Zero Punctuation: Fable 3

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lol @ Peter Molyneux expecting players to give a fuck about a population of identical NPC mooks.


They really need to come up with moral choice systems that don't use the words GOOD and EVIL or any of the synonyms. Good/Bad, rightous/evil, paragon/renegade, sunshine-flowers/darkness-sins of the flesh. i don't think these cover all the bases... Wait let me restate; We know these do not cover all the bases. Moral choice meters and moral choices are a good thing to have but i think they need to more than binary. i think there are many way to implement a system i think game developers are being lazy.


See? came up with that in less than five minutes. as a king or ruler or leader or whatever this should be your meter... in fact this should be your meter as any famous adventurer person with access to guns, swords, area of offense spells, biotics, or massed forces of destruction. And even more so you add a Z axis and/or an alpha axis (i think thats what a four dimensional axis is called, honestly idk). I don't know i'm no game designer but i feel that by simply adding another axis to a moral choice meter would make stuff more deep open and less idiotic.

Hey, that's pretty good, mind if I start a discussion based around your idea?

nah go for it.

Whether I agree with Yahtzee or not, I like his reviews, mainly because he doesn't kiss anyone's ass, unlike G4's reviewers. That said, I liked Fable III and I don't care what anyone else thinks.

Very funny Yatzee.


Omigod, I've never played it but I don't think I want to now.

That does seem kinda weird and everything. Doing something for the good of the people's wellbeing is ironically evil even though you're saving everyone's lives.

I'm surprised he didn't start over. As soon as I saw the day of reckoning was at hand, I'd have been all, fuck that! and reset.

Meh, I like Fable's combat, and while the game is shallow, it's at least entertaining.

Funny video, though.

People are always yelling about how great and innovative Fable is, but every time I try them, they just seem bland and badly designed.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks so.

I've actually played all three Fable games without buying them, first two were my brother's, the third one my roommate. The first was interesting I thought, it was unique, rough around the edges, but it seemed like they had a good idea at least. And then, the second one came. And they didn't fix anything, just added new features. Combat was still broken, the NPCs were still uninteresting, the story was still a fragmented mess, moral choices were a joke, and your avatar acts like a mute idiot. And then the third comes and it actually has LESS features than the second and all the same problems. Hell I think it's even a shorter game. Yahtzee nailed it, the only thing keeping this game going is the fact it's an exclusive title to attract fanboys, I honestly think were it on both systems it would sell less overall!

Yeah, I got tripped up by that 150 day bit too. NEXT TIME I play, im going to buy as much fucking houses as I can at the start and just let the money pile up. Because you know...theres no need to buy anything else than your starting guns and clothes.

As if you got that many choices in guns and clothes...
Or moral decisions...




If he has trouble looking for other games to review, he could review Half Life 2. (He's already reviewed Silent Hill 2. Why not Half Life?)

Well, that's easy. He already did.

Oh. I wonder why he didn't just title it "Half Life 2".

Um, because he reviewed the other games in the package too? Half life 2 isn't the only game that matters you know.


Probably to get his "fans" to shut the hell up.

I'm just glad I'm not the only one who got screwed up by the last "day" jump. I had almost the same idea as Yahtzee, and because of my mistake, everyone in the game died...


I used the multiplayer glitch and gave myself money.
The game made me sad, while they managed to fix my female character from going butch, they broke everything else. How in the fuck do you do that.

Yahtzee is always bragging about his "powers of clairvoyance" about video games before announcing something obvious. How many of you had your own clairvoyant moments when you knew Yahtzee was gonna mention people whining for this game to be reviewed within the first 30 seconds?

