Oh, Molyneux.

Back in June after E3, Peter Molyneux started hearing that everyone was referring to his upcoming game, Fable:  The Journey, as an "On-Rails Shooter", which was clearly not his intent.  Clearly.  He just decided to disable navigation before the demo was shown, because it 'wasn't quite ready yet' and clearly no repercussions could have come from this at all.  So he had a little sit-down with a bunch of journalists to make clear, in no uncertain terms that his game was not on rails, acknowledging that it was obvious people would think it was, given what they saw.  But it's not.  Remember this.

Now, today, he's given us another little tidbit of information namely that Fable:  The Journey will not feature Guns, nor Swordplay, two staples of the Fable franchise (well, guns starting at Fable 3, I imagine) because swordplay on Kinect looks silly because Kinect offers no Feedback.  While true, this sounds like every shade of cop-out.  "We could have done melee weapons, but the one thing I hate about melee weapons, and guns as well, is that the human brain is encoded to expect recoil from those things.", Molyneux says, and then goes on to say, "The thing about magic is there's nothing encoded in your mind about how it should feel.". 

...

That just sounds silly, man.

Again, this is true; we don't have any sort of preconceived notion on what shooting a fireball from your hand feels like.  But this is mostly because it's an impossible task.  And I don't know about you, but I would expect feedback and/or recoil from launching a fireball from the palm of my hand!  So there.  I've ripped his entire stance asunder, and that's that.

For what it's worth, after seeing the screenshots of the game, I can actually see it not being -entirely- on-rails.  But....the new possibility doesn't look much more fun.  Rather than a guided experience, I would assume one controls the reigns of the (seemingly ever-present) horse companion to navigate tracks, not unlike another horseback game recently shown off.  Which...looks just lovely doesn't it?