Fable: The Journey Message Board

Fable: The Journey is Lionhead making the most of what it's got to work with, which in this case is the limited and unreliable range of inputs provided by Kinect. When it works, The Journey is a breezy little confection, a simple, directed romp through the fantasy lands of Albion that's shot through with Fable's special brand of charm and a healthy dose of honest-to-goodness drama. When it doesn't work, it's not much better than Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor. Good thing it works a bit more often than not.

The challenge of mushing Fable's traditionally free-wheeling role-playing style into a form suitable for Kinect's limited capabilities must have been a daunting one, and Lionhead met that challenge by...having your character walk forward automatically while you use both hands to fling magic at whatever hobbes, balverines, and hollow men come your way. Yes, contrary to what you may have heard, the game proceeds entirely on rails, but even if The Journey's action levels amount to little more than shooting galleries, there's still a bit of depth to the mixing and matching of magic within them. On your left hand, you've got a Force push of sorts that lets you stun enemies and then fling them around; on your right, you get a basic magical bolt spell that can later be morphed into an area-of-effect fireball and a powerful magic shard that can be split into multiple projectiles. You can also counter almost all enemy attacks with a quick left fist across your chest, and later levels get intense enough that you'll have to use all of these abilities pretty quickly in concert to make it through without taking too much damage.

The game does a decent job of mixing up the types of enemies it throws at you from one sequence to the next, so it's relatively rewarding to change up your spell usage, and incorporate the occasional explosive barrel or throw object, to take out foes. Plenty of later enemies also come with specific requirements, such as making you use your push spell to jerk a shield out of their hands before you can damage them. The game rewards you for dispatching enemies with style, like popping them up into the air then taking them out, or flinging them off of cliffs or into lava. So while the combat is pretty by-the-numbers and doesn't demand a lot of finesse (as long as it actually works--more on that later), you can at least get creative in the ways you deal with enemies, and you'll earn more experience points by playing with a little flair. There's a simple upgrade path that doesn't dramatically change the game, but at least lets you increase the usefulness of individual spells, make your horse stronger, or give yourself extra health.

The Journey is longer than its dozen or so self-contained action levels, though. In between those on-foot sequences--which have you exploring ancient temples, infiltrating a hobbe camp, defending a homestead from a balverine attack, and routing a stinger infestation from a deserted township, among other things--you'll view Albion from the seat of your horse-drawn cart, where you can whip your trusty mare Seren into a gallop, and take the reins to steer back and forth around obstacles and pick up some experience orbs scattered around the road. I can't say these benign travel sequences are wildly exhilarating, aside from the occasional running fight with mounted hobbes or chase sequence involving some hideous monstrosity (which are only mildly exhilarating). But they do provide a good chance for some exposition between your hero Gabriel, a rotating cast of incidental characters, and Fable's omnipresent wizened old seer Theresa about the ancient evil du jour that's threatening the land. And believe it or not, spending so much time watching the countryside roll by over my horse's hindquarters actually did go some length toward creating the illusion of a single long journey through a big, contiguous land. Know that this is a one-way trip, though, with no real meaningful choice about where you go. The path branches here and there for a couple of minutes, but that only changes the occasional sight you may see along the side of the road. Most of this journey is already written in stone. It's worth noting that Lionhead moved to the latest iteration of Unreal Engine 3 for The Journey, and as a result, what Albion there is to see here has never looked nearly this good before.

Your travels are punctuated by the occasional break to make camp, which is where the spirit of Peter Molyneux truly lives in this game. That's where you lay your magic-gauntlet-covered hands on your horse's wounds to heal them, brush her dirt off, feed her an apple, and generally take a breather. These activities don't even constitute basic minigames--they're just simple gestures--but they contribute enough to your upgrades that it's worth doing them every time they come up. More to the point, these are the sort of quiet Molyneux moments that are supposed to engender an emotional connection between you and your animal, and...they aren't completely unsuccessful at doing that. Maybe I'm a big softy, but I actually felt responsible for not messing it up every time I had to grasp an arrow embedded in my horse's rear end and very gingerly remove it without hurting her. The first time you pull too hard and she recoils in pain, you might just feel like a real jerk about it.

