Fable III -- Initial Impression.

I have been sitting on Castlevania: Lords of Shadow and Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II came out the same day, but I've decided to go with Fable III as my next game. Fable III was developed by Lionhead Studios and has been published by Microsoft Game Studios. Fable III takes place fifty years after the events of Fable II and has you playing as the offspring of the hero character of Fable II. It's no secret at this point that you're out to become the king and you achieve this roughly halfway through the game. After that the focus shifts to you attempting to keep the promises you made on the road to becoming king. This shift in focus was put in the game presumably to keep things fresh. From what I've played so far the starting half of the game still pretty much comes off just like Fable II albeit with some rather extensive streamlining to the menus and the like. If you want to check the map, equip or compare weapon stats, change outfits, check the quest list or the like, you'll need to go to the sanctuary. Which just happens to be accessed by pressing start, you know, like a menu. The difference being the sanctuary is an actual location, it means you wander around to different rooms to access everything else you would have done in a menu previously. Fable II's menus were a pain in the ass to navigate and scrolling through the hundreds of items you were carrying around took too long. Fable III's sanctuary for the most part makes things much easier to deal with. It's still not the most intuitive menu system but it's definitely an improvement. Fable II seemed like a game that was about to crash. It just felt unstable. Fable III feels even more like it's going to crash at any moment. I've experienced buggy quests and enemy AI that just seems to shut off. Fable II turned out to be one of the best games of its year, largely in part to its wonderful sense of humor. That sense of humor is clearly in place for Fable III. I just hope the engine works well enough for me to see it through...