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Reviews » Fable: The Lost Chapters [PC]

It's hard to have been a gamer over the past few years and not been burned by either a Lionhead Studios game (like Black & White) or by a substandard unpolished console to PC port. Because of this, PC gamers with no prior knowledge of Fable may be doubly concerned. And for people who heard about Fable's shortcomings on the Xbox, well, they may be even more concerned. All your concerns are well-founded, but don't worry, it's not as bad as it could be.

First, let me clear something up. When I say "Fable", I mean "Fable: The Lost Chapters for PC". I call it Fable because the "The Lost Chapters" is like what Fable should have been in the first place. It's Fable with less bugs, an extra city, a few more unique weapons and a new ending. It still isn't what was originally promised, but hey, Peter Molyneux (the designer responsible for Fable, Black and White and quite a few other disappointing games) already apologized for it not being what they promised. If you're coming from Fable for the Xbox, know that this is the same thing but less broken and with about half an hour of extra content.

Fable is a Generic-Fantasy Hack-n-Slash Action RPG. The gimmick with the game is that unlike your usual static unchanging world, Fable has a "living" world, and you play a "living" character. You age, you can get scarred in battle, you can talk to and influence NPCs, you can gain fans in cities across the world and impress them by being strong and virtuous, or scare them into agreement by being ruthless and horrifying. Unfortunately, this gets kinda boring after awhile. There's only so many small-town girls you can woo into marriage and only so many times you can stand hearing the villagers shout out your chosen nickname before it gets old.

The story is pretty decent. It isn't amazing, but it's not so chock-full of cliches that it's unbearable. It's also not entirely set in stone. There are forks in the road, giving you quite a bit of freedom in how you play through the game. It's like Knights of the Old Republic, though, so most of your choices boil down to "OBVIOUS GOOD" vs. "OBVIOUS EVIL". Choices come in a number of different categories. It may be what quests you pick, it might be how you play the quests, it might be what powers you choose, or it might be that nice Assassin suit you wander around in.

The basic gist of the story is as follows: You're a kid, your hometown gets burned to the ground, but you get saved and whisked away to magical Hero Land where they train you to kick ass and take names. Then you go be a hero and make a name for yourself out in the world. Sure, there's more to it, but that's all you really need to know going in. Again, it's not huge and needlessly complex like you'd expect something from Squeenix would be, but then again, it doesn't really NEED a big complex story to be decent.

Like the story, gameplay is pretty simple too. The best comparison I can come up with is that it's like Diablo in 3D. You will click more than in any game you have played in the past year, since left mouse defaults to attack. Also like Diablo, you've got a variety of things to collect and equip. For weapons you can equip a melee weapon and a ranged weapon, and have one ready at any given time. To attack you just click. If you want to be super lazy, you can right click to target opponents, and then click. But really it all comes down to feverishly clicking untill everything's dead. As a result of your clicking, you rack up "Combat multipliers" for consecutive hits, which influence experience gained, and there's also flourishes, which are special block-breaking attacks that you can unleash after charging your weapon. Just something to mix it up a bit. Your ranged weapon (bows or crossbows) work much the same way, just at a distance.

Apart from standard melee and ranged combat, there's also magic, which is called "will" for some reason that never really sunk in for me. But seriously, it's magic. You shoot fireballs, you cast magic missile, just call it magic because that's what it is. Magic is used by holding a modifier key and then right or left clicking to activate one of two equipped powers. I can't really tell you much more about magic because I never used it apart from a single "Physical Shield" skill which I kept upgrading. There's a ton of powers available, but you never NEED them. Since there's no shield to ever equip, I went with the magic shield, and used it for extra protection during boss battles. There's other stuff in there, though. Tons of it, even. Spells are divided into three or four different categories, but I never even investigated it, because I just couldn't be bothered.

So, what all is there to do in Albion, the world of Fable? Well, the primary thing you'll be doing is quests from the Heroes' Guild. At any time, you can head to the Guild HQ, pick up a quest, and go do it. Quests are rather well varied. Some involve going somewhere and defending a location. Some require you to go rescue people. Some have accompanying Good/Evil quests, like you may be offered a "Protect the Traders!" mission up alongside a "Kill all the Traders!" mission.

Once you accept a quest, you'll be taken to the boasting menu. Boasts are like bonus conditions for success. A common one is "Fight Nude", to do so you have to strip off your armor and complete the mission. There's also ones like "make sure the person you're escorting never gets hit". It's interesting, because boasts like these have almost always been around in games, just never officially. There's always been a drive for some people to impose self-regulated "challenges" to artificially increase the difficulty of a game, and Fable just brings them to the forefront by making them part of the Game. By completing it with these extra optional conditions, you can gain extra renown, extra cash, extra experience, etc. Once you're done boasting, you go do the quest, collect your reward, and move along. Then you repeat this for another 15 hours.

