Fable III Preview

Billed as a Fable III preview, this article on Next Gen News is really more of a brief history lesson on Lionhead Studios’ entire Fable franchise. Here’s a bit on Molyneux’s many early promises for Project Ego/Fable:

Project Ego was a game that was supposed to revolutionize the RPG genre. The player’s choices during the game would ultimately affect the character’s appearance and the overall story. Become the hero of the land, evil and fearsome villain, a hustling-gambling nomad, or just simple a family man. Project Ego was supposed to offer the freedom of freewill. It was supposed to be the holy grail of role-playing games. Gamers always dreamed of a game where they got to tell their story that is exactly what Peter Molyneux promised us. In his words, Project Ego was going to be the (greatest role-playing game of all time). That’s a pretty big promise to make, and a refreshing one at that! Peter Molyneux showed a lot of confidence in his project and in return gamers would share in his confidence and hop on board the hype-train.

Project Ego then eventually turned into what we know today as Fable. When Fable finally hit retail stores around the globe in late 2004 it broke sales records selling over 375,000 in the first week (mind you, those are great figures considering how young the Xbox franchise was) however, many gamers were disappointed to find that all those amazing features that were promised were lacking. Sure, your character would get fat if he ate too much and get scars in battle, but the game was nowhere near as free-form as it was made out to be.