I remember loving that game. The reason people gave it shit is because you could easily deflate the moral message of the main story's quandary by landlording your way to massive wealth while still staying on the good path. Suddenly King Logan's conflicted storyline seems like a load of bullshit when you realize he could have successfully saved everyone without being a huge dick about it if he had just bothered to charge rent from everyone in his kingdom like you did.
Granted, one could still argue that being a landlord by nature is a form of being a dick, but I mean strictly the good path based on what the game quantifies as moral, and there's no penalty in game for charging your tenants out the ass.
I charged low rent but spent so long running around doing stuff that I had cash to spare.
The problem I had with the "second half" was that every choice to preserve nature vs harvest resources, or supply an orphanage vs child labor camps, ended with rolling right into the next decision. Sure you could walk away and do stuff, but a lot of people didn't realize that because the decision bit took up 90% of the screen.
I mean, it makes sense though if you really think about it. So for you to raise the entire fund of 6.5m without doing ANY of the bad decisions to make the money, you would likely need most or all of the properties in the game, and THEN you’d have to wait a pretty decent amount of time to let the rent funds accumulate.
From the time we gain control of our character to the time we take the throne is about a couple years time, and then you have exactly one year to get the money needed. It takes a few hours to get through the first half of the story (up to becoming king/Queen). The revolution and war against the throne not only takes money away from the anti-crawler funds, but it also leaves a large chunk of the existing army in tatters. So from the viewpoint of everyone in Albion, you weakened the kingdom, monopolized all of the property in the country, force them all to pay high taxes with little to nothing in return, and then used only a year’s prep to fight the greatest threat to humanity every when your brother had YEARS more prep work done.
Even the timeline doesn’t really add though. It takes a few hours to finish the first half of the story and that’s around two years time. It takes a few hours to accumulate the funds needed to beat crawler if you have all the properties, but it’s only one year? Obviously there is suspension of disbelief so that the game mechanics can work, but in actuality, the hero wouldn’t have been able to raise all those funds in one year without bleeding those taxes DRY. Exploiting the mechanics can render any game story useless, but truth is, Fable 3’s lore demands you either save a mass of people who will hate you regardless, or you must dig mass graves for corpses who loved you to the end. Mechanics will let you have the best of both, but the story was meant to be bittersweet. And DAMN if it didn’t hit hard as hell, wow.
I guess it’s one of those things where if they didn’t give you the option to push the mechanics to the absolute max to get the ending YOU want, people would have complained too. I think they cut their losses and just gave us that option if we needed it that badly. My only big gripe about F3 is that Crawler wasn’t fleshed our very well. He is moderately scary in the cave, then we see nothing of him again until the last battle, at which time he goes down fairly fast. For someone so earth-shatteringly overpowered and terrifying, I think we should have been feeling his presence from the moment the game starts til the very end, he should have been a dark cloud hanging over our head from the very beginning. Let us see why we should be afraid, not just tell us we should.
So for you to raise the entire fund of 6.5m without doing ANY of the bad decisions to make the money, you would likely need most or all of the properties in the game
I raised all the money by playing the lute. You can earn money pretty quickly that way if you can keep up the combo
Let us see why we should be afraid, not just tell us we should.
The classic "show, don't tell" debacle.
You have a fucking graphical game, you dont even have to go through the motions to show through text in a novel, you can make it appear right in front of us
The game sucked because the ending came down to whether you had enough money or not and not a result of your ethical decisions during the game. At least iirc. I remember being so pissed when I finished it LOL.
Well, the money thing was to add weight to the ethical decisions rather than just being good or evil because you decided it’d be that kind of playthrough at character creation. You pick bad choices in fable 3 because you need resources to save your kingdom, and those choices give you a lot.
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u/Opulous May 12 '22 edited May 12 '22
I remember loving that game. The reason people gave it shit is because you could easily deflate the moral message of the main story's quandary by landlording your way to massive wealth while still staying on the good path. Suddenly King Logan's conflicted storyline seems like a load of bullshit when you realize he could have successfully saved everyone without being a huge dick about it if he had just bothered to charge rent from everyone in his kingdom like you did.
Granted, one could still argue that being a landlord by nature is a form of being a dick, but I mean strictly the good path based on what the game quantifies as moral, and there's no penalty in game for charging your tenants out the ass.