I'm surprised a game with that much developement time is so short.

Guess I'll wait for this one as a greatest hits title.

word...

glad i didn't pre-order

Read all the way through the review and it does look like a very good game. It doesn't even come close to living up to its hype, but neither did Black and White so I'm not shocked. Peter Molyneux has become the master of promising a lot and taking way to long to deliver a lot less.

That bit of negativity aside this looks like a very cool game and it is one I will pick up at some point. Paying $50 for a 15 hour game is just not going to happen though. I'm not the kind of person to just run around and explore looking for some obscure easter egg after beating a game (I'm sure all the easter eggs and secrets will be up on gamefaqs anyway so that probably won't add that much game time) so I'll wait for it to drop in price.

The scars are the thing that was me the most interested though. Just the thought of having some demon looking guy with head to toe scar tissue as my character makes me want to pick this game up. The aspect of being a drunk and having multiple wives looks like fun at first, but the puking and farting will only be fun the first 2 or 150 times I do them.

Guys, it's only 15-20 hours if you "power through." Considering that you'll probably want to play this at least twice (once as Good, once as Evil), that's very acceptable.

10.0 Presentation
A true storybook game, the fresco-painting cut-scenes are a perfect idea and the controls are very intuitive. Albion is a very dense world that has a rich history.

9.0 Graphics
Beautiful environments and great details on your character. The bloom lighting is a nice touch of the fantastic and the magic looks great. Occasional framerate drops and repetitive NPC skins hurt.

9.0 Sound
Beautiful opening score from Danny Elfman and plenty of great voice dialogue. Some of the sounds get repetitive and I wish a few of the creatures sounded a bit more varied.

9.0 Gameplay
It's lost a lot of what would have made it revolutionary, but the combat is good and the game is still a lot of fun. Some of those NPC reactions are priceless. Great humor.

10.0 Lasting Appeal
Sure, the main adventure is short for an RPG, but there's reason enough to play again. Plus, the world is dense with secrets and fun stuff. It's great to just fool around for a while.

9.3 OVERALL:
(out of 10 / not an average)

I don't see the problem. I still can't wait for this

Exactly. With SW:KOTOR I finished the game in about 21 hours, then promptly went back and played the game through again using the "good" path. I have every intention of doing the same with Fable, and I also don't plan on motoring through the game. The developers took all this time to create an incredibly dense world and I want to experience as much of it as I can.

well, for one thing, i don't want to play an evil character. it bores me. i tried being evil in KotOR and i felt really dumb just picking evil answers for the sake of it.

also, i think 15-20 hours is generous... as the teamxbox guy did a whole lot of the stuff (including many subquests, secrets) in 21 hours. he does qualify it, but i expect my time to be closer to his time.

finally, much of the review points out what i think are really superfluous stuff... like 30 tattoos, hairstyles, 100 articles of clothing, etc. "So yes, putting on a dress, getting a Mohawk and a handlebar mustache are the first things to do in Fable, but my favorite alterations are the roughly 30 tattoos you can get inked on your body." to me, that's just silly, but i guess you could spend several hours dressing up your character in a dress.

and then it goes to scars and aging... depending upon how your character is played of course. but again, although the idea of a dynamic character appearance is interesting, it's not a big deal to me. actually, it bothers me that the you age too fast if you use magic. "In fact, magic ages you far too fast. In the span of 20 game days, when using magic heavily, you will easily reach the max age of 65 (at which point you just stop growing older)."

good looking environment... but a small world. "When you couple the repetitiveness with the overall lack of variety in NPC models, and one NPC begins to look and sound like the other. Every bartender in every town is the same damn dude. Lots of the women look the same, almost all of the men. Heck, there are only three different traveling merchant types and you often see three or four "twins" on the road at any one time. That just sucks the vitality a bit from the entire NPC community."

short AND easy... "I hate to say it, but Fable definitely offers greater rewards for evil as opposed to good, though you can certainly beat the game as a good guy (considering that it's quite an easy game to beat)."

i could go on w/ all the problems that are pointed out in the reviews (both at ign and at teamxbox), but i'll stop w/ the conclusions of the reviews.

"Is this the greatest RPG of all time? No. No, it's not even the best RPG on Xbox (KOTOR's engaging story retains that crown)." KotOR got a 9.5 at ign... i find the 9.3 very inflated.

