This is what Fable 3 should have looked like. It has a huge scale like Oblivion with a focused main quest like Fable..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7ON0Yi4yU8
That's the PC version but the Xbox 360 version is said to look very close to this in detail. It's a third party multi-platform title that destroys a first party,massively linear Lionhead game. You can't use the "Fable isn't supposed to be Obliovion!" line when games like Fable 3 are so severly lacking content.What did Lionhead do in those 2 years of development that cause them to come up so massively short of other games in content? You have a small, focused world that should be absolutely overflowing with choices and quests. You can't say it's because they were trying to keep a consistent story because..well, there's nothing consistent about Fable anymore.
I look at all of the content in games like Fallout New Vegas and it's shocking to see just how far ahead they are of Fable.They both had 2 years of development and a previous engine/game to build on.
Lionhead is clearly one of the most inefficient developers in the industry.
I wasn't in the room, but my suspicion is that they first spent a TON of money on the voice cast - Stephen Fry, John Cleese, Ben Kingsley, Simon Pegg, etc., which cut into the development budget.
Then they devoted tens of thousands of developer hours to figuring out how to do weapon morphing (which didn't really work) and getting rid of 2D menus (which I don't think anyone thought was a problem to be solved), then thousands more developer hours working on the touch system - which only kinda worked but at the expense of making interaction less personal and customizable (you meet a soldier and instead of shaking his hand you dance with him.)
In other words they spend all of their time on 'what no one else is doing' and forgot about what everyone else is doing. That's a fine approach, to an extent, but when everyone else is doing it to the point where players expect it (large maps, more sandboxing etc) it's a mistake unless you have something really amazingly awesome going on instead - which they didn't.
From the bugs, glitches, limited play time, rushed story line and all of the new elements which only kinda work it feels like they got overly ambitious and ran out of time and money, then had to package SOMETHING together and get it out the door.
Again though, I wasn't in the room.
p.s. Peter Molyneaux needs a babysitter. Someone needs to follow him with a cattle prod and stop him from saying anything to anyone about Fable IV until it's actually released. Part of the problem with Fable III is that PM has spent the last 18 months telling everyone about all of the awesome new things that would be in Fable III and many of those things weren't in it at all, and some of them were but didn't work the way he said they would.
p.p.s. - I miss Brightwood. That was my home in Fable II and it's where my children would have grown up (not the castle). Having it not in the game at all, for me, makes it feel completely separate and detached from my Fable II character - His children would not have become Logan and the Prince.