Before E3 officially began, RPGamer's Doug Hill, Alex Wollenschlaeger, and Andrew Duff were fortunate enough to spend some quality time with the top minds at Lionhead Studios, including industry legend Peter Molyneux, to discuss their upcoming mammoth RPG for Xbox, Fable.

Lead Developer Dene Carter was on hand to play through sections of the game for us. The Fable demo begins with the hero approaching an area of the Heroes Guild, where Whisper, a female warrior, is boasting to her fans that she is going to complete her quest while meeting some requirement: either doing it in a limited time or doing it without using some kind of weapon, item, or healing magic. Your hero also has a fan base, which grows or shrinks over time, so the player can boast as well. Along with the two quests to choose from, there are three boasts, which are basically bets you can make with your fans.

The first boast that the hero chose to accept for his mission was that he would not use any healing items while on this particular quest. If successful, the hero would gain ten gold from each of his fans. For the purposes of the demo, the hero had one hundred fans, so he would make one thousand gold. The other two boasts involved beating the quest using only his bare hands, at a price of eight gold per fan, and also beating the quest in under three minutes. The boasts, if failed, will cost you that much gold as well, making the choices that much more risky, yet adding a great element of suspense to taking a mission.

The hero, after taking a mission and all three boasts, ran into his crowd of fans and proceeded to smack one around with his bare fists. The cheers quickly turned to jeers. Molyneux stated that not only would this affect the alignment of the hero with either good or evil, but it would also be a large negative with the crowd. These guys, being your fans, do not like being abused by you. This also demonstrated that combat is not only limited to quests, but can be perpetrated on any character in the game at any time. All characters are accounted for, and characters that you kill will stay gone.