Criticisms

While most will complain that Fable: The Lost Chapters is short, I think a greater accusation is that it isn’t deep. For example, you can buy a house – and then what? Well, it can be your marital home with a wife, but a wife is really just a black hole for jewelry and other gifts. Buy her stuff to keep her happy or bad things will happen.

That’s Fable’s biggest failing – it promises a lot, it delivers a lot, but it does so in the most simplistic fashion possible. In many ways, it’s like a more streamlined version of The Elder Scrolls – with global state triggers that are set off (“Hero is now known as Liberator”, “Hero has killed children in a town”), but, like in Elder Scrolls games, these settings are too obvious. While Fable is more streamlined and a more organic experience than Morrowind or Daggerfall, it also lacks their depth or huge size, thus falling into an uncomfortable middle ground. It’s not quite as story-driven as Jade Empire, it isn’t as open as Fallout or Morrowind, and the game doesn’t offer the “more, bigger, better” pursuits of Diablo.

Fable is still a good experience, but by lending itself to comparisons with other, more specific titles, it can be criticized for many faults. The sum total is worth exploring but it’s too easy to wish that more effort was spent on this or that.

One area where the game has clear and unambiguous shortcomings is in the writing. For a title with generally high quality production values, the plot is full of holes and the characters in the game are fairly flat, yet manage to behave in nonsensical ways. It’s one thing to criticize the denizens of a town for letting you back in after you just finished butchering them and paid a fine, since this is necessitated by gameplay and a typical compromise in many games. Where Fable starts falling flat is when characters are scripted by the storyline to make completely illogical decisions in the cause of perpetuating conflict and making things more mysterious.


The graphics, while impressive for the Xbox, fall well short of modern PC capabilities and even standards. Most notable are the low-resolution textures, a consequence of the small amount of memory available to the Xbox. Animations are crisp and natural but the models are lacking a few hundred triangles that they might have earned if this was a dedicated PC game. However, the art style of the game masks these shortcomings very well. In any event, the graphics aren’t as likely to break immersion as the writing.