Seeing Fable in person the first thing that comes to mind is “this is what Morrowind should have been”. It’s a fully interactive world, where every action you take changes the course of the story because you are trying to build a reputation for yourself. You don’t have to be good or bad, but if you are trying to be a noble hero and you crush a flower, the level of respect you get from the townspeople goes downhill.
One of the most amazing things in Fable is the character progression, not only do your skills grow, but so does your appearance. For example if you get sliced up in a battle and don't apply a bandage quickly, the scar sticks with you forever, say you eat to much and drink a lot of beer at the bar, here comes the gut. If you go the way of a mage and spend most of your time in the dark caverns, you’ll get pale skin and a receding hairline from all the magic you use.
When you start out, you’re just a kid with no reputation. People don’t know you, so they can’t respect you. As you take more quests, that level of respect grows and you can build on it. One unique thing is that when you choose a quest, you can brag to the townspeople how you will do it. Say you are going to slay a monster in the woods, you can tell them that you will defeat the monster without using magic, using your bare hands etc… This makes for some different scenarios because if you don’t do as promised they will mock you and your popularity will falter, but if you do as you said they respect you just that much more.
The AI in Fable is something to behold, when you become a hero children will start dressing like you, they will copy your actions. One of the funniest things I have ever seen in a game happened at the bar, the main character stole a beer from a local, and a brawl broke out, so then the player left the bar and looked in the window to watch the melee that he had started. The townspeople will be increasingly excited when you come home from a long journey, they will greet you when you get home, unlike when you start as a lowly peasant and nobody cares. There’s also courtship in here, so you can get married and have a house together. This is both good and bad, for one if people disrespect you, your wife will stand up for you and in some cases throw punches if it’s bad enough. The downside to having a wife is that if you leave for a year on a lengthy quest, she will be extremely pissed at you for not coming back sooner and not writing a letter telling her what was going on, (sound like real life guys?).
The battle system is all in real time, and the action is intense. One of the big additions to the fighting is that your spells are assigned to hot-keys on the controller, so you never have to look at a menu to choose a spell. Once you gain notoriety from your successes, you will have people in the various towns that want to follow you around and help you on your quests, henchmen if you will. In addition, if you get to be a great hero they will even fight the battles for you, you just oversee everything.
Fable's world is massive, and as you reach new towns you not only see new people, but entirely different cultures, all with their own heroes they worship. Some of these heroes will be cooperative and want to help you, others will want to show you who’s boss. With an ever changing weather system, and environments that you can alter, you will never play the exact same game, so after you complete the game, meaning you die as a hero at an old age, you can start again and take a new path.
It's disappointing to see that multiplayer has been taken out since the last time I saw it, but if that leads to a more engrossing single-player experience then it might not be such a bad thing. Another thing to note is the frame rate, it's not up to speed yet, so let's hope that gets ironed out before release later this year. Those things being said Fable is still number one my list of most anticipated games for Xbox. Check out the video to see for yourself.
Video- here
File Size- 3.5 MB
Posted by John Majewski on Saturday, May 15, 2004 at 02:41:26 pm
Reply With Quote