Then again, the only thing you can feel when the game messes it up for you is rage. The Journey is a simple and inoffensive game right up till the minute the poor reliability of Kinect suddenly makes you feel like you can't play it at all. There were several instances in combat where all of my spells were flying off in seemingly random directions and the game constantly refused to acknowledge my blocking gesture, causing me to die over and over on what should have been an extremely simple encounter, and that made me want to turn the game off and throw it out the window (as you should do with any game that refuses your best efforts to play it). For what it's worth, I never had any real trouble guiding my horse in the traveling bits, which isn't very responsive but at least worked like it should. The quality of the combat gameplay seemed overly sensitive to the lighting conditions in my living room, though, which I experimented with extensively. Once you at least get Kinect reading you consistently, there's an in-game calibration scheme that seemed to make the aiming more reliable, but an onscreen reticle indicating where your shots are actually going to land probably would have fixed all of this in the first place.

I bet hobbes make horrible house guests.

In light of the occasional technical problems, The Journey gets by largely on its charm, which is in abundance. There's mirth and melancholy in equal measure over the course of the storyline, which isn't especially original but is rendered effectively nonetheless. As cheeky and lighthearted as Fable is (and this installment is no exception), it says something about the game's talent for melodrama that you end up genuinely feeling sorry for certain characters on several occasions when bad things happen to them, and the game culminates in a moment that will likely be among the most poignant seen in a game this year. The whole thing is just so gosh darn British, too, which I imagine is less of a selling point if you are British. That pervasive sprinkling of refined, humorous nonsense makes The Journey feel a little more like one worth taking, even when some of its nuts and bolts are less appealing.

Lionhead designer Ted Timmons says he learned a lesson after showing off Fable: The Journey to the public for the first time at E3 2011. "It's fine to be on rails," he says a year later, at the tail end of E3 2012. The spin-off was famously labeled as "on rails" by the public thanks to an early demo, and Timmons told Joystiq that while the team was surprised at the response, they eventually got a different message out of the whole thing: "We shouldn't be distracted by the whole 'on rails' issue," he says now. "We just want to make an awesome Kinect game."

The Journey's awesomeness is yet to be determined, but it is certainly a Kinect game. The E3 2012 demo featured about ten minutes of two different levels in the game. You use Microsoft's all-seeing camera to snap and steer a horse's reins, throw a magical spear and open a locked door with magic spells.

But while it all works (once you're shown how to do it - the tutorial is still a work in progress), the real question here is whether this journey is one worth taking.

In an unexpected yet perhaps not altogether surprising piece of news this morning, we have learned that famed designer and notorious over-promiser Peter Molyneux will be leaving Lionhead Studios, and by proxy, Microsoft, following the completion of the studio's upcoming Kinect title, Fable: The Journey.

The news comes in a statement picked up by Kotaku, in which Molyneux expressed his deep admiration for the team while citing a desire to move on to newer pastures as the reason behind the departure.

"It is with mixed emotions that I made the decision to leave Microsoft and Lionhead Studios, the company that I co-founded in 1997, at the conclusion of development of Fable: The Journey," he said. "I remain extremely passionate and proud of the people, products and experiences that we created, from Black & White to Fable to our pioneering work with Milo and Kate for the Kinect platform. However, I felt the time was right to pursue a new independent venture. I'd like to thank the team at Lionhead, as well as our partners at Microsoft Studios for their support, dedication and incredible work over the years."

Molyneux's history with Lionhead dates all the way back to its formation in 1997, when he helped co-found the studio following his years at Bullfrog Productions. There, he helped more or less invent the "god game" genre in Populous. His tenure at Lionhead has been marked with numerous critical and financial successes, including the aforementioned Fable franchise, as well as PC-centric titles like Black & White and The Movies.

For all his successes, many were perhaps unfortunately overshadowed by Molyneux's own reputation as something of a sideshow carnival barker, a man perhaps better at conveying a fantastical idea and selling people on it than actually making good on said idea in the end. On more than a few occasions, Molyneux promised gamers the stars with his new projects, and then proceeded to deliver them interesting video games, instead.

As the years have gone by, Molyneux and Lionhead's games have often been spoken of better in retrospect than at the time of their release. Still, Molyneux has persisted in his habit of speaking perhaps above the resources at his disposal, especially when it came to Microsoft's Kinect. His famous "Milo" demo never quite formed into that Milo and Kate game that seems all but canceled at this point, and Fable: The Journey's development cycle has had its share of bumps along the way, including the much-mocked "It's not on rails!" goof from last year's E3.

And yet, despite that perhaps deserved reputation, there's no denying that Molyneux is one of the industry's most creative and forward-thinking minds. It's difficult to imagine a game industry without Molyneux--and thankfully, we won't have to. Molyneux's new independent venture is a small start-up company he's titled 22 Cans. What is 22 Cans? We don't know yet, but it does appear that it will be rooted in gaming. Hopefully the venture is something that will well suit Molyneux's ambitious mind--or, at the very least, help rein it in a bit.