Fable III Preview

We really haven’t heard much about Fable III since its announcement at GamesCom, but luckily the new preview over at CVG comes loaded with some additional information to ingest.

Fable III’s second half charts your reign as king or queen of Albion. Rather than the mock monarch you could be in the second game – if you bought every piece of land in the kingdom, you were rewarded with a crown, robes and a fancy title – Fable III lets you indulge in every kingly/queenly act you can think of, from sending your subjects to prison for no good reason to distributing the crown’s wealth as you see fit. You’ll still be able to wander round the kingdom, smacking bandits and looking for silver keys, but it’s now backed up by a more evolved version of Fable II’s sim elements – rather than simply buying everything in sight, you’re able to shape the very nature of Albion.

Say your castle is looking a bit grim. You could spend your kingdom’s limited resources on sprucing it up, but then you’d have no money left to attend to all the other items left on your royal to-do list – like going to war with other nations, or keeping all those promises you made.

Ah yes, the promises. For some bizarre reason, The People want you to uphold your pledges, rather than sticking your fingers in your ears and chopping off their whining heads instead. It’s up to you whether you honour or ignore these promises, but you’ll soon learn that life as a monarch isn’t as straightforward as you imagined it to be – in order to ensure the smooth running of the kingdom, compromises have to be made. It’s Fable’s customary morality system taken to another level: rather than being good or bad simply for the hell of it, you’ll be forced into making the kind of tough moral choices that real leaders have to make all the time.