by: John Olin

October 28, 2005

Though you begin the game as a young boy, your youth serves simply as a tutorial to prepare you for adventuring. After you’ve accomplished your objectives as a youth, you’ll simply be asked if you’re ready to skip ahead to the next stage in your life or not. Once you reach adulthood and become an adventurer, however, your character truly begins his life, and you’ll watch the metamorphosis as his physical appearance changes based on how you’ve played the game. This is actually one of the more innovative features of the game, and it truly is a wonder to behold just how different one character can be from another. Combat skills are split up between three professions—those that focus on strength, skill or will, which is how the game refers to magic abilities. As you defeat enemies you’ll earn experience, which can be used to learn new abilities and upgrade your old skills. Additionally, you’ll earn specialized experience by using your abilities, which can only be used on skills that belong to that profession. In other words, the more you use the individual abilities at your disposal, the stronger they can become. While some may try to focus on mastering a single profession, most players will probably learn several skills from all three, turning their character into a “jack of all trades” type of hero, since it costs much more experience to upgrade your skills as they progress to each new level.

Before long, you’ll find yourself facing some of the vicious creatures of Albion, and you’ll be happy to know that Combat in Fable will feel very familiar to anybody who’s played the Legend of Zelda games since the N64. You can wield any combination of melee and ranged weapons that you choose, and swap between them at any time using the black and white buttons. Melee combat is primarily hack-and-slash, with your swings being controlled by the X-button alone. If you’re locked on to a target you can block by holding the Y-button, and moving in any direction while doing so allows you to roll and dodge attacks. Landing a few hits in a row allows you to finish with a powerful “flourish” move, with has a chance of knocking your enemies unconscious or even decapitating them in a single swoop. You can fire ranged weapons while moving by simply locking on to your target or you can click the left-thumbstick and line up your shot from a first-person viewpoint. Lastly, each magic spell you possess is mapped to the four face buttons, and you can cycle through them on the fly and cast them by holding down the right-trigger. A total of 16 spells can be learned and upgraded, ranging from attack spells like lightning or fireball to mind control spells, summons and healing spells. Each spell has the potential to be quite useful if used properly, and some higher level spells are simply devastating to your opponents. Defeated enemies drop experience orbs which much be absorbed after the fight is over, or no experience is gained from the battle. Landing multiple hits on your enemies in succession in a short period of time adds to your combat multiplier, which increases the number of experience points you gain from each orb. Knowing this, it’s always a good idea to defeat as many enemies as possible before collecting your experience, as you’ll earn much more from doing so.

One of the most impressive features of Fable is how the world truly does feel like a living and breathing environment. Time passes in real-time, with an entire day and night cycle lasting roughly an hour. Throughout the day you’ll notice the inhabitants of Albion going about their business as you’d imagine. As the sun rises you’ll hear towns begin to wake from their slumber, and you can watch as they get out of bed and eat a little something before heading off for their daily activities. Kids rush off to the schoolhouse for the better half of the day, while their parents head of to work to open their shops. You’ll see men hauling shipments from the docks to the various shops in town, and housewives scrubbing the floors of their homes while the family is away. In the evening the city fills up with children getting in some playtime before bed, while the working class heads to the tavern to enjoy a few drinks, all the while praising your good deeds or lamenting your evilness as you pass by. It truly is a sight to see. Disappointing, however, is just how quickly your character ages as time flies by, made all the more noticeable since nothing in the world of Albion ages alongside you. As close as we could tell, your character ages roughly two years for every game day that passes. For a game that touts its nearly unlimited replay value and the large number of activities available to you, they sure do try to hurry you through the storyline with that “you aren’t getting any younger” fact hanging in front of your face. Your character does cease to age once you’ve reached the transition between seasoned and senior, though. On top of that, the single-player storyline is on the short side, clocking in somewhere between 10 and 20 hours depending on how you play the game. Because of this it’s obvious that, while Fable truly does allow you to play any role you choose and thus is the epitome of role-playing games, it really plays like an action-adventure game.