I dont think Im too far off if I say that most
game designers believe, or hope that their jewel will be the game to end all games. Peter
Molyneux is perhaps a perfect example. At his presentations weve heard the plans and
watched them unfold, from Project Ego to Fable. After quite a few years in the making its
here, and fortunately its a pretty solid game, even though it feels like the designers had
to choose the easy way out in some ways.
You start the game like any other boy,
living happily in his sunny village. Apparently its your sisters birthday, and your father
reminds you that you havent bought a present for her yet. For every good deed you do your
father will give you a coin, and after a time this should be enough to buy something great.
Even at this early age you start stumbling upon serious things, such as a man cheating on
his wife. Should you be good and report him, or be bad and take a bribe? During the game
youll be given lots of chances to alter your alignment, but unlike most role-playing games
this actually makes a noticeable difference on your character, and how people in the village
treat you.
Soon after youve handed your sister her present some rather unexpected
things happen. You see a man running towards you, who ends up having an arrow shot into his
back. Bandits are coming for the village, with you and your family as the targets. Your
village is burned down, your father killed, and your mother and sister taken away
certainly not an ideal way to end ones childhood. When things seem absolutely dismal a
mysterious man named Maze rescues you and brings you to the guild of heroes, here you spend
many years training in melee-, ranged combat, and magic. After graduating as a certified
hero you begin taking quests and helping people, but always remembering the day when your
life was turned upside down.
Quests are found primarily in the guild of heroes. Here
you get a list of things to do, how much itll pay, and how much renown youll receive by
doing it. You can choose to accept a quest, or accept it and boast. By choosing to boast
youre teleported to an area outside of the guild where you can choose from a certain number
of boasts, which the people nearby will respond to in one-way or another. A boast may be
that youll finish the quest unharmed, without using any weapons, or maybe without any
clothes. Also, before you head out you might also want to purchase a title, something people
will start calling you the second youve handed over your money. Maybe Avatar or Sabre
sounds nice; if not then you can always buy the title Chicken Chase, or even
Arseface!
The quests you take on mainly involve killing vicious things, protecting
people, or finding special objects. They can seem a little repetitive, but not overly so.
Lets say your quest is to find a hidden bandit squad and take out its leader. A boast may
be that youll kill all the bandits. When done youll not only get the agreed sum of money,
renown and experience, but also a nice bonus due to the boast, and in some cases also a
special item that you can show off in town. You see renown can be earned in many ways. If
youre in an area with a decent amount of civilians you may pull out the shield of the
bandit leader and run around town making sure everyones seen it, all within perhaps a
minute or less.
The story in Fable takes place over many years, so obviously your
character evolves greatly in that time. There are three main disciplines of combat, melee-,
ranged combat, and magic. You may choose to specialize in either of these, but in my
experience its very useful to put experience points in all three. To make a very good melee
fighter youll want to spend many points in the sub categories of strength, which improve
melee damage, health points and natural armor. Itd also be smart to put points in the sub
categories of skill, because even though its focus is on ranged combat it also improves your
attack speed and affects your luck with merchants. Finally you have magic, where you
primarily buy spells such as Fireball and Lightning, but by choosing Berserk (think The
Hulk) and Multi-strike (up to five fast consecutive strikes) youll deal damage like no
other. There are tons of spells, and to see them all it would take several time of playing
through the game to accomplish this, which I think many people will do.
Good combat
in any third person action game is heavily reliant on the controls. In Fable you move much
like you would in any similar game, but you use L1 to lock onto targets and use two buttons
to launch melee attacks. By holding R1 you bring up magic, where you can have numerous
presets depending on what weapon youre using. For instance, if youre using a melee weapon
you may want shortcuts for multi-strike, berserk and heal, while you might want multi-arrow,
heal and something else when using a ranged weapon. Cycling through the presets is done by
holding R1 and pressing Y, so it works well even during the most hectic fights. My biggest
gripe is that cycling through enemies can be annoying at times, because sometimes it just
doesnt want to move to the enemy youre interested in attacking. Also, by using L1 you can
lock onto friendly people, something that can happen relatively easily when your mission is
to protect someone and youre ambushed by bandits. This is hardly a big deal, but it felt as
though there is room for improvement with this control scheme.
Playing through the
game as a good hero can be fun in many ways, but you should get many laughs from being
naughty and manipulating the villagers. You can for instance run around punching random
people, breaking into houses and stealing their food, or maybe have an army of wives. Peter
Molyneux likes to mention one example where a young player had married the female mayor of
one of the games major towns. After a while he killed her. Why? Because by killing her hed
hopefully inherit her wealth and status Far too few games of this kind focus on this kind
of human interaction, so its great to see one that does it so well.
In terms of
graphics and presentation Fable does very well. The game takes place in medieval-looking
scenery, with castles, villages, and thick forests, but its all rendered convincingly.
Theres this very nice organic look to the outdoor scenery, and you also have lots of
dynamic shadows and a cool glow effect on characters and more. Performance-wise its fluid
almost throughout the entire game, but when you start using the bigger spell effects in
areas with a lot of enemies the framerate does go slow down slightly. If I were to nitpick
on one thing specifically itd probably be that some of the textures used in the cutscenes
look awfully low-res. They dont really affect anything, but theyre easy to notice and
shouldve been replaced.
The audio is perhaps even better than the visuals. British
voice talents are used with all the in-game characters and they do an awesome job overall.
With over 10000 lines of speech in the game its easy to tell that a lot of work has gone
into it, but I wish the henchmen you can hire wouldnt repeat the same lines again and
again, and again. The sound effects sound rich and are appropriate, from the sounds of
intimacy to the sound of wasps being smashed by a warhammer. Also, the musical score,
composed by Russel Shaw and performed by the London Philharmonia Orchestra, does an
excellent job of adding emotion and mood to the game. The background music just fits the
area youre in and it changes according to whats happening. The Oscar winning Danny Elfman,
of Hollywood fame, did the main theme, which in my opinion fits very well with the whole
light / dark, good / evil concept.
Conclusion:
Its been a long time coming
and now that its here I must say Im impressed in many ways. Fable is a funny and exciting
game, with pretty graphics and extremely well done audio. The only downside is that it only
takes between 7 and 10 hours to finish, depending on how many sub quests you do. You can add
a couple of hours if you plan on marrying, messing around with villagers, and so on. Playing
through the game a second time as the polar opposite of your first character can be fun,
just to see how the in-game people react, but personally I didnt feel too motivated to do
it, considering how the story had already unfolded in its entirety. Star Wars: Knights of
The Old Republic was better in this way, but Im sure many will want to give both good guy
and bad guy a shot.
Due to its short length and somewhat limited replay value itd
be easy to recommend this as a rental, but in all honesty its a game youll want in your
collection just for the sake of owning it.
Fable was once said to be something along
the lines of the best RPG ever, but because of the overly simplified console mechanics its
merely a very good one.
Graphics :9.0
Sound :9.3
Gameplay
:8.4
Multiplayer :N/A
Overall : 9.1