Luckily there's more to do than just quests. Unfortunately, a lot of what's left amounts to "screwing around". By completing quests you get three things: experience, cash and renown. Experience is pretty straightforward. Collect points, level up, win the game. To mix things up slightly, Fable has four kinds of experience. General and Strength/Skill/Will. General is a pool that can be applied anywhere, but Strength/Skill/Will applies to only those specific tiers of upgrades. Rather than a straight leveling system like Diablo or most other RPGs, Fable is just about point allocation whenever you have sufficient points. Strength lets you independently upgrade Health, Constitution and Melee Damage. Skill lets you independently upgrade Speed, Ranged Damage and Bartering power (which acts as a gateway to stealing skills). Will lets you pick and upgrade all your 8 billion magic powers. When you go to upgrade these attributes, you effectively pull from two pools of experience. If you want to upgrade your health, for instance, you wouldn't just be pulling from your Strength experience pool, but your Strength pool plus the General pool. Another nice aspect is that you gain specific experience when you do specific things. If you specialize in melee combat, you'll rack-up a constant stream of Strength experience. If you specialize in bows, you'll get a bunch of Accuracy experience. And if you're some kind of will-using freak, you'll get a bunch of Will experience. This makes it easier to upgrade the things you use the most, but the general experience means you can barely ever use will, and still have general experience with which to pump up your physical sheild skill.

Cash is mostly useful for buying up all the assorted suits of armor and weapons throughout the game. For weapons, I stuck to katanas through most of the game, and then jumped around to whatever my most powerful unique weapon was. There's a pretty wide range of weapons: hammers, axes, katanas, broadswords, etc. Bows mostly come in longbows and crossbows, but there are subsets within those to give some variety. Most all the weapons work roughly the same, though. Armor is a bit more complex, since there are 5 slots you can equip at any time (head, chest, hands, legs, feet). Armor can be used either mix-n-match, or you can collect entire "suits" or sets of armor. These aren't like sets from Diablo, where you'd get bonus modifiers for wearing the whole set, it's just for visual consistency. Sets are also useful because each new set will most likely be a complete upgrade, so by collecting the whole set for your next new piece of armor, you'll get an overall higher AC. Unfortunately, there is a rather small number of sets, and once you get to plate armor, you're pretty much set for the game, it's just a matter of if you want shiny good plate armor, dark evil plate armor, or neutral plate armor.

Then there's renown. Renown is a measure of how famous you are across Albion. It determines how scared people are of you, how much in awe they are, and how desperate they are to get in your pants. See, one of the other things to do in Albion is to buy a house in one of the towns, settle down, and start a family. Or not. Perhaps you'd rather be a player, and build up a harem of wives, and tons of other devoted followers in every town. If you want to, you can. Nothing's really stopping you. Hell, some of it comes naturally. For instance, every time I wandered into Knothole Glade I was immediately accosted by every woman in the city, each demanding me to marry them. This reaction was based purely on the fact that I did the quests in that city and then waved to a crowd once.

Beyond all that, the only other things to suck up time are the assorted hidden things around Albion. There are two main categories of these: Silver Key Chests and Demon Doors. Silver Key Chests are locked chests that can be found all over the place. To unlock them, you have to collect a set number of Silver Keys through a number of different methods, like digging in certain places for them, getting them while fishing, or finding them in other normal chests. Demon Doors are enchanted stone doors found all throughout the world. When you approach them and talk to them, they'll make some kind of demand or give you some kind of riddle. Solve the riddle or satisfy the demand and it lets you in. With both Silver Key Chests and Demon Doors, the prize is usually the same kind of stuff. It might be a suit of armor, a unique weapon, some experience-in-a-bottle potions, or something else. No matter what it is, it's safe to assume that it'll be worthwhile. It should also be noted that Silver Key Chests and Demon Doors are two of the ways Fable: The Lost Chapters is better than Original Fable. Lionhead added a couple new doors and a couple new chests, and made it so that certain quests didn't exclude you from getting to certain chests.

Unfortunately, that's about it. All this will amount to 10-20 hours, depending on if you take your time, and if you go for a second run to try out both the good side and the evil side. I'm torn on this fact. It's good or bad depending on if you consider Fable to be an RPG or an Action game. For an Action game, that's a stellar game length, and barely any of it is needlessly repetitive, a problem action games often suffer from. But if you take Fable as an RPG, that's a horrible game length, and the game feels sparse, tiny, and incredibly limited. In all other aspects, the game straddles the line between genres so completely that I really just don't know. Is it an RPG with action elements, or an action game with RPG elements?

