Uncharted: Fable’s Fortune
I remember a surprising amount about the plot toFable 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 ofFable Fortunewhen they asked me if I’ve ever played aFablegame. It’s a fair question! Anecdotally, people don’t care aboutFable– in part because the studio behind the series was closed last year and Microsoft cancelled that free-to-play co-op game.Fableisn’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 aboutFable, all they ever remember is “chicken chaser” in a bad Cockney accent.
So I’m not the only one who findsFable Fortune– a Kickstarted card game featuringFablecharacters and iconongraphy – extremely curious. The collectible card game (CCG) space is well-tread in video games, withHearthstonetearing it up on just about every platform. You could make a play for that genre by stapling your game to an established franchise, likeThe WitcherandGwent, whichFable Fortuneis almost certainly trying to do. As a game,Fortuneis nothing to sneeze at, borrowing fromHearthstoneby keeping things simple while still making each deck fun to play. But thatFablename 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.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: inHearthstoneFable Fortune, you play a Hero with special Hero Powers. Using those powers as well as summoning monsters or casting spells all pulls from the same pool ofmanagold pieces. Monsters have an attack stat and a health stat, and they die when that health stat drops to zero. Both players have a health pool that monsters can attack, and when that runs out, you lose – that mechanic is not unique toHearthstoneby any stretch, but the UI for health and hero powers inFortunefeels deliberately evocative of Blizzard’s über-popular card game.
It’s just as fun asHearthstone, too! The risk-reward of spending all your gold on a potentially game-changing card, worrying all the while that your opponent will counter on their next turn is as suspenseful as ever. I’ve always been a “spam the field with creatures” man, which is even more satisfying inFortunethan it was inHearthstone.
Fortunedoes have a unique hook – and maybe the biggest tie to theFableuniverse – in the addition of a “quest” system. At the beginning of the round, you pick an objective for the rest of the match, like spending [x] amount of gold or casting [x] amount of spells. Once you hit that objective, you’re given a little bit of backstory and a decision between a Good or Evil plot development that changes your alignment. Evil buffs the damage you do to your opponent’s life, and Good will give you a little bit of healing to go with your damage. I can see use cases for both
Pulling fromHearthstoneis not really a bad thing – that game’s clean visual language has become almost second nature toHearthstoneplayers, so having that beFable Fortune‘s main point of inspiration significantly lowers the entry barrier. But on the other hand, ifHearthstonefans already haveHearthstone, why would they bother with a new game? Why pay for new cards and packs when you could stick with the ecosystem you’ve already bought into? Curiosity will assuredly drive some established CCG fans (like my roommate) toFortune, but I suspect that – like so many reheated Applebee’s lunch specials – they’ll cool on it faster than you might expect. If you have yet to get into a free-to-play card game or if you’re absolutely dying for moreFablecontent, you could do a hell of a lot worse thanFable Fortune, but card game veterans might get more for their money and time out of the radically differentGwent.
