Reviews// Fable

However, many of these ancillary touches may go unnoticed to those not willing to seek them out. For example, the character's physique adapts according to their diet. If you were to spend a couple of game weeks sitting in a tavern, noshing through a stack of apple pies, you’d eventually stumble out as a flabby knacker. It’s a nice idea, but there’s no real reason to sit in a tavern eating pie in the context of a videogame. After a few minutes of that, normal people will get bored – so despite the theoretically vast variety of outcomes, most characters will follow a comparatively narrow fate.

Similarly, the main quests branch into different directions depending on how you conduct your behaviour. All in all, if all these missions were to be combined, there’d be a considerable amount of gameplay to be had – it just involves replaying the game over and over again, taking a totally different approach each time. But even the most keen Fable players aren’t likely to go through the whole game more than 2 or 3 times, which means that there will almost certainly be aspects of the game that go unseen. Whilst Molyneux’s initial claims to over a hundred hours of gameplay might just hold true if you want to discover every single secret the game has to offer (and you’re quite slow), you’re not likely to extract much more than 20 hours of play from a single run-through.

Another cause of disappointment is the way in which the ageing process works. Although we were promised a game that took the player from childhood to old age, it doesn’t actually follow any consistent measurement (like time, for instance!). The childish years basically form the introduction, and the teenage years are little more than a training level; meaning that you start the game proper as a young adult. You then grow older according to how much magic you use, and how developed your 'will' power is. We found that our twenties disappeared in a flash of +2 lightning, and then we were then in our mid-40s for most of the rest of the game.