Fable: Huge Hands-On With Final Game

We begin our epic coverage of Peter Molyneux's mind-boggling Xbox adventure with this massive hands-on preview with pretty much the final version of the game. Come in, sit down, have a beer!

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Update: Complete selection of Fable videos added, including a 10-min walkthrough with BBB's Simon Carter and our exclusive 40-min video interview with the Fable team.

It's your younger sister's birthday, and you're broke. Like every big brother, you want to look out for your sibling, so getting hold of some cash is foremost on your mind. But where to get it? Disheartened, you stroll into the village, looking for an out, when an old man asks you to look after his crates for a while - for a reward, of course. Do you (a) do as the sexagenarian asks and earn your money the honest way, (b) smash open the crates for the spoils within, or (c) try to get away with both?

Choice is something we're faced with every day in our lives, yet as soon as we pick up a controller we're tethered by the imaginations of developers. Sometimes these constraints are ridiculous (Why can't I climb over those boxes?), while in other games the shackles have been made a little more transparent (Should I kill the next baddie, or do I feel like delivering pizzas for a while?). It shouldn't have to be this way.

Simon and Dene Carter, co-directors of Guildford-based Big Blue Box, have a lot of respect for you as a gamer. They don't see themselves as puppeteers, predetermining your every move. They genuinely want you to be able to think out problems for yourself and to do things your own way. And they want you to have a damn good time while doing it. The two brothers have been working on Fable at Lionhead Studios with Peter Molyneux for four years now, and as we ride the train into the quiet town from London, the excitement surrounding the game's imminent release is palpable.

Fable has been a long time coming, and for better or worse the media has elevated expectations considerably. Not that Molyneux didn't have anything to do with this himself. The amiable creator is first to admit that in the past he has often spilled-over with excitement, revealing ideas that might never make it into the final game. This has lead to a segment of the gaming populace writing him off as someone who never delivers on what he promises. Saying that, however, misses the point that what he does finally deliver is usually of astounding quality and depth.

As a consequence of this unbounded enthusiasm, several early concepts for Fable have not survived. Most obviously, you're no longer able to choose to start out your journey as either a boy or a girl, and the multiplayer system has been nixed too. While the Carters are aiming to provide ample side-roads to explore, the central path through the game is firmly laid out. This core story is there so that, to a certain extent, everyone will experience the same overarching plot progression. As usual, though, the devil is in the details, and this is where Fable demonstrates its emergent gameplay potential.

With the progression of videogame technology, one of the most important and unseen areas of advancements has been in artificial intelligence. Fable has five AI systems running simultaneously, governing the world and its economy, non-player characters and their relationships with you, and enemy monsters. The malleability of these was ably demonstrated during quality control by a teenage tester at Lionhead who sought to determine the depth of the economic system. He moved into a town, and subsequently went on to kill every resident. This caused a severe drop in property prices, which he took advantage of to buy up every building in town. Once people started to move back in, he - as sole landlord for the entire village - simply raised the rent on all his property and proceeded to make a fortune. Albion - the setting for Fable - is imbued with a full economic system, and this is just an example of what's possible. Only your lack of imagination will anchor you down.

Your interaction with the world and its denizens is also of vital importance. This is, after all, a fable, a fantastical journey through life, and how you'll be remembered by the masses is through legend. It's completely up to you to decide whether you want to be good or evil, and no one is better prepared than Molyneux to incorporate such a system. It's crucially not a black and white system, but rather an infinite series of greys. The AI subsystems constantly poll NPCs to determine your average level of respect or notoriety and your alignment with good and evil. Importantly, this polling is restricted to areas you're currently in, so one town can hold you in high esteem, while the townsfolk might curse your very presence in another. Had this game debuted a year earlier, this would have been a more novel concept, but the release of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic has stolen a fraction of Fable's thunder in this instance.

While you wouldn't think it to look at the game, Fable is replete with layer upon layer of statistics. Traditional RPG enthusiasts will be in heaven, trying to squash every last point into such esoteric categories as how often you puke, how much sex you have and your furthest chicken kick. At the same time, you're not overwhelmed by numbers as you wander through the game world. One of the defining characteristics of the game is that the depth is there if you're looking for it, but you're not going to be forced to deal with it...

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