Many credit Peter Molineux to be a pioneer of a game designer. And he has proven to come up with great infact awesome ideas in the past.
However, there are times that they lack depth and are a bit toned down on implementation. Pinoygaming Network revisits Fable, his first very ambitious project and put it to the test.
Welcome to Albion where thieves become richer than the Marcoses and good and bad don’t matter. Fable starts you out as a kid who got orphaned by a malicious attack in your village. You are adopted by an organization called the Heroes Guild and raised to be a Hero. The adventure begins as you search for vengeance.
There are a lot of things that need to be done before you satisfy yourself with revenge. You need to get stronger. You do this by kicking the living crap out of monsters, bandits and other magical creatures. They give you experience points that help you level up one of three skillsets, melee (refers to any weapon you actually hit your opponents with), ranged (bang bang, twang twang, bows and arrows), and magic (hax ito grabe).
You also need to make money. You do this by participating in quests or better yet, buy and sell. The game has its own living breathing economy. If you keep up with the prices you can buy and sell your way into millionairehood and get all the items you need.
Every hero starts out the same and you end up a unique hero depending on your decisions of what skilltree to develop and what items you use. There is a third element, alignment, which tells you how good or bad your character is. Not Michael Jackson bad but Skeletor bad. Sadly this just changes the appearance of your character and has no bearing whatsoever in the story.
The game plays very much like any RPG out in the market and what Peter Molineux proudly boasts is the story and how one interacts with the NPCs (non player characters). The story is good to say the least but the interactions with the NPCs simply do not affect the storyline. Infact its pretty shallow.
The game looks good granted and with systems out today this game will play like a dream. It lacks anything too “wowish” and is a bit cartoony in design but it actually helps the game somewhat by not putting in too much eye candy.
What we really like about Fable is the music. It is epic when it needs to be epic yet subtle and oh-so-calming during the downtimes. You should listen to the music during downtimes when you’re doing taxes or your algebra homework, its therapeutic.
All in all Fable offers all that an RPG needs and something extra. Although the extra stuff added on are pretty superficial, it still deserves a buy.