Fable Retrospective

The guys at Rock, Paper, Shotgun have put together a fairly short retrospective article for Lionhead Studios' original Fable.
Thanks to their exaggerated swaggers and cartoonishly bloated limbs, you don't look for cracks in Fable's reality instead, you accept the world it paints. Had Fallout 3 not chased photo-realism, its many animation failings wouldn't have been anywhere near as glaring. As it is, this remains a remarkably pretty game: like WoW, there's a certain timelessness to its toy-like character designs.

At the time, Fable was both praised and hated for its moral choices choices that, as has forever been the case in games that make similar promises, were pigeonholed into a simple Lovely and Horrible dichotomy rather than reflecting any sort of inbetween status. Looking at it now, the morality seems far less important than it did in 2004. It's a choice we're so used to now, and the only difference here is that your character visually reflects it: angelic light and butterflies for a goodie, satanic horns and sulphurous insects for a meanie.