The Journey takes place fifty years after the events of Fable III. Players take on the role of Gabriel, a dweller who is living a happy, but simple life with his tribe in Albion. After a sudden lightning storm, Gabriel is separated from his caravan and forced to find an alternate route to reunite with them. Soon after, our hero is caught up in the attack of an earth-shattering force known as The Corruption. Narrowly escaping the spreading darkness, Gabriel meets the mysterious Theresa. The last of the hero bloodline, she’s tasked with protecting the world from evil that threatens it. Gabriel must help restore her power by taking her to the Tattered Spire. To assist in this quest, spell-casting bracelets are harnessed to protect them from the evils of Albion.

Fable was one of those titles that caught my attention well before its release in some article in a game magazine back when paper gaming magazines were still in abundant supply. How far exactly before the release is uncertain, but I want to say it was well over a year before Fable's launch, possibly even as far back as 2002 or 2003 when it was still called its working title Project Ego. Open world gameplay has practically become the standard in modern game design, but this was not the case in the early 2000s.

And really, Peter Molyneux, for all his broken promises and enormous aspirations, is an innovator. He’s proven his enchantment with taking well-tread ideas and making them into something unexpected. Populous remains one of the most important games of all time, and that couldn’t have happened without some desire to step beyond the established setting. Fable to a lesser extent and certainly with the Milo demo, Peter Molyneux hasn’t made anything flat-out terrible in decades. But his tendency to get excited about his new ideas so much has led to a negative perception of who he is: many in the gaming community consider him a dreamer, not a doer. Quite frankly, I think that’s unfair to say. Some companies are perfectly content with what they’re doing in gaming, but Molyneux has proven time and again that he’s never satisfied with his creations. He’s always reaching further, even if his eagerness to progress has made him despise the past and ignore the present in awkwardly narrow-sighted ways.

Fable eventually was released in 2005 to high anticipation, but the game failed to live up to Molyneux’s sky-high aspirations. The game earned acclaim for its real-time combat and various methods of dispatching foes, but the morality system was much more limited than originally pitched (good and evil were the only really distinctive ways to progress in the game) and a number of features such as the children component were missing. The abilities to impact the story and the world around you were disappointingly limited as well. But despite these problems, Fable was still received with enough praise that it became a full-fledged series, with Fable II dropping in 2008 and Fable III in 2010.

In fact, it’s such a classic that describing such a widely-known story seems irrelevant until you realize that there are prospective gamers who weren’t even out of diapers when the Adventure game Treasure maps was originally released, so here goes: Fable sees you take the role of "The Hero of Oakvale" who begins his quest as an unassuming boy until his village is brought to ruins by invading barbarians. The hero survives and is rescued by an even older hero named Maze. Maze sees great potential in the boy and takes him under his wing at the Heroes’ Guild. The hero grows up here, honing his skills and training for the perils that lie ahead. When he’s finally old enough, he sets off on his quest and can choose to either be the savior of Albion or its reckoner. This is of course the major gimmick of Fable, a game that allows you to choose the path of your character throughout their entire life. It was a concept that was ahead of its time in 2004 and remains interesting even after ten years and countless imitators. Of course, it’s major flaw is still the missed potential that was put in the spotlight thanks to the endless hyperbole from Peter Molynex.

The sense of freedom became apparent in the early stages of the game during the tutorial. There was no fighter, mage or rogue class; the player simply trained in archery, melee combat and spellcraft. How these skills developed was based on what approach was used in battle and doing successful combos with any of them would multiply the gained experience. The experience was divided into the three combat categories along with general experience that could be distributed as desired. Personal experience seemed that mastering consistently high combat multipliers with the bow was tricky, but by halfway through the game the character would easily be a formidable magic using tank. Bandits, balverines and trolls quickly changed from dangerous enemies to cannon fodder.

While Molyneux’s inventive mindset gave rise to the "god game" genre (a genre loved by many a PC gamer), he’s also earned himself a number of negative connotations with how he promotes his games. It’s become a running joke that Molyneux tends to hype up any project he invests in to absurdly high levels, only to have the games miss their mark in one way or another. Fable became one of the most noteworthy examples of this "Molyneux Paradigm." During the game’s development, Fable was regarded by Molyneux and Lionhead as a paramount innovation in role-playing games. Using more open-ended role-playing elements like morality and personal alignments was pitched as this rejuvenation of the role-playing idea, a way to give players more options in creating an avatar and playing to their liking. Molyneux himself even referred to Fable as what would be "the best game ever" during the development.