Fable III Preview

Lionhead Studios’ Fable III has once again been subjected to the preview treatment, and this time it’s courtesy of the editors at Hooked Gamers.

It has been revealed that, during the course of the story, you will become the King of Albion and being King of course comes with a whole lot of responsibilities, even more than being a spouse or a parent in Fable II. Not only do you need to consider the needs of your family alongside your normal RPG questing, you now need to take care of an entire kingdom and decide what sort of ruler you want to be. Will you rule Albion with an iron fist to maintain order? Or will you earn your people’s trust with good deeds? As the ruler of Albion you will have to enforce the law and keep an eye on the day-to-day activities of your subjects. Your options are so varied that different approaches to certain scenarios can result in vastly different results for different players. One such incident, referred to by Peter Molyneux, involved deciding what to do with someone who had not paid their taxes. One player might send them to a trial and have them locked up, another might choose to send an entire army after them. Choice has always been a seminal element of Lionhead’s games, but the scale of what is possible in Fable III is actually much more similar to a “god game” like Black & White, which is also from Lionhead, rather than a traditional action RPG.

Along with choice, “touch” is another element of Fable III which is being greatly expanded. You can now lead NPCs by the hand in a variety of different scenarios. You might be leading a friend down to the pub for a drink, or dragging an unruly character to be locked away in a dungeon. Like everything in the Fable III universe though, touch can be abused. Lionhead have shown one example where the hero befriends a homeless person. A good player might lead the man to a clothing shop or a pub for a drink and meal. But a bad player might lead the poor man to a factory and sell them into slave labour. As the player takes the man towards the factory he is even intelligent enough to realise what is happening and attempt to wriggle free of the players grasp.