Apart from this genre confusion, there are some other problems. Despite this being the second release, there are still a bunch of bugs. A good example of this is a spoiler, but it's so incredibly dumb I feel compelled to tell you. There's only so many NPC comments recorded. One of these comments is "I SAWED TWINBLADE TH'SMORNIN! 'EES TH' LEEDAR O' TH' BANDITS!" or something thereabouts. They will say this no matter where they are, they could be in the town adjacent to TwinBlade's camp (where this comment makes sense) or all the way across the planet. This annoying on its own, but becomes even more annoying when you consider that one of your missions (which I don't believe is optional, because it's plot-based) is to kill TwinBlade, and they STILL say "OO'ER I SAWED TWINBLADE TH'SMORNIN!" 20 game-years after you killed him. This makes Fable's highly-hyped "living world" seem significantly less live, and considering how widespread it is, I can't imagine they didn't see this as a problem.

I also experienced some graphical performance issues. Sure, it looked pretty, but I had to turn down my resolution and turn down graphical settings to get it to run smoothly. For some reason, even though I got the main game running smoothly, and even though it still looked quite pretty then, it slowed down to an almost unplayable level whenever I tried navigating through a menu that had inlay graphics, like the menu used for upgrading skills. This menu had little FMV icon things in it, and for some reason my computer just churned hard when it came to playing those back. This made leveling up fun. It should be noted that I have a quite capable computer, not bleeding edge, but also not made up of parts circa 1998. I was also extremely disappointed that the game didn't let me map it's controls to my gamepad. I've got assorted console -> USB controller converters here for a reason, and I hate it when I'm not allowed to use them. You're effectively forced to use the mouse and keyboard, which sucks because I really didn't want to, and have no idea why they would prevent me from doing so.

I also had problems with the fact that it was a Console -> PC port. This is always pretty clumsy, but it got especially weird in Fable. For instance, menus are totally strange, and are obviously throwbacks to how it was on the Xbox. To save, you have to dig through two levels of ingame menus. To exit the game, you have to dig through two levels of ingame menus and then exit through the root menu, which means you have to go through an exit-confirmation dialog twice just to leave the game. Exit confirmation dialogs annoy me in the first place, but this is the first game where I've had to go through TWO exit confirmation dialogs, and had to go hunting for them just for the privledge of telling them that YES I WANT TO QUIT. There's also a bunch of little irritating things that aren't really buggy but are just things they couldn't be bothered to change and make logical during the porting process. A good example of this is the save dialog, which informs you "Now saving your game. Please do not turn off your PC." Thank you for reminding me, Lionhead. Sometimes I get excited and push the wrong buttons.

As far as replayability goes, you'll find more replayability than a 3rd person beat-em-up, but nowhere near the replayability of a good solid RPG. The game is only really worth two plays, once on full-good, once full-evil. Playing on either side excludes you from VERY few missions, so there won't really even be that much difference, it's just a matter of how you play, not necessarily what you play.

So, is it worth it? should you run right out and buy this right now? It depends on who you are. If you played Fable back when it was released on the Xbox, I wouldn't worry about it right now. This extra content is expected to be included in the $19.99 Platinum Hits re-release which should be out in the next couple months. The extra content isn't worth losing all your savegame progress. Anyways, when it comes out, you'd probably be best off just renting it, since it isn't worth buying the whole game over again, even at a price point of $19.99. If you missed Fable the first time around because you don't have an Xbox like me, or because you were scared of the lukewarm reviews it got, check it out on PC. I seriously suggest that you shop around, though, because Fable isn't worth it's $50 retail price. Luckily, even though the game was just released, I've already seen it available cheaper than that at some stores like Circuit City, where it is on sale for $35 at the time of writing this review.

Overall, Fable: The Lost Chapters is a decently fun game. The only real problem with it is that it doesn't really excel at anything. Compared to pure RPGs it's short, sparse and repetitive. Compared to pure Action games there's too much dead-time spent screwing around with character management, item hunting and town-life. And finally, compared to the game that was originally promised to us, it falls so short that it necessitated a public apology from Peter Molyneux. Despite all these failings, it's still a decent way to spend ~10-20 hours of your life. So, if you don't have as full of a gaming plate as some of us do at the moment, check it out, but try to avoid paying retail if at all possible.

Fable: The Lost Chapters - PC

Presentation

If you've got a good recent computer, you should be able to get the game looking very nice. The music can get kinda repetitive, and the NPC voices can be grating at times, but it's nothing so distracting that you'll get too pissed off.

Gameplay

It's repetitive. Soon as you've killed something once with a melee weapon and once with a ranged weapon you've seen all there is to see. All that changes is enemy model and block rate.

Replayability

After two playthroughs, you will have had the opportunity to do everything there is to do.

Value

It depends. If you played it on Xbox it isn't worth it at any retail price. If you haven't it just isn't worth retail, but can luckily be had for cheaper if you shop around. $35 is a very fair price.

Overall

Fable has its flaws. It's a slightly-better-than-halfassed port, and it can't tell what genre it belongs in, but it's still a decent game. It just isn't anything better than decent.