Linear "on-rails" RPG with more flash then substance.
Just before the game’s release, the often touted co-op feature was to be one of many casualties. The 40+ hours of game play was now weighing in at a rather anemic 10 hours. These were omens of foreboding to be sure, but the worse surprises were to only be revealed upon actually playing the game.
I began to lament within minutes of control being relinquished to me following the opening cut-scene. I observed a rather nicely rendered world, albeit highly stylized, extending out from my starting location. Exploration, being the pinnacle past time of a large RPG and a personal favorite of mine when presented with a new world to explore, was my first order of business. Imagine my chagrin as I had the audacity to dare and stray off the beaten path only to find the bane of all explorers; the invisible wall. There might be a nicely detailed hill or grassy plain extending towards the horizon, but I would never know what lay beyond said hill or what resided in those idealic grassy plains since exploration of these locales was verboten. What happened to the “fully explorable world”? Slap! Face; meet the cold unforgiving fist of reality.
My jaw, already red and stinging from the slap it had just received, was barely recovered when the next resounding slam was on target to hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. I completed a number of “proving ground” quests and activities that were obviously in place to familiarize the player with Fable’s control scheme. Things seemed to be going rather swimmingly until a message displayed before my eyes; “Would you like to progress to adolescence?”. I know parents always say “they grow up so fast don’t they?”, but this was ridiculous. Where was the naturally progressive aging we were promised? Oof! One punch to the kidneys courtesy of seemingly un-realistic expectations.
The remainder of my time with Fable, aside from demonstrating my own self loathing by perpetrating this abortion upon myself, simply displayed what has become rote in the industry; linear quests, hack-N-slash combat, “boss monster” battles to represent a final conflict for a series of repetitive events, etc. ad nauseam. Another “feature” present in Fable that has become epidemic within the genre is the adding of “flash over substance”. While they are nice features being able to get a haircut or to take on a characteristic representative of your worldly actions (e.g. angelic glow if you do good, devil horns and flies if you’re evil), if they were added at the expense of the freely explorable world or co-operative game play, I would have rather have been able to walk to the horizon then look like an on-screen cameo extra in The Crow.
Fable simply represents what has become wrong with the RPG genre in my opinion. It’s been shown time and time again in recent years that it is much easier, expedient, and profitable to create a homogenized action RPG with excessively flashy combat wrapped in a trite cliché of a story, then it is to create an immersive in-depth tale that draws a player in suspending disbelief for hours at a time within a world that is both alien and familiar simultaneously. While these may seem to be lofty goals, they are by no means unobtainable as precedence has certainly been set by past example (Ultima VII, Wizardry 8, Daggerfall, etc.).
Many of the vanguard RPG series have become extinct due to afore mentioned “corporate sensibilities” (e.g. Ultima, Wizardry). The Elder Scrolls series seems to be one of the last western “old school” RPGs that remain relatively unscathed by the ravages of corporate raping and pillaging. Several European developers also appear to have bucked the trend and taken up the call for championing immersive CRPGs (e.g. Gothic, Arx Fatalis) for the nostalgic and those who want more then a 10 hour dungeon crawl hacker.
Those looking at Fable to contain more then rudimentary RPG elements should look elsewhere. Indeed, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Gothic 3, or even the older but still excellent Morrowind would result in a better investment of your RPG dollar.