When a game designer goes so far as to issue an apology for the shortcomings of his game, you can't help but admire his candor in an awkward situation. Not many have taken the kind of responsibility Peter Molyneux did when he made his apology on the official Lionhead message boards for Fable. But at the same time, you're left with the reality that the game has failed to meet expectations, and that's exactly what happened with Fable.

Your character in Fable was supposed to age subtly over time throughout the course of the game. Instead, he abruptly jumps out of adolescence and into adulthood within the first couple hours of the game. There was supposed to be a huge world with no fixed paths in the game, yet it plays out over a series of rather small areas instead of one large cohesive world. Your character was supposed to face complex moral decisions in the framework of the game, and your decisions were supposed to contribute to your appearance. This actually is implemented in the game to a degree, but your decisions are mostly obvious and binary. And another role-playing game, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, ended up beating Fable to market with this feature. Villagers were supposed to independently respond to your exploits and laud your heroics. Instead, you must laud yourself in the game, actively showing off trophies to gain stature.

In short, we were promised "the greatest role-playing game of all time" with Fable, and what was delivered instead was a good action adventure game with some role-playing elements. On its own merits, Fable was certainly a great game, but the greatest RPG of all time? Not exactly. That the final product still seems imaginative and innovative speaks volumes about just how ambitious it was. But in the end, many of the game's interesting features are shallow enough to make you feel as though Fable is a lot like the world's biggest puddle--a mile wide, but an inch deep.