Fable III Great Game Unless You Get Perma-Stuck

{sidebar id=1}This review will be necessarily short and terse. Fable III features a game breaking bug. Based on questions asked on Yahoo! Answers, Internet forums and calls to Xbox Support, this bug seems to be occurring for a large number of players. Furthermore, the game’s save system effectively ensures there is no reasonable way to revert to a previous save. As such, Fable III is a fundamentally unplayable game, which should never have been released in its current state.

Approximately 10-15 hours into the game, players can undertake a quest called “Gone but Not Forgotten.” By that point in the game, players are required to collect a certain number of guild seals, which function much like experience points, to advance through the plot. Typically, players need to obtain 80-100 guild seals, and the quest in question is worth 30, virtually guaranteeing that most players will attempt it.

The final room in “Gone but Not Forgotten” becomes a closed combat arena once the player steps in and, if certain corpses do not despawn, the player is locked in with no way out. The autosave function prevents reverting to a save before entering that room because the game’s single save slot ensures that players will revert to a save in the same room. There is no mechanism to restart the quest from the beginning. Entering into co-op play apparently has no effect, since it seems that quests must be completed in a player’s own world to count.

I spent two days trying to resolve this issue using a variety of methods in both single-player and co-op play, and researching potential causes. Eventually, Xbox Support told me that it is a known issue with no current workarounds, hot fixes or solutions beyond restarting the game from the beginning. However, restarting the game does not guarantee that it won’t happen again. After spending two hours on the phone with Xbox Support, I stopped playing Fable III and Amazon has issued a full refund because the software is fundamentally defective and a replacement copy will not resolve the issue.

Simply put, this is a major quest in a relatively linear game and the presence of a bug this severe indicates that limited or poor quality testing was performed on the game prior to release. There is absolutely no reason why this bug should exist in shipped software, particularly considering the severity and likelihood of occurring. This issue, more than anything else, is what makes Fable III a game that no one should purchase.

With that in mind, if players are still interested in playing Fable III, it’s little more than a continuation of Fable II, set in Albion in a period reminiscent of the Industrial Revolution’s beginning. The player can choose to be either the King’s brother or sister, but will work to overthrow their tyrannical sibling in the first half of the game. According to other reviews, Fable III has a second half which involves responding to hostilities from another realm, but – as previously noted – I wasn’t able to reach that part of the game.

With that in mind, and with the knowledge that my experience with the game is incomplete due to the above bug, let’s review the accessibility.

Go and read Scott's Review of Fable III and feel free to write your own!