You had one job: Don't remove features. Visionary motormouth Peter Molyneux is one who divides people like a hype-knife through gaming butter, but for many even after the original Fable didn't live up to some of its lofty claims, part two came in and was one of the best RPGs of the generation. Surely it's just a case of part three wrapping it all up nicely, right? Wrong, Fable 3 was an absolute mess in everything from core features being removed to a story that didn't just go off the rails, it practically buried itself at the bottom of the cliff in pointless last-minute gameplay mechanics. In Fable 2 we were given a dog companion; something that Molyneux made a huge deal of as you never controlled him directly, instead he reacted to your actions and would get stuck into combat, becoming an obedient best friend or a hound from Hell depending on what you did. In Fable 3 none of this mattered, as where before you and your pooch were tied together in a compelling narrative with the world reacting around you, Fable 3's "Now you're the king!" intro left us with nowhere to go. That was just one aspect of where things felt a little off, as in addition we had a cack-handed map system that saw you trying to relate strange minimalist dioramas of towns to their real life counterparts, whilst also literally walking around in a room that represented what was previously a very accessible inventory menu. It was a case of forced iteration on the part of Molyneux and his team at Lionhead, and in trying to fix things that weren't broken in the first place, we got a overproduced mess that appealed to nobody.
