Developer: Big Blue Box
Publisher: Microsoft
Genre: Role-Playing Game, Action
Release Date: 11/14/2004
Console: Xbox

I feel as though I can really speak with some degree of authority now when it comes to this game. I’ve finished it a total of 3 times, amassed a pretty large sum of played hours on it, and I was initially hesitant to play at all.

First, let me say that I enjoyed this game. I wouldn’t have played it through so many times if I did not. I liked the portions of Project Ego that made it into the game, and lament the ones that did not (though I am hopeful that many of these will make it into Fable 2, the trailer for which looks quite impressive).

One unique aspect of this game is the way experience is handled. There are four categories for experience to be shunted into–General, Strength, Skill, and Will–and those quantities are determined by how much you use the associated abilities. If you spend all your time bashing foes with a giant sword, you’re going to pick up lots of Strength skillpoints. If you shoot your arrows all the time, you get Skill. If you hurl lightning bolts everywhere, you’ll rack up Will points. Everything you kill, regardless, gives off General points, the total number of which is modified by a ‘combat multiplier,’ which goes up the longer you go in combat without getting hit. A really high combat multiplier makes your experience grow exponentially.

The game is set in “Albion”:http://en.wikipedia.com/Albion, which is supposed to be a mythical place and what looks remarkably like Wales. You start the game as a child and are immediately faced with making choices for good or for bad. I’d say ‘evil’ there, but evil isn’t really something attributed to lying to authority or breaking some crates. From that moment on, almost every decision you make in the game has an effect on the character (referred throughout the game as ‘Hero’ or with a title you can purchase, such as “Deathbringer” or “Avatar”) and on how the world perceives you. Do you play for good, or for evil? Does the decision actually matter?

The short answer is that yes, the choices you make do matter. If you’re dressed all in assassin garb and have facial tattoos depicting a vicious animal, people will shy away from you. If you’re sufficiently evil, you’ll have horns, flies buzzing around, and a red fog at your feet. People run and scream.

This choice system is really one of the highly-touted aspects of this game. But it does fall into the same trap as any other game that inflicts choice on the player (see Knights of the Old Republic and its sequel): your choices, really, only change the end movie. Sure, if you do something horrifyingly evil, like kill a family member, people will say things like, ‘They say you killed your own sister!’ and scream at you. But do they charge you more for goods & services? Do they refuse to talk to you? The answer is no.

At the very end of the game, you’re faced with what can be called a big decision. Bad guys have been defeated, and the greatest power known to exist throughout all of time is in your fingers. Do you keep it or not? Doesn’t matter. Keep it, don’t keep it, health potions still cost about 32 gold.

I yearn for a truly immersive game where you can *change* the world, not just have your actions *reflect* in the world.

There are other slightly more annoying drawbacks than the world impact aspect. For example, if you’re keen on playing an archer (which is a perfectly viable archetype), you _will_ run out of things to spend your skill points on. After finishing the original game (I have played all this on the ‘expansion’ game, _Fable: The Lost Chapters_), I was totally maxed out in Skill points, and had no Skill skills left to spend them on. Tens of thousands of wasted experience points. I imagine this was overlooked because not many people like playing the Ranger archetype, I guess, though I can’t imagine why.

The world is large, but the way in which it is presented makes it feel much larger than it is. There are 15 or 20 different zones, each one relatively small, with large load times between them. Fortunately there is a fine teleportation system in place which keeps you from having to journey for hours. I would have liked to see a more Morrowind-style worldview, rather than break the map apart into ‘point of interest’ style navigation.

The combat system is powerful without being too specific–you can target or not target depending on if you want to stick to one NPC at a time, for example–and the spells make even a physically weak mage-like character be able to hold his own without immediate death.

All in all, this game is a really great Xbox roleplaying game. I enjoyed myself with it, and will likely run through it one more time before I shelve it to gather dust for a while and turn my attention back to the new Splinter Cell that I haven’t finished yet.