Back at Gamescom last year I remember looking at some of the press conferences and thinking that there will be some good games on the horizon. What did take me by surprise though was Peter Molyneux’s appearance and the announcement of Fable III. While I was pretty damn excited about this announcements, I couldn’t help but here alarm bells going off in my head. I was still happily playing through Fable II. Granted it might have been my 3rd time through the story line, but I was still playing it to death. So to have its sequel announced this early after the release of Fable II. I thought they must be doing something wrong here, was this next game going to ba a half arsed rush job?
Well I can tell you now that after reading up on Fable III recently, the game has promise and it’s very far from just another rush game job.
For those of you out there who don’t know about Fable, I will give you a quick run down. Fable as a series takes place in the world of Albion. It is an epic tale mixed with a good does of British humour. It is kind of what you expect a story to be like when it has the name Fable, a fairytale-esque story line mixed with some good game mechanics. If you have not tried fable, sink your teeth into Fable II. Even though Fable I is good, II is a better step in the right direction.
Now onto Fable III. Fable III starts in the eyes of the son or daughter of Fable II. After Fable II finished the hero of Albion had 2 twin children. Now in classic story telling form, one of the twins turns evil, this twin being your brother, becomes King of Albion and has turned a tad insane, so you band together a front of people to overthrow the king. Then you yourself become ruler of Albion. Becoming the ruler of Albion takes up about half the game. The second half of the game is where you have to rule Albion. This is where the game comes very much into its own with new game mechanics and what sounds like a hell of a lot of moral choices.
The biggest new gaming mechanic to feature in Fable III is the ruling mechanic, once you sit your virtual bum on that thrown a whole load of stuff opens up to you. Now back when you were trying to overthrow the last king, people came up to you and asked things that you can promise to do when you become king. The one example I found was our old friend from Fable II, Reaver, come up to the new prospective ruler and asks is he can have a portion of the Albion land for factories. Now when you become the ruler of the land you have the choise of keeping promises such as this or not, in true royal fashion. You also have the money of Albion to think about. Are you going to use people’s tax money for good of the land? Or are you just going to make an Uber Castle for yourself and laugh your royal fat arse off while sitting on a pile of money? The choice is of corse up to you.
Another thing that has been added to your royal game mechanic system is a follower meter. (and before you ask no, you’re not going to be spending hours of virtual twitter gaining followers and typing things like ‘LOL you at all the moneyz I Haz.”) How this works is that the more people who follow your ways, the more stuff opens up to you around Albion. You get followers by doing quests, keeping promises and just plain grinding. The good old follow me or I will kill you probably works here as well. Soon enough you will get so many followers that a revolution will start and all will be great.
Ok so now your king and you have all this land to rule over, what else can you do? Well one of the things I did pick up on is that you can craft your very own weapons. Now this is a very interesting game mechanic in itself. You know in Fable II where your body changed depending on what you did? When you used magic a lot you had loads of blue glowing lines on you, or if you used a lot of melee attacks you became the size of a house. Lionhead have now applied this morphing technique to weapons. Say you have a standard sword, if you like to do a lot of flourishes your blade is going to get longer, if you kill a lot of the same type of enemy your hilt is going to change. If you like killing innocent people your blade is going to change, and so on. This makes for what quite frankly sounds like an amazing game mechanic, and the beauty of this is, your weapon is going to go up in price the more you use it, so that’s a paid job in itself in the game. The awesome thing here is though, it works on any weapon. Guns, swords, hammers, axes, you name it.
After looking at what Fable III has to offer this game is going to be huge. I have decided to make this a two-part post as there is so much more I have found out about his title. This is defiantly not a rush job, and it looks like Lionhead have gone all out here.
Garv
