Fable III PC Reviews

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Written by Brother None on May 17th, 2011

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The combat doesn't help distract from the issues with story and shallow characterization because it's so stubbornly inflexible. Melee weapons, guns and magic are used in essentially the same way the entire game through. Mechanically it requires a wearingly repetitive cycle of rolling and firing, which proves to be an effective method of dispatching nearly everything encountered, even with the difficulty cranked. For a game that so frequently reminds me of the significance of choice and commitment, it's especially disappointing to be given a combat system that incorporates none of it. The gradual evolution of the weapons' appearance and power as I purchase upgrades and meet goals is a nice touch and conveys a solid sense of progress, but it fails to add any lasting excitement to a combat system that is, quite simply, boring.

To mix things up it's possible to bring another player into the game. You can take on quests together, open Demon Doors to secure hidden loot and even get married. It's certainly a welcome option, though is more of an added frill than a core part of the experience. The interface managing all this, while fancy, isn't particularly well suited for the PC. Though you can play with a mouse and keyboard if you want, having to click and hold buttons to input decisions doesn't really make sense, and the method of selling items at shops and browsing custom closing options could have been made less cumbersome. That being said, the game plays just fine with an Xbox 360 controller.

I do not, however, see the point in the new 'Challenging' difficulty mode. The idea is that your health doesn't automatically regenerate, requiring you to drink potions, eat food, or sleep to get it back. Death still has no penalty barring adding some new scars to your character model, though, and the game still gets a tad easy around the halfway mark if you focus on levelling up your combat skills.

The only real differences are that you'll get a few scars at the start of the game and that you'll spend a lot longer looking at the world through the greyscale filter that is employed when you're low on health.

The Limited Edition content is included as standard for PC Fable III which is a good way of thanking the PC crowd for being so patient while Lionhead kept plodding away. Their charity ends there though as we don't get to have the released downloadable content thrown in as well. There's plenty to enjoy with the vanilla experience of the game and thankfully it has more highs than lows to experience from start to finish. Some features like NPC relationships and the dog need to be given a thrashing at the brainstorming stage again. Combat remains one button for each of the three styles and I actually find it hard to picture Fable violence being carried out any other way now.

PC Fable III is clearly the superior when it comes to the Xbox 360 version, if you've the Windows machine to match its requirements. The keyboard and mouse are embraced with the game's notifications and cues adapting on the fly to whether you're using them or if you've stuck with an Xbox 360 controller for Windows. I hope Lionhead and Microsoft will be keeping any future Fable action adventuring closer together when hitting consoles and PC. I thoroughly enjoyed going back to Albion and can't wait for more from Peter Molyneux and Lionhead Studios.

Though Fable III feels structurally solid in that all the right parts are in all the right places, it still seems to have issues with shrugging off an overall feeling that the game's time has already come and gone. The combat's sluggish feel and wonky targeting doesn't make it less fun but certainly less refined, and interacting with people comes across as a downright robotic derivative of actual communication; you can simply do the same actions for every conversation, and everyone will love you for it, regardless of what type of people they are. These flaws don't sink the title as much as they easily spoil the potential.

Fable III was released in October of last year and, somewhat bizarrely, is only now getting a PC port. The good news is that the PC version comes prepackaged with the contents of the Limited Collector's Edition and all of the DLC packs. The bad news is that the keyboard and mouse controller arrangement is awkward, with particular problems involving camera angles during combat. While you're manipulating the WASD keys to move your character, you'll also be utilizing the mouse to move the camera -- so you'll often find the camera is looking the one way you don't need it to. Using a console controller solves this problem, but PC purists will wish the game was better mapped to keyboard and mouse controls.

Complementing that, we have a wide variety of graphics options, though unfortunately, some are tied to each other (e.g. AA, depth of field, and bloom). Sadly, despite all manner of tweaking, performance is still not where it should be, ranging anywhere from about 30 frames per second to 90, with shadows off (even on the lowest settings, these cause significant framerate drops on a mid-high range rig where more demanding games run much better); stuttering is seen fairly often, especially during camera movement. Worse, shadows add a much needed layer of depth to a given scene, as shown below. All in all it's quite playable, but certainly not ideal. It's one of the game's major issues, so with any luck, it will be patched promptly.

The PC version of Fable III, when run at its highest specification, is superior to the Xbox 360 version to a certain degree. Largely unnoticeable to the untrained-eye, the higher resolution backdrops and action-figure like character models do present a slightly crisper portrait of the world of Albion. The few changes are merely cosmetic, the game and characters within appear just as they did on Xbox 360, but that doesn't mean that Fable III is a slouch. It's still a unique and inviting world in which the player's actions within have a tangible effect on the environment: love and you will be loved; hate and you will be feared.

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