“I think it should be so much more sophisticated than ‘Do I want to be a psychotic killer or do I want to be Mother Teresa?’ That’s what most moral choices come down to,” says Molyneux. “I want to know what you’re going to do with power. I think there is an analogy with today’s world, and someone like Obama. He had the coolest presidential campaign ever. Literally, you had the world stopping and cheering when he was elected. And here we are over a year later and it’s now cool in America to bash Obama. A lot of leaders seem to age and whither within a few weeks – personally I’m looking forward to seeing David Cameron age a little bit, but there you go. Part of that experience is in Fable. When you become ruler, promises turn out be a lot more difficult to follow through on – like closing Guantanamo Bay.”

And what would be a Fable III equivalent of Guantanamo Bay? “Throughout the game you see these poor kids working in these factories,” says Josh Atkins, Fable III’s lead game designer. “Along the way you get an ally who says to you: ‘I really want you to make Bowerstone [one of Albion’s main cities] a better place, get the kids out of the factories and workhouses and into schools’. But you come to a point where you have to decide against a counterbalance of limited time and money.”
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