[fable]

I just checked out Interplay's forums. Nobody seems in ecstasy about the title. Most who have played through to the point where they leave the first big city are screaming mad. Apparently, Barcelona is very RPGish, but once you get outside the game morphs into Diablo, with hordes of identical monsters and the usual few bosses. Most comments do not appear to be coming from trolls. Some clearly are from people who will pass on early impressions as though they were final ones, which in turn are picked up by others who treat them as fact; but it's easy to discount these remarks, and note the posters who do it.

What's harder to dismiss are the debates between RPG fans and game devs that date back over an entire year in some threads, and show the devs opting for features that would deliberately make the game Diablo-like at certain points. I don't understand: if some people wanted pausable, BG2-style combat, and the devs wanted simple realtime, why couldn't they have designed pausable and realtime as game options?

I'm waiting for my copy, but this doesn't bode well from my perspective, which is that of a hardcore RPG player who enjoys planning battle strategy.