Fable III Preview, Video, and Concept Art
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Ships and cannons and troops, metal and rivets and chattering pipework: Fable II was already a game built from details - anyone who ever stopped to watch the hot blast of animation thrown out whenever one of Albion's humble clockwork doors got ready to open will know that - and this tentatively mechanised environment is a proposition that sounds entirely fitting, even if it promises to significantly alter the familiar environments. "There's still a consistency," offers McCormack. "We never want to be photorealistic. The art style is: never put in straight lines, never use a right-angle, always break shades into opposing colours. There's rules within the art that hopefully turn it into a fairytale no matter where we go. I think we solidified the style with Fable II; with Fable III, we've nailed it.
"We've moved it forward. Think of the monsters: industrialisation has pushed the fairytale creatures underground, and to the edges of the forests. You'll go there, and they're still around, but they're not happy about it this time. Albion's still full of mystery and wonder, but it's more aggressive: the ancient creatures don't like to be shoved away."
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To clarify further, if Fable II spent a lot of energy making you feel significant, Fable III aims to show you the challenges that come with power and influence. "We've played off of the end of the last game," says Atkins. "After you've saved the world, how would the world treat you? What would they think about you as a hero? We've always been thinking about morality with this series, but we started thinking about responsibility too. And what that turned into was this idea that, if we want your moral choices to have a much wider impact, what would happen if your Fable II hero had become king or queen? We played around with that and got quite excited. But we really wanted the game to have some kind of journey. Fable is always about the path from anonymity to greatness.
"So maybe you're not the Fable II hero, but maybe you're attached to them. Maybe something happened to your Fable II hero, and you have to right the wrong. Maybe you're their child. That gives us the best of everything: you never play your hero from the last game, but we will be looking at the decisions you made on that adventure, and referencing that - those decisions will carry through."
