird. (Also I stopped preordering games after Fable 3... still love 2 though)
I seem to recall that I was so fabulously wealthy by the second half that I didn't need to worry about money at all. I nationalized (bought) the whole kingdom, minimized all rents (I would have made them free if it let me), and paid for all the promises mostly just to spite whatshisname because I was still mad at him from Fable 2.
I don't remember how I got so much money but it may have involved spending a huge amount of time on minigames, including the gambling demo that released before the game and let you carry over your money.
why would you spell out 'idk' irl
Ideekay, probably to get people to comment about it to drive up the engagement for his video statistics
Why not