Fable is a ground-breaking role-playing adventure game from Peter Molyneux, in which your every action determines your skills, appearance, and reputation.

Create your life story from childhood to death. Grow from an inexperienced adolescent into the most powerful being in the world. Choose the path of righteousness or dedicate your life to evil.

Muscles expand with each feat of strength; force of will increases with each work of wit. Obesity follows gluttony, skin tans with exposure to sunlight and bleaches bone-white by moonlight.

Earn scars in battle and lines of experience with age. Each person you aid, each flower you crush, each creature you slay, will change this world forever.

Fable: Who will you be?

That passage is from Microsoft's press kit. When you read it, it makes you wonder about the validity of the statements made. A lot of games have made grand claims only to end up falling short. Despite Peter Molyneux's credentials as the creator of Black & White and Populous, delays in the game's release date and the lack of a solid playable build left a lot of people skeptical. Most figured that even if it saw the light of day it would be another case of developers putting so much emphasis on all the things you can do in a game that they forgot to build a game around those things that is actually fun to play. At best, most people figured we'd see a game like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind where you had all the open-ended gameplay and flexibility in the world, but the combat system fell far short of the rest of the game. At worst, we'd have developers who tried to do too much and caused the game to collapse within itself. Just another dream that wouldn't see the light of day.

Fable showed up at E3, however, and it was the belle of the ball. Is it really as open and broad as they say? Yes. Does it manage that at the expense of everything else, particularily gameplay? Not that we could tell.

In Fable, you're in complete control. Everything that you do has consequences, and they follow you throughout the game. Kill a villager, and guards in that town will always pursue you and other villagers will always be afraid of you - unless you pay for your crime in cash. The same goes for other crimes, like pickpocketing or stealing from someone. These actions will also affect what kind of person you become, either good or evil, and your appearance will change with it, from a shiny attractive, princely character with butterflies and a halo circling his head to a demonic looking fellow, complete with red eyes, horns, and encircling flies.

Your appearance, right down to the clothes you wear, will also affect how people interact with you in the game. A good person in fine armor will inspire respect and wide renown, while an evil person in a dress will inspire fear or laughter. The amount of different clothing available is already staggering, and yes, there are dresses. If that's not enough customization for you, you can also buy a tattoo at a local shop or get your character into a lot of melee battles, which will leave him scarred.

Speaking of battles, the combat system is coming along nicely. What we've seen so far is some standard hack-and- slash melee combat, ranged combat, and of course, magic. The combat is very well balanced, with ranged weapons like the bow useless in close combat. Since the yew has to be pulled back to do any real damage, trying to use it while in close won't do much except get you killed. You're also able to zoom in to a first-person view with the bow, allowing you to hit enemies with decapitating arrow shots from some distance away.

The kind of combat you engage in also affects the rest of the game. As I mentioned, melee fighting gets you scarred, but it also builds muscles, while stealth play builds accuracy and reflexes. Magicians will start to see their fingertips crackle with magic. Even the way you heal yourself will change your appearance. Using potions and the like won't do much to you, but if you use too many pies and that sort of thing to regain health, you'll notice your character becoming fatter and slower, which may or may not kill your chances of finding a wife, which is just one more thing you can do in the living world of Fable.

And alive it is. Your character isn't just going to run into the same people who say the same things every time. Everything you've done up to each point in the game will change how you're interacted with. Your reputation can earn you not only respect, but also followers, allies, and enemies. All of the prestige in the world isn't going to win you a woman's heart, though, so you'd better invest in a ring and a home. For all you Morrowind fans who, like me, spent an insane amount of time decorating your house and doing odd things like spelling your name in front of your home in candles, Fable is going to own your life. You can buy houses all over the world and decorate them however you like - like a scarred, tattooed Martha Stewart.

With an expected release of September 2004, Xbox owners will have something to keep them busy right up until Halo 2 comes out. And if Lionhead and Big Blue Box can keep Fable living up to it's potential, it might keep you occupied well past the release of Xbox's second big game - if it doesn't become Xbox's second big game.

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· · · Derek Durham