I didn't think it was possible for someone being Cynical to actually turn me off a game this quickly, but congratulations, there's always a first. So Yhatzee, firstly screw you for permanently destroying any remote curiosity I had to get this game and thank you because I now have money to spend on something infinately more enjoyable. :)

this review was funny, especially the part about the king not collecting rent for 5 months and the real-time elements in a non-real-time world . i was caught offguard by this trick as well. I still think that they should have used sped up real time progression, not quest time progression. The sense of urgency was lost as soon as it was found that time only progressed with the story. i only disagree with a couple of points
1. that the King should have told the people about the Big Bad coming to eat them but if he had, the general populace would think they have a crazy king and he would have been dethroned very quickly, which would be the worst outcome for the kingdom
2. i believe the Evil/Good meter was also meant to be from the perspective of the common people of Albion, hence keeping the kingdom pretty is good and higher taxes is bad, even though from the kings perspective, it is the exact opposite.

Yeah randomly losing games was one of the biggest WTF moments of gaming in 2010 for me.
And yet for all its flaws, I still love playing Fable games. I don't know why... maybe its because I ignore all the character bollocks and just randomly slaughter stuff?

I was also blindsided my the random skip of 150 f***ing days. Fortunately, the income was still flowing as long as I didn't go through the portal and I got the perfect good ending with everyone alive.

For fun I played it again as a dick and put all the money I earned from being evil into my pocket. Everyone died but the main NPCs were all talking about the hard decisions I made to save everyone for some reason.

So basically, there are 4 possible endings, but LionHead only put in 3 clips. They never assumed a player would both be a dick and keep the money. (although it was fun to kill everyone without the guards fighting back :))

Sounds like the ending was written based on Jim Cunningham's Love-Fear Exercise



Does the Clock trick still work to get money?

From what I know, it does but it only gives money a few times a day as opposed to every 5 minutes or something...

So it will take me a half an hour longer to get 5 zillion gold? Oh noes!!!

Didn't say it was somehow difficult.

IMO, anyone who didn't start buying up properties immediately, Yahtzee included, deserve that because it's really the only way to make money in this game.


If you ask me, the game's okay. It's not spectacular nor is it the greatest game of all time, but Fable 3 DOES have some good bits worth merit. It's a decent rental game, at the very least.

That sounds like why I hate moral dilemmas. There are obvious tiered choices and not everything that's pegged as "evil" is "evil." More often than not, coices are pulled down by "good" (Do it the creator's way) and "evil" (do it the other way). I know extra choice is hard to program, but binary situations are often really dumb.

Plus, it baffles me when I do almost everything "wrong" and get the "good" ending, anyway.

I thought this episode was seriously hilarious.


The problem with Molyneux's design is that, rather than contextualizing your moral choices with an inherent role, responsibility, relationship to the goings-on -- or at least, doing so to a degree that actually makes you GIVE A FUCK -- he just jumps right in and assumes that Good is this universally objective quality that all actions and decisions can be reduced to having or not-having.

Which is kinda...


...fundamentally retarded.

Mass Effect does everything Fable wishes it could do, with the extremely elegant good-cop-bad-cop "paragon/renegade" mechanic.

I can't help but feel that if someone had gone back in time and tapped Peter Molyneux on the left shoulder, and then over his right, reached in and scratched out 'good' to replace it with 'Leader' and 'evil' to replace it with 'Ruler', the entire design scope of Fable III would have shifted for the better.

Edit again: Double post? Mod please delete.

I'd go with:


Dreadful game. How this half baked barely working glitchfest ever got through 'quality control' will remain one of the world's greatest mysteries. I feel bad criticising Molyneux because his heart seems to be in the right place, but he has no idea what he's doing.

The best moral choice, in the king phase, is the choice to either bailout the entire economy (for a huge sum of money) or suffer the conseqyences. I don't know what those consequences were because I doggedly refused to choose evil even though i knew it was a stupid idea, but surely it's a hobsons choice. Either the treasury goes bankrupt because i bail out the economy or it goes belly up because i didn't. Feeble.



Not really, Mass Effect has no deeper or more believable a morality system. You either choose to be a giant ass or a nice person. You aren't rewarded unless you commit to a single path, it's totally facile. And you don't benefit unless you rack up an arbitrary amount of renegade or paragon points, sometimes awarded incongruously.

...and here I was: Interested in what Yahtzee thought of Molyneux's latest attempt at making the game-play "more realistic". Sure, ragging on the story is fun, but not when it takes four minutes in a five-minute feature.

