Phenixx Gaming

You might be familiar with the concept of “the divine right of kings,” a justification used for ages by monarchs that claims that they’re meant to rule their land because some form of higher power has personally chosen them to do so. Noble Fates takes that idea a step earlier in the process. Noble Fates is a city-building/management game in which you (technically) play as one of those gods who has chosen to appoint a ruler of a kingdom intended to worship you. Is it “good to be the king” within Noble Fates?

Within each run of Noble Fates, one mortal plane of existence is ruled over by a pantheon of gods who strive for balance in all things. Of course, since balance is the goal, logic dictates there can be no good without evil. This means there are much less benevolent forces from other planes who dedicate themselves to counterbalancing the righteous intentions of the gods. All of these powers can directly influence mortals. You play as a Kontra, a nameless and formless type of demigod. Thus, you can also shape the wills of mortals – whether your intentions are righteous or otherwise.

The stage is set when you decide it’s high time you had a kingdom full of mortals to carry out your will. You indirectly lead a group of four randomly-generated adventuring settlers to a cave, where they find a crown you placed there. Since these few souls are to be your first devotees, you get to decide which of them will be the first to wear this crown and lead your envisioned kingdom.

This is where the first aspect of Noble Fates that I quite like comes into play. This first group of mortals can be any combination of an assortment of fantasy races, such as dwarves, elves, humans, and orcs. Each race has its own accepted cultural preferences, though these aren’t necessarily devoutly followed by each mortal of that race. These cultural differences mean your potential subjects are complex and unlikely to be perfectly compatible with one another. This gameplay mechanic adds a ton of details that you’ll have to consider carefully.

While I typically like having those sorts of details to manage in city-management games, what I like even more about this is that Noble Fates has four fully customizable difficulty settings. When you mouse over any of these settings, you’ll get a window explaining the differences that difficulty mode has from the others. If you find that none of them offer your preferred level of challenge, however, you can further customize virtually everything to your heart’s content. This is a great design choice that I’m sure will appeal to many fans of this genre.

Noble Fates allows you to more directly attract your preferred types of devotees beyond the cultural differences among the races and more detailed differences between each mortal. You do this by setting up to six principles each time you start a new run of Noble Fates. Principles allow you to choose such things as the following: your kingdom’s alignment (good/neutral/evil); which races are and are not allowed to live in your kingdom and which race you favor most; what your followers eat; and whether or not they consume alcohol. This isn’t an exhaustive list, to be clear.

You must choose your principles before Noble Fates will present your first procedurally generated mortals. I’m glad this is required because it helps to gently constrain the player to ensure that the selected principles must make at least some logical sense. For example: As a test, I tried to create a kingdom comprised entirely of dwarves after choosing a principle that makes my kingdom outwardly hate dwarves. I didn’t get a single dwarf in my first group of mortals, which suggests that my goal wouldn’t have been possible to accomplish later in the run. Admittedly, however, I don’t know that for sure.

Thankfully, these sensible restrictions on what principles you can combine seem to be the only limitations on this mechanic. You can’t make a kingdom inhabited only by dwarves who hate themselves and their kin. However, if you want to set principles to make a kingdom of dwarves who never go near alcohol or a kingdom of elves who hate nature rather than revering it, you’re more than welcome to run wild. I like how much freedom the player is given here. The few existing limitations prevent scenarios that are so specific as to potentially be game-breaking.

If you’re not happy with the first mortals you’re shown or you want to change your principles for any reason, you can always re-roll and customize both of these until you’re satisfied. Keep in mind that differences between each mortal, such as how strongly each one likes or dislikes your chosen principles, likely mean you won’t be able to recruit all four mortals in your first group. There will probably be at least one who refuses to join your kingdom based on which of the mortals you choose as ruler. This transitions perfectly into your first two influential decisions.

Once you’ve chosen a ruler, one of the other mortals will likely say they want to leave because they dislike the leader you chose. They’ll declare that they intend to depart and take their share of the group’s supplies with them. At this point, you have several options. You can allow them to leave (with or without supplies), detain them, or even order your remaining followers to execute them. Mousing over these options will tell you how each mortal feels about that option and how strongly they like or dislike it.

You can choose the group’s most favored option, ignore their will entirely and issue your preferred command, or anything in between. This decision, and countless others you’ll make during each game, will influence how your worshipers feel about you and the one among them you’ve chosen as ruler. You can express your will any way you see fit, but you’ll have to remember that your will is nothing without mortals to carry it out. Alternately, you can make each run’s difficulty so peaceful that you’ll have to worry about hardly anything at all.

The degree to which you can customize each run of Noble Fates helps to make it a great “chill-out” game if that’s what you’re looking for. You can set a run to your preferred level of challenge and required engagement, put on your favorite podcast, and while away the hours building your kingdom and watching your subjects do your bidding. I enjoy when city-building and city-management games let you do this, and Noble Fates goes about it particularly well. I’m sure its customizable difficulty also easily caters to those who want the most complex, grueling challenges.

Noble Fates is still in Early Access at the time of this article’s publication. I’m glad that’s the case because all my complaints about Noble Fates are technical. I’m hoping its developers can easily address these and other issues before the full 1.0 launch. My first complaint is that Noble Fates’ loading times are consistently long, especially considering its rather small file size and the fact that I have it installed on a speedy internal SSD. Still, I won’t be too harsh about this since each run requires a lot of procedural generation.

That being said, I can’t help but wonder if Noble Fates’ game data might not be optimized properly. I’m wondering about this because each time I’ve launched Noble Fates, the game appears as though it’s about to crash to the desktop while loading its main menu. I’ve gotten a Windows pop-up each time asking me if I want to close the game because it’s not responding, only for everything to sort itself out if I wait a minute. I’d imagine this could make some players think Noble Fates is unplayable for them since they might understandably conclude it can’t even start up without crashing.

There are several instances where windows containing important in-game information look awkward and don’t fit well on-screen. The list of differences you see when you hover over one of the four difficulty settings is one example of this. The in-game technology tree is so huge that its display window is zoomed out pretty far by default. This requires quite a bit of zooming in and scrolling along the sides just to be able to tell what you’re looking at, much less find the specific technology you seek. I hope things like this can be redesigned as necessary to make them easier and clearer to read.

During each run of Noble Fates, you can quickly pan your view to any of your mortal subjects or possess your chosen ruler to control them directly. My final complaint about Noble Fates in its current state is that the screen transition when you do this is uncomfortably abrupt and jarring. I would suggest this could be slowed down, or perhaps have some sort of effects added to it to make it less so. I could easily be in the minority on this point, but this (admittedly minor) mechanic could use more development.

Overall, I’m glad to recommend Noble Fates to fans of the city-building and city-management genres. I think Noble Fates will especially appeal to those who also like its high-fantasy setting, as I most certainly do. However, I’d also understand if you’re put off by the fact that Noble Fates has been in Early Access since mid-December 2021 and still has some issues to iron out. Its base asking price of $24.99 USD might also be a bitter pill for some potential players to swallow for that same reason, even if that price doesn’t increase after Noble Fates leaves Early Access.

A PC review key for Noble Fates was provided by Xobermon, LLC for this preview.

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