I remember a surprising amount about the plot to Fable III, considering that I stopped actively thinking about it once the credits rolled some seven-odd years ago. I remember you were a prince, and your brother was the king, but he was a mean king. You had to put together a scrappy gang and overthrow your evil brother, only it turns out he was being a despotic ruler because he needed to save money to defend Albion from some generic evil threat. I think the morally ambiguous guy from the last game showed up. Then you leave your Xbox on for like three days while money just kind of accumulates.
That summary was what I rattled off to the developers of Fable Fortune when they asked me if I've ever played a Fable game. It's a fair question! Anecdotally, people don't care about Fable – in part because the studio behind the series was closed last year and Microsoft cancelled that free-to-play co-op game. Fable isn't being scrubbed from the public consciousness because of any active disinterest, it's just that pop culture only has so much room for middling role-playing franchises. When I ask people about Fable, all they ever remember is "chicken chaser" in a bad Cockney accent.
So I'm not the only one who finds Fable Fortune – a Kickstarted card game featuring Fable characters and iconongraphy – extremely curious. The collectible card game (CCG) space is well-tread in video games, with Hearthstone tearing it up on just about every platform. You could make a play for that genre by stapling your game to an established franchise, like The Witcher and Gwent, which Fable Fortune is almost certainly trying to do. As a game, Fortune is nothing to sneeze at, borrowing from Hearthstone by keeping things simple while still making each deck fun to play. But that Fable name might end up being more of an albatross than anything else – at best it might evoke a franchise players forgot because it was too uneven to remember.
I remember a surprising amount about the plot to Fable III, considering that I stopped actively thinking about it once the credits rolled some seven-odd years ago. I remember you were a prince, and your brother was the king, but he was a mean king. You had to put together a scrappy gang and overthrow your evil brother, only it turns out he was being a despotic ruler because he needed to save money to defend Albion from some generic evil threat. I think the morally ambiguous guy from the last game showed up. Then you leave your Xbox on for like three days while money just kind of accumulates.
That summary was what I rattled off to the developers of Fable Fortune when they asked me if I've ever played a Fable game. It's a fair question! Anecdotally, people don't care about Fable – in part because the studio behind the series was closed last year and Microsoft cancelled that free-to-play co-op game. Fable isn't being scrubbed from the public consciousness because of any active disinterest, it's just that pop culture only has so much room for middling role-playing franchises. When I ask people about Fable, all they ever remember is "chicken chaser" in a bad Cockney accent.
So I'm not the only one who finds Fable Fortune – a Kickstarted card game featuring Fable characters and iconongraphy – extremely curious. The collectible card game (CCG) space is well-tread in video games, with Hearthstone tearing it up on just about every platform. You could make a play for that genre by stapling your game to an established franchise, like The Witcher and Gwent, which Fable Fortune is almost certainly trying to do. As a game, Fortune is nothing to sneeze at, borrowing from Hearthstone by keeping things simple while still making each deck fun to play. But that Fable name might end up being more of an albatross than anything else – at best it might evoke a franchise players forgot because it was too uneven to remember.
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