I'm gonna be blunt here: I don't think Fable is particularly good, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. Peter Molyneux has a lot of ideas, as we all know, and that sort of resulted in this development crunch where the dev team scrambled to try and implement all these different ideas and concepts into the original game according to his vision. Naturally, that means that most of the actual meat of the game is spread quite thin and exists, but not much more; the combat devolves into mashing X until they block, in which case you mash B, there's some kind of morality system but I don't think it actually matters until characters begin to take some kind of notice near the end of the game, and you can buy a house and sleep with people I guess but I never really saw any value in that unfortunately.
What Fable is good at doing is becoming this janky sandbox that's a ton of fun to break at every corner. For example, you can buy 154 apples from the first shopkeeper and then sell them back to him to profit because the price of buying/selling all depends on his current inventory (i.e. the shopkeeper has no apples after you buy them all, so they must be worth more selling to him); that's right, you can literally make untold millions just selling apples and meat from the first shopkeeper in the game with a net exchange of zero, and not only destroy the foundation of the entire market system, but also buy the most powerful armor in the game within the first hour. The magic system is also absurdly busted; spamming multihit arrow/sword spells makes your already pretty simple combat skills significantly overpowered, and the Slow Time skill just lets you hack away at enemies to your own leisure while they are forever trapped in the eternal limbo of hitstun. Oh, and there's a cave pretty early on that you can farm to raise your experience multiplier that keeps going up as long as you keep whacking enemies and don't get hit. Fun fact: since the experience multiplier also affects experience potions, you can consume an experience potion as soon as you have a multiplier of 20x and gain like 8000 XP in one go to become even more absurdly stat-buffed in the early game.
What I'm trying to say is, if Peter Molyneux's vision of Fable was to create this open universe where anything is possible, then he actually kind of succeeded, albeit in all the "wrong" ways. The story's inconsequential for the most part and I never really cared about what was going on (nor bothered to read the texts provided to me in the middle of the game that are the only source of lore/continuity actually) and the characters may as well just be generic Morrowind NPCs for all I know. And obviously the game has many issues being a product of its era, amongst other things. But Fable is not devoid of value because it is a ton of fun exploiting this game at every corner to do unintentional and dumb things and fortunately never takes itself too seriously. Maybe it's not a game I would necessarily recommend first or in earnest, but if you're looking for a few hours of sloppy yet enthralling entertainment from busting open the berth of bork 2000s games, then I think you'll find something very special here.
What Fable is good at doing is becoming this janky sandbox that's a ton of fun to break at every corner. For example, you can buy 154 apples from the first shopkeeper and then sell them back to him to profit because the price of buying/selling all depends on his current inventory (i.e. the shopkeeper has no apples after you buy them all, so they must be worth more selling to him); that's right, you can literally make untold millions just selling apples and meat from the first shopkeeper in the game with a net exchange of zero, and not only destroy the foundation of the entire market system, but also buy the most powerful armor in the game within the first hour. The magic system is also absurdly busted; spamming multihit arrow/sword spells makes your already pretty simple combat skills significantly overpowered, and the Slow Time skill just lets you hack away at enemies to your own leisure while they are forever trapped in the eternal limbo of hitstun. Oh, and there's a cave pretty early on that you can farm to raise your experience multiplier that keeps going up as long as you keep whacking enemies and don't get hit. Fun fact: since the experience multiplier also affects experience potions, you can consume an experience potion as soon as you have a multiplier of 20x and gain like 8000 XP in one go to become even more absurdly stat-buffed in the early game.
What I'm trying to say is, if Peter Molyneux's vision of Fable was to create this open universe where anything is possible, then he actually kind of succeeded, albeit in all the "wrong" ways. The story's inconsequential for the most part and I never really cared about what was going on (nor bothered to read the texts provided to me in the middle of the game that are the only source of lore/continuity actually) and the characters may as well just be generic Morrowind NPCs for all I know. And obviously the game has many issues being a product of its era, amongst other things. But Fable is not devoid of value because it is a ton of fun exploiting this game at every corner to do unintentional and dumb things and fortunately never takes itself too seriously. Maybe it's not a game I would necessarily recommend first or in earnest, but if you're looking for a few hours of sloppy yet enthralling entertainment from busting open the berth of bork 2000s games, then I think you'll find something very special here.