Fable Legends - Announced

Albion is back!

Lionhead’s fantasy - overly green - version of the medieval English countryside will be offering another slice of magical action. Dense woodland, dank ruins and meadows will play the set of Fable Legends.

The trailer shown at Gamescom gave us a glimpse into this multiplayer/single player RPG. The differences in the gameplay styles are vast, and oddly numbered, as five players can get involved at the same time. Four heroes – a female warrior, a male knight, an archer and a magician – fill out the cooperative options while the mysterious fifth controls the hoard of enemies being thrown their way (a dungeon master if you will). I should however note now that these four heroes seen in the trailer won’t be the only ones playable in the final game.

Ok, it’s not quite the MMO that’s been rumoured but it’s still very ambitious.

Set 400 years before the other Fable titles, at a time when Albion’s myths and lore are being forged, heroes are common. The clever wit of the franchise is intact and the character designs are just as you would expect. It’s great to see that the good/bad alignment of your character is even greater than ever before.

Playing as the villain allows you to control the quest for the other player: you can decide on enemy spawn points, their attacking nature, when to raise a boss and when to set traps to separate the team of heroes.

Fable Legends is built to be played with five people at once, though you can play alone and let the AI take over. The heroes are set into MMO roles – the Warrior tanking the oppositions attacks, the Magician healing those around them, the Knight covering all bases (but excelling in none) and the Archer taking pot shots from afar. It looks accessible, fast-paced and very physical. Playing alone, you can switch between these party members at will but the real fun will be has with friends.

Naturally this changes a lot of how Fable Legends plays, but it doesn't change the fundamentals of the series: great storytelling, a gorgeous world and quintessential British humour. The last two are in full evidence even at this early stage.

Lionhead are also working on the Unreal 4 engine which should give the final game a smooth glitzy art style. The heroes argue with one another, spout clever one-liners and emotionally interact with the environment around them. I certainly hope you can still call the cocky townsfolk ‘Chickens’.

The idea of having a live dungeon master raises a lot of complex questions. This is much, much more complicated than Fable 3's rather tacked-on co-op mode, and Lionhead is going to have to work hard to build an infrastructure that can support five players like this. Matchmaking, especially, will be crucial, and is a big focus for the studio. Fable Legends makes use of the Xbox One's cloud capabilities, and thus it's not playable offline. It's also quest-based rather than open world: there's a hub city called Brightlodge, where you can occupy yourself with classic Fable busywork like smithing and pie-making and, presumably, trying to seduce random townspeople, and once you've selected a quest from the map (like in the first Fable) you're sent out into the world.

Theoretically the human villain means that no two quests will be the same twice but you are only as good as your last victory. Winning against heroes will allow you to earn point and then spend them to unlock enemy units. Infact, Lionhead have already claimed that the ‘villain’ of the piece can use Smartglass to control the battlefield.

Because Fable Legends isn't an MMO, it's not limited in the same ways as an MMO. Lionhead hasn't had to build an enormous open world that can support hundreds of hours of exploration and play, meaning that Lionhead can lavish the same artistic attention to detail upon each individual environment. It still looks and feels just like Fable should, then, and if Lionhead can pair this hugely adventurous five-player gameplay, with affecting and rousing storytelling and characterisation of Fable games past, Fable Legends could be very special indeed.