Where was the clever insight about needing friends to be more powerful or something? Where were the biting remarks about how the weapon upgrade thing works? Oh wait... he compared the game to an asbestos and bacon sandwich. I guess that's supposed to sum everything up. Ever.

...and here I thought that his thoughts on one aspect of a game belonged in extra punctuation.

Azmael Silverlance:
I love it when Yahtzee makes some uber strong and valid points about the games he is reviewing.
Seriously how is getting money to LIVE an act of EVIL???? :O
IF the population knew what was gona happen they`d freaking throw their money at him....
Anyway this was one of my favorite episodes :)) seems to me yahtzee is going back on track :P


Best quote, "fanboys will angrily defend angry wasps if they exclusively nested in xbox casings"

...true of all fanboys.

That was one of the best Zero Punctuations in a while.

The fact that Yahtzee reviewed both of the previous games gave it a nice sense of continuity, since we were already invested in his opinions (on both the Fable series and Peter Molyneux). Also, the criticisms were both constructive and pretty hilarious (especially the "aggressive Xbox wasps" joke).

I almost didn't want to watch this one, considering how terrible the WoW review was (not that I have any stock in the series, its just that I've heard Yahtzee say these exact things before in a much funnier, fresher way), and I found myself pleasantly surprised.

Here's my idea for a better use of that moral choice system. It's not perfect, but I think it's close to as good as this system of choices could possibly be. First off, switch the labels of good and evil. Keep the "harvest and invest" options the same, but label them as good, because, duh, it's all for the purpose of protecting the people of the land. As for the "party and die" options, label them as evil, and, and here's the major change, emphasize the ulterior motive: To keep the civilians happy and make them let their guards down. Prepare for the day that the monster comes, and let him kill the majority of the people, while you and the royal guards and police, who have been trained in dark magic defense behind the scenes, defend yourselves. The reason for this is thus: You plan on killing most of the civilians so that the population will be low, and with a weak population, they will have no ability to defend themselves against a more aggressive tyranny, of which you are the all-powerful ruler. By the time the population regrows, your harsh rule will have settled, and your guards and police will be loyal and unstoppable, because you spent the year training them, and concluded the attack by placing them near the top of the pyramid, giving them wealthy privileges.

Admittedly, this begs the question of why exactly you didn't just have the police kill random civilians and leave it at that. Well, for two reasons: One, you wanted to keep the population high, so that the monster could eat a while bunch of people and leave with some people left, whereas with a low population, there would have been little to no people left after it was done. Two, somewhat contrivedly, you wanted the massacre to happen in one quick, massive attack, so that the civilians will not have time to form another resistance, whereas killing people with the police may have taken too long, and would have left people an opening to hide and form something of a rebellion.

Thirdly, if you made "harvest" choices at some points and "party" choices as others, then the main character will feel the need to protect the civilians, but also the need to keep them happy. I guess s/he would be idealistic, but kind of a moron. It sounds stupid, but we need a middle ground for mixed choices, BioShock.

The problem with this is that it still consciously differentiates between good and evil, but come on, how is it possible to make the "party and die" options and make them look both noble and not completely stupid?

Never understood Fable or anyone who cares for the franchise.

Just a bunch of half-baked rpgs with a bare bones combat system and the most basic morality system ever devised.

I know this has been brought up already, but why can't I go Julio-Claudian on Reaver's ass (and by that I mean kill him and seize his assets)...
People keep raving about how Fable is all about choice... but when I actually think I'll have the chance to make a choice I've wanted to make since the end of the 2nd game (killing Reaver), it's sadly not there... It's not like it'd even be that evil of an act... I mean, you watch him kill people in cold blood...

Personally, by the time I got near the end of the game, I found myself wishing I could have Page executed for just being so painfully stupid... Yahtzee speaks of exactly why in his review. It involved a lake.

Honestly, Yahtzee more or less just hit the nail right on the head with this entire review. And, as always, was funny at the same time.

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