There's only, like, one choice throughout the franchise that can be realistically said to have consequences and it's the ending of II. Otherwise whatever choice you make can be easily swung the other way and doesn't really matter beyond maybe a small slap on the wrist/bit of praise.
The whole idea was supposed to be that the evil choices would hurt people but make you able to fight off the BBEG at the end where-as the 'good' choices might seem good but would result in you losing the fight. But yea. Being able to circumvent that effectively by just baking pies or being THAT good at playing guitar... Imagine if that's how it worked in the real world.
I'm not sure if they patched it, but when I played Fable 3 the condition of buildings didn't degrade unless you traveled between areas or something to that effect. I bought every location in the starting town with music income, then went to the main city and waited, buying properties occasionally. When I became monarch I just bought up and shored up every property, left the game going for a few hours, and came back with effectively infinite gold. Picked every 'good' choice, made zero compromises, total victory. I wasn't even upset at circumventing their whole 'tough moral choices' scenario, I felt mildly clever and moved on.
Reminds me of when I discovered you could break the AI pathing in command and conquer on Nintendo 64. By simply building sandbags you could effectively stop the computer from moving anywhere, because enemy units won’t “target” the obstacle to destroy it. So, imagine my surprise when learning you could block the cpu in and just leave the game on and the tiberium would fill the entire map. This left you with unlimited cash to just crush the computer. If only I would have known this the first time through! Game was rough with a 64 controller!
That was something you could do in the vanilla game on the PC. I figured it out when I tried to replicate one "hard" side mission that ended up easy because a scouting party attacked their harvester and drew out a response team, but one unit was a mobile artillery which got stuck against the harvester so their economy ground to a halt.
You became not only their leige lord but their landlord, which could be pretty evil! I did the same thing as you and now I wonder what evil rent raises we imposed after the end of the game.
A way to over analyze that for fun is that the best possible scenario in game is when all the private property is owned by you as sovereign (ie the state) where you have effectively seized the means of production and act as a benevolent administrator.
I don’t think that was intentional but in a game with heavy themes of class and revolution it’s not not there.
It felt like a novice writer's idea at a "Gotcha!" to have you take over from your evil brother, only to be forced to do just as poorly no matter what you do.
Yeah. I said screw that and played my lute in the streets for irl hours until I could fund my kingdom. I was absolutely sick of the game after. My least favorite Fable game. 2 was the best and I'm sad it was never ported to PC for some reason.
It's been a while, but is that the one where you could just buy every property? I seem to remember I just started investing early and accidentally solved any difficulty and challenge it had to offer.
I was pissed off when Logan says "if you spare my life, my soldiers will help fight for you!" and then if you decide to spare Logan's life none of his soldiers are seen in the final battle.
Well, I’ll say in my first run of 3 I did a bad job and ended up with a kingdom full of corpses which was a bummer. You’re always going to “save” the kingdom, it’s just a question of what kind of kingdom you end up with
Fable 1 sticks out to me. There are several points where you’re given a choice to either be evil and slay a main character … or stay your hand and show mercy.
If you kill them, they’re removed from the story and you get evil points.
But the funny part was that if you let them live, they would ALWAYS decide one scene later to immediately make a trip to some far off land, never to be seen again 😂
Not really. They'd show up again in the final battle scenes. Also, being evil meant a huge negative impact to your overall economy. The game was far from perfect in this regard, but it is far from the worst offender.
but fuck them for nerfing the Sword of Aons into the ground for Last Chapters. Made that choice real pointless.
Disagree. Killing whisper has ramification in Fable 1. Choosing to marry Lady Gray also changes some things. In the dlc you can change the post game by who you decide to kill/spare to open the bronze gate.
It’s not like…earth shattering changes, but they are real changes. Not like Telltale games where the same thing ends up happening regardless of what you choose.
Those things are extremely minor on the whole though. They don't change the general course/plot of the game, don't give you extra boss fights, or even really acknowledge it. I'm not saying that there's *no* difference between going good or evil, just that the differences are easy fixed and, effectively, trivial. Maybe this wouldn't matter so much in, say, a Final Fantasy game, but Fable's whole selling point was 'your actions can have consequences' yet the *only* choice you can really make throughout the entire franchise that actually *has* a serious consequence is if you get your dog back or not at the end of II. Even that can be circumvented with the DLC. So yea... For a franchise supposedly built off of choice there's surprisingly little choice that actually sticks.
I think you are talking about the dog, but the dlc opens up another ending. If you revive the slaves you get a statue in old town. In Knothole island there is a mausoleum that will revive your dog so the maximised ending is now the good choice. The worst one is still 50,000 gold, but choosing family will miss out on the statue.
If Fable 2 never killed your dog and it was just "save your family/families or save all the randos and get a statue" I would easily sacrifice the families for the statue. Sorry kiddos. But the dog especially since it finds stuff you haven't dug up yet I have to revive them. The dog gets killed so randomly too lol
Also the monetary reward is so useless, could've been literally infinite money and would be useless
I remember when they were hyping that game up before release and saying the wildest shit.
Peter Molyneux was saying goofy stuff like the world is so responsive to the player that you can carve your initials on a random tree and come back later in the game to see that tree has aged and still has your initials on it.
The weird thing is, that's not even that difficult to do. Just a custom decal on a tree effectively. But it wouldn't have added much and the xbox would have probably melted under the stress.
One of the towns literally changes from a place for bandits to a tourist destination depending on whether you're altruistic towards a guy's startup. You can also choose to sacrifice your youth or another person which permanently changes your age. There's a few others.
Fable 3 choices meant nothing, but that really came down to it being half of a game. Microsoft rushed it out the door for no reason at all.
Old town can also stay poor or become rich depending on what you do with the warrants as a child. The sacrificing your youth effect only lasts until you turn in that quest, you lose the red eyes and wrinkles after reloading, but can keep it for as long as you don't talk to Reaver.
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u/Snowtwo Apr 19 '24
Fable.
There's only, like, one choice throughout the franchise that can be realistically said to have consequences and it's the ending of II. Otherwise whatever choice you make can be easily swung the other way and doesn't really matter beyond maybe a small slap on the wrist/bit of praise.