Peter “Childtouch” Molyneux has done it again friends, amidst the doubters and the nay sayers this prince among men and fine representative sample of English sensibility has risen to the occasion, and a mere two years after the release of Fable II he has returned to deliver us his magnum opus; Fable III. This virtual shoe-in for RPG of the year has once again seen Molyneux make good on all of his promises, and rest assured that I do not indulge hyperbole when I state that Fable III is quite simply the most important game ever to have been fashioned by mortal hands.
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Many games have dabbled in cinematic tropes when creating their narrative, yet they are as rank amateurs compared to the unparalleled grandeur that Molyneux has gifted to the world. Fable 3’s narrative marks nothing less than the next evolution in interactive theatre, to which other RPG contemporaries could scarcely hope to aspire. The player will begin the game as a plucky up-and-coming person of importance (you can choose to be a woman, Ethan) whose world of privilege is suddenly turned on its head when they are tragically orphaned, and find themselves pitted in a grim battle of life and death against their evil brother. In short, this is a story that has never been told before.
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Fable 3’s narrative clout, is its ability to effortlessly accommodate a deep morality system, which allows gamers full dramatic licence to be either very, very good or very, very not. This complex and nuanced role playing is at the fore when players are put upon to assemble a peasant army to raise the protagonist’s standard, in the hopes of restoring him to the throne. Once this has been accomplished it is for the gamer to decide whether to raise his/her/Ethan’s people up out of poverty and oppression, else run them into the ground. This nuanced decision making mechanic has important implications for the way the game pans out, as it will directly impact upon the way your character looks when engaging in Fable III’s compellingly similar uniform endgame content.
The role of this thespian's career!
Key to Fable’s winning formula is the elimination of needless complexity in order to focus on what is really important, the core of the experience if you will. What need have us gamers for complex controls, strategies and robust difficulty in our games? These mechanics only get in the way of enjoying Molyneux’s masterful prose, luckily this master game design savant was one step ahead of us, fixing the problem we never knew we had. Don’t like mastering arcane control schemes? Have one button combat! Scared and bewildered by complex skill trees? Molyneux has taken a tree and turned it into a post! Have we not all tired of the tyranny of exploration? It is only in Fable that you will find the liberating inclusion of Molyneux’s glowing trail of bread crumbs. Even Fable III’s character interaction eschews needless complexity by having players communicate through burps and farts, rather than being bogged down by pointless dialogue trees which ruin the pacing of all the burping and farting. It is this efficient design philosophy which frees up the development team to flesh out more important aspects of the game, such as turning the game menu into a fully realised three dimensional locality which one must explore in order to equip items and accept missions!
In conclusion it is obvious that Fable III is the most important game that you will ever play. The general gaming population can be roughly divided into three camps: people who have played Fable III, people who are going to play Fable III and idiots. Needless to say, you should most definitely buy a Kinectbox 360 for Fable III, you don’t want to be an idiot now, do you?
Babby out of Molyneux
[Editor’s note: in the interests of maintaining COMPLETE objectivity SiliconNooB took great pains to avoid any and all contact with Fable 3, just another way that Lusipurr.com goes the extra mile in bringing you game journalism you can TRUST!]
Posted by SiliconNooB 