Fable III Previews

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Written by Brother None on February 12th, 2010

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"You tell her off and now we can take her home," Molyneux said. "In Fable II you press the A button. In III you use a trigger. When you press the trigger the most appropriate thing happens. This time you comfort her because she is upset. You pull the trigger again and you take her hand and guide her."

On the television the hero, holding his young daughter by the hand, gently leads her through the street.

"This is using all of our AI because it is highly context-sensitive," he said.

So while you can say you're going to clean up the streets, if you don't deliver on this, the people will lose faith in you as a ruler. That doesn't mean you can't be evil though. As a ruler, you have free reign to play with the new Judgment system: when people come to you and ask for favors, you decide whether to throw them in the dungeon, or take pity and give them funds from your treasury. You see, as the king, you have access to a massive pile of gold. You then decide whether to use it for the people or yourself. Do you turn the factories into schools and orphanages, or do you put the kids on the street to work?

You'll be able to pick up kids with Natal-aided hand motions.
You'll use a controller to play, but you'll also use your right hand to do gestures and initiate things.
Your avatar in the game can get evil or bluish angelic wings instead of horns or a halo.
You do overhead finishing moves with your hands.
It looks, feels, and smells like Fable.

Passing judgment will be done using what Molyneux calls "the most emotionally driven feature in a game," a touch mechanic inspired by ICO. In the first example given, the character's wife was in hysterics -- their child had gone missing. The demo driver was able to use his dog (yes, man's best friend is back) to track her scent. As it turned out, she'd just wandered off to play with friends. The touch mechanic (performed with the right trigger) was first used to admonish the child. (The actions performed by press right trigger are context sensitive to the other character's emotional state.) She began to cry, so the touch mechanic was used to pick her up, hug her and start tossing her in the air until she was happy again. The character then stood next to her as the demoer held right trigger to hold her hand and walk her home.

So the HUD fades away, the combat is ruthlessly simplified, and in a stunning move against the prevailing winds that have blown XP from RPGs into virtually every other genre in recent years, the whole concept of gaining experience which is spent on new abilities has been scrapped.

Instead, your hero's growth, your increasing power in the fantasy land of Albion, will be mainly represented by the number of followers he or she has. This (as well as being an amusing echo of Twitter mania) ties in with Fable III's theme and its narrative arc: the road to power, and what you do with it when you get it.

Speaking of kissing or slapping -- yes, you can be a polygamist in Fable III... if you pass a law that allows it. Here, Molyneux referenced the six wives of English King Henry VIII; he didn't want to be married to Catherine of Aragon anymore, so he made up his own religion, divorced her and married someone else. Just so in Fable III, you get to make these kinds of decisions. But whatever you decide might impact your ability to run your country.

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