Breaking Player Immersion, or Why Fable 3 is a remarkable failure

I should start this post by emphasizing that it is more or less spoiler free. While I treat on a number of the mechanics and design decisions in Fable 3, I've kept almost everything about the game narrative out of it. That said, if you haven't played Fable 3, reading this post might make you disinclined to get the game. Oddly enough despite the title, that isn't actually my intent.

There are a lot of problems with Fable 3. Of course, I've come to realise that saying there are problems in a Fable game is kind of like mentioning that American politics has become increasingly partisan in the last decade. Everyone knows it, and while there may be some benefit to engaging in a conversation about why this is the case, there's really nothing to be gained from complaining about it. This is the reason why I'm going to drill down into a hand full of very particular issues I had with the game around the topic of immersion, rather than trying to capture the entirety of the Fable 3 experience and how it disappointed me. After all, other folks have already written on a number of issues around the game including Liz Ellcessor who wrote this post that got me rolling over some of these issues in my mind before I'd finished the game, Michael Abbott who posted about some of the issues I will be discussing here in this rather excellent post over at The Brainy Gamer, and Emily Short who recently wrote this Gamasutra post detailing a whole range of problems in the second half of the game that I'm not even trying to tackle here.

I should start by saying that I enjoyed a great deal of the Fable 3 experience, but in general I enjoyed it in spite of much of the game design rather than because of it. While the combat system was fluid and fairly gratifying, it stands out as one of the few game mechanics that truly enhanced immersion in game play even if the combat itself was a little too easy at times. Additionally I found the changing rooms inside the sanctuary generally allowed me to sink into the game space. Admittedly, much of that may have been due to the excellent voice acting by John Cleese, but the mechanic itself actually did do something to improve my experience of managing gear. In both instances (combat and item selection), we can see how Molyneaux and Lionhead made specific choices to simplify based off of issues they had observed around Fable 2.

If those two adaptations towards a simplified UI were at least moderately successful, virtually every other form of simplified interaction in the game served to break immersion rather than enhance it. Numerous people have complained about how interactions with villagers via the limited range of gestures is both mechanically forced and narratively disruptive. However for me, this was one of the less problematic design decisions. While it was annoying I was at least able to increasingly ignore it as the game went on.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the map and quest system. In attempting to make the UI disappear from the game by placing the map in the sanctuary and only allowing quest selection to take place through an option available on the world map (e.g the option is not available when zoomed in on a city), Lionhead buried one of the key mechanics of play in an Action/RPG at least three levels below the primary game interface. If you count the total number of controller movements it takes to select a new quest in the same area you're in, you find that there are seven or possibly eight actions a player needs to perform to pursue this completely natural aim. Furthermore, I often found that after selecting a quest in this manner and deciding not to warp back to the location the game suggested, the trail leading to the quest objective would fail to materialize, or would lead me out of the current zone before leading me back in. Ironically this "simplified" interface not only breaks player immersion, but creates a much more complex sequence of actions for players attempting to do an activity that is internally consistent with both played narrative and either the Action or RPG genres.

There are other problematic features in the game, and there are also other design failures. A few of the other core broken features include the "road to rule", management of rental properties, and quest descriptions. While the road to rule and the property management issues are generally annoying, neither of them is particularly core to game play within the genre. However, the quest description issue deserves more attention. Complete quest descriptions are only available if the player both listens through all of the dialogue before accepting the quest, and then hangs around to listen to the rest of it after doing so. This would be less problematic if the quest log itself offered some means of getting a fuller quest description, but it is unfortunately hopelessly sparse. I recognize that many players aren't going to listen to the full dialogue anyway and would rather push past the substance of the quest in order to get to more button mashing. However, players like myself will actually care about the content of the game, and given how much work clearly went into writing that content it seems a shame to limit player access to it.

In my playthrough, another immersion breaking dialogue issue occurred towards the middle of the game when starting a quest chain that had to be completed before I could regain the ability to choose different quests. One of the characters speaks a line indicating that the player should tie up any loose ends before continuing. However, by the time this line is voiced the player has already started the unbreakable quest sequence. It was at this moment that I began to wonder whether or not Fable 3 had been thoroughly play tested, or if the only player data the team consulted was from Fable 2. Unlike many of the other problems that I've enumerated here that are fundamental to the redesign of the Fable franchise,  this is the sort of simple error that someone should've caught and responded to by moving or removing that piece of dialogue. This was not the only minor design issue I encountered, but it was by far the most frustrating.

Ultimately it is the combination of minor errors in the game (which would be forgivable by themselves) and major design flaws, juxtaposed against a handful of core features which the Lionhead team got fundamentally right that make Fable 3 an incredible design disaster of sorts. It's startling in some ways that a team which clearly pays so much attention to detail in many regards can completely miss other issues both large and small. I'm almost tempted to describe Fable 3 as half baked, but the truth of the matter is it doesn't feel like an incomplete project. Rather it bears the mark of a particular kind of designer tunnel vision. The aims of simplifying everything and subverting the paradigm of the hero's journey so thoroughly informed the design of this game, that issues with other essential features were completely neglected. In the end, it's a game that would probably feel almost entirely coherent so long as you didn't push at the edges too hard. For a game that revolves around player choice this makes it a sort of remarkable failure.