Good and evil is barely the start of it, frankly. Fable is one of those rare, fascinating game series upon which nobody can really seem to agree about anything for very long. It's a shallow RPG, or maybe it's a canny and satirical examination of RPGs in general. It's hilarious - oh, the burping! Or maybe it's just juvenile. Let's face it: Fable's easy to the point of being obsequious, isn't it? Or maybe it's choosing to measure itself in ways that go beyond mere difficulty? It's no surprise, then, that with all this discussion churning around it, the world of Albion is so often defined by a mechanic that it doesn't even contain.
Work is underway on a brand new, big-budget Fable game, Eurogamer can reveal.
Hello! Hopefully everyone's had a chance to read Wes' spectacular feature on the life and death of Lionhead by now, but if 20,000 words isn't enough to satisfy your curiosity, I had a chat with Wes to discuss how the piece came together. Oh, and we recorded it! That's lucky!
In October 2008, Microsoft released Lionhead's Fable 2 to critical and commercial acclaim. At a launch party an emotional Peter Molyneux held aloft glowing reviews and praised the exhausted team of developers who had spent the previous four years pouring everything they had into the game. Fable 2 would go on to win a BAFTA and become the best-selling role-playing game for the Xbox 360. Lionhead was on top of the world.
Fable developer Lionhead closes its doors for the last time today.
If you ever had doubts as to whether Fable Legends was a worthy extension of Lionhead's much-loved RPG series, consider this: in the final, never fully released game, there were at least 10 different ways to fart. There's Sterling, the self-obsessed hero who lets rip into his hand then relishes the ensuing aroma; Flair the acrobat who stands on her hands, parts her legs then politely parps; Inga, the armour-clad bruiser who winds up her arms before unleashing a burst from her bowels. Finally step forth Shroud, the assassin who makes sure he's not being watched before letting out a silent, deadly gust. We truly were robbed of something special.
Fable Legends, Lionhead's free-to-play multiplayer-based spin on its fantasy world that sadly never saw release, has come to its end with the closed beta winding down for good.
The best games create stories as well as telling them, and when you ask people about a Lionhead game there's usually a good one. A friend told me how, when playing Black & White, he'd found his inscrutable cow-god familiar taking a dump in the village's food supply. He went to punish it, mis-clicked, and instead petted the beast. From then on the cow went out of its way to poo on food, and no amount of beatings would dissuade it. My friend persevered with his save for days before, finally, admitting defeat and starting over - left only with the memory of handing out monotonous beatings to a bewildered, unhappy, constantly-befouled creature.
UPDATE: Fable Legends ends at 3pm on Wednesday, 13th April 2016, Lionhead has said.
Some fantastic games came out in 2015. Unfortunately, quite a few (hopefully) fantastic games didn't come out in 2015. With the likes of The Legend of Zelda Wii U, Tom Clancy's the Division and Uncharted 4 all pushed back into 2016, I decided to take a look at some of the upcoming games we really ought to own by now.
Fable Legends developer Lionhead Studios has finally given an update on its MIA free-to-play title, which was previously slated for launch before Christmas.
The Xbox One and Windows 10 game will now launch in open beta at some point during spring 2016.
Earlier this year, Microsoft promoted the title as part of its Greatest Games Line-up campaign, alongside Forza 6, Halo 5, Gears of War: Ultimate Edition and Rise of the Tomb Raider.
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Gamescom is a beautiful, hot, noisy mess of a show and an utter delight to visit. Sadly, not everyone can go - and this year, that includes me. But thankfully, we packed Chris Bratt off to tour the show with a camera in hand to capture just what attending the world's biggest gaming show is like.
Last night, Microsoft announced it was expanding its ID@Xbox self-publishing program to Windows 10, where numerous games will feature either cross-buy or cross-play capabilities with Xbox One.
Microsoft's PC and Xbox One multiplayer-focused, four-versus-one cross-platform role-playing game Fable Legends is free-to-play.
Microsoft's upcoming Windows 10 will let you stream Xbox One games to PC and tablets, the company has announced.
Fable developer Lionhead is pushing its little-known incubation team, which experiments with new game ideas, into the public eye. And as part of that push it has revealed a cancelled game called InkQuest.
The Microsoft-owned Guildford company works mainly on Fable games, but Lionhead Incubation has for about a year now dabbled in new projects.
"Game developers love to create," the developer said in a statement published on the Lionhead website.
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Fable Legends developer Lionhead has charged a small team with coming up with the studio's next big new intellectual property.
Saving the world is easy. Conquering it, however, is hard. The former I've done in thousands of games, but the latter? That's the tricky part. At least that's how it is in Fable Legends, Lionhead's asymmetrical third-person brawler/RTS hybrid that cleverly mixes team-based co-op with tactical top-down defence.
Fable Legends will be launching its beta this autumn, developer Lionhead announced during Microsoft's E3 press conference today.
The series spin-off pits four players cooperatively against one villain, who's tasked with spawning monsters for the heroes to fight in real-time. The heroes will play from a third-person behind-the-shoulder perspective, while the villain overlooks things from above.
It appears that the four heroes are class-based and specialise in Will, Skill and Strength. In other words, one focuses on magic, another ranged combat, and another melee brawling. Perhaps the other is a jack-of-all-trades?
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Lionhead Studios is working on a non-Fable game, it has confirmed to Eurogamer.
It's a grey January morning and the rain batters the windows of the taxi taking me from Guildford train station to Surrey Research Park. Typical English weather, then, as I head to the home of a developer which has been making typically English video games for a decade.
Fable Anniversary has been delayed to February 2014, developer Lionhead Studios has announced.
Lionhead's recently-announced multiplayer adventure Fable Legends for Xbox One is the only game in the series currently in-development, the developer has said.
(Well, that and the upcoming Fable 1 remake Anniversary.)
Microsoft neglected to provide a release date for Fable Legends, but Lionhead expects a beta test to be ready next year.
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