"Fable certainly falls a tad short on many of its original claims promising an epic adventure. When I think of epic, a strong story is first and foremost in my mind. Fable’s core story is very ordinary and even uninteresting and cliché at times," teamxbox. "Even though I truly enjoyed playing through Fable twice, I still can help but feel a little bit let down by the scope. This was an adventure that I didn’t want to end, yet it did far too soon."

so, i guess despite all the stuff i picked out, the reviewers still really loved the game. so, it could really be great! i hope it is. but, i'm certainly going to wait until it gets cheap to find out.

anyone know if there will be downloadable content? more quests? i would think maybe even an add-on.

I'm just not sure there will be enough difference in the game for me to play through twice though. People reacting differently is just not enough. I'm also one that has a hard time going through a game doing evil stuff. I never could do it in KOTOR. I'm evil everyday in real life, I play these games to be a hero. I agree though you could get 50 hours out of it if you tried. I'm an inpatient RPGer though and really need the game to just have a long quest. I don't mind side quests, but I don't do a lot of roving the country side looking for hard to find secrets.

My other minor gripe is there isn't much of a story. That is honestly why I play these RPGs. I'm loving the story in Tales of Symphonia right now. Granted this is a different kind of game and more about just developing your character (like the Sims) than a grand Final Fantasy style quest.

I'll definitely get the game, but I know I'm probably going to be one that gets the 15 hours out of the main story and done. The posibility of extra quests with Xbox Live is good though.

I don't think there's going to be any downloadable content in the furutre, since it's not listed on the website or box cover. Too bad. Still overall it sounds like a fun game. I'm definately getting it (but that's largely because I pre-ordered it eons ago in exchange for four old, crappy PS2 games as part of an EB promotion; otherwise I'm sure I'd be spending the night of 9/14/04 playing Sly Cooper 2).

I'm probably in the minority here, in that I don't mind a shorter, easier RPG, assuming they're fun and well done. I've avoided FFX and FF X-2 because of their length. I just don't have that much free time to invest in games as my wife and daughter like to watch our TV and understandably don't want to spend the evening watching me play a game. For me, a 50-hr game would be nearly impossible to complete, no matter how much I liked it (I found this out tackling Dark Cloud 2 a few years ago).

The game packaging doesn't indicate that Fable is live-enabled, so don't count on extra quests or any other downloadable content.

I don't mind a shorter game because I am so busy I hardly get to play them nowadays. So short is probably better anyway

Well, I'm not regretting pre-ordering this. Looks to be a nice 'RPG-lite' that you can pick up and just dick around with for a while for short periods at a time.

I figure if this is shorter then expected, then by the time I am done with it, GTA San Andreas will be out.

To side with the short RPGs, Panzer Dragoon Saga was only a 15-20 hour game and still one of the greatest RPGs ever. So a game doesn't have to be 50 hours to be good.

Damn, now I want to go and play Panzer Dragoon Saga again.

I can never commit to games over 10 hours anyways. I tend to start a game that only takes a few hours to beat before I grab the RPG's sitting on my shelf. At the pace it takes me to finish most games, four hours is about a weeks worth of play time if I am lucky, and once you factor in that I suck at games we are looking at a couple weeks. I just can't devote that much time to one game anymore, and RPG's tend to not be the type you can just pick up and play randomly.

I'll probably wait for a good deal on this anyways, but the short length for this doesn't bother me.

15-20 hours is fine with me, as long as they are quality hours.

I'll definitely wait for a price drop to pick this up given the length (not one to bother with sidequests and I doubt I'd play it twice as I still haven't played KOTOR the 2nd time through).

I'll wait for a price drop on it. Even if whats on the disk is gold it's far from what we was told we would be getting in the end. I damn sure don't trust the IGN and teamxbox reviews. Yeah Loinhead is going to send them the first review copy's and let them gave it a shit review. Also them two sites been hyping the hell out of the game. I damn sure don't trust the teamxbox review half of their page has been a huge fable picture for like a month now.

I don't know if that was a typo, but it's pretty funny.

I never played KOTOR a second time either, although I wanted to. I eventually sold it. That being said, I just picked it up again in last weeks Best Buy sale for free after the coupon and some RZ certificates