Online co-op focused dungeon crawler?
Gamescom: Fable Legends is Fable, But With Friends
...
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/H6VsmYKDuKg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
...
Screens:
Gamescom: Fable Legends is Fable, But With Friends
And the enemies are controlled by another, fifth player: the villain. From a top-down perspective, the villain controls the heroes' quest, placing enemies, traps, ambushes and more in their path as they play. He's the classic dungeon master.
It's not quite the Fable MMO that's long been rumoured, then, but it's very ambitious. Fable Legends is set 400 years before the other Fable games, at a time when Albion's myths and folklore are still being forged, the point at which legends are reality. Heroes are common: these four on-screen aren't the only ones (and when the game comes out, they won't be the only ones you can play), and they compete and co-operate with each other to step out into the wilds and claim the monster-ridden lands whilst villagers cower away at home. It's not Fable 4, but it's most definitely Fable.
It's not quite the Fable MMO that's long been rumoured, then, but it's very ambitious. Fable Legends is set 400 years before the other Fable games, at a time when Albion's myths and folklore are still being forged, the point at which legends are reality. Heroes are common: these four on-screen aren't the only ones (and when the game comes out, they won't be the only ones you can play), and they compete and co-operate with each other to step out into the wilds and claim the monster-ridden lands whilst villagers cower away at home. It's not Fable 4, but it's most definitely Fable.
Fable Legends is designed around five people playing at once, though should you wish to play alone the AI will take over the roles of your companions and the antagonist. That, though, is not the game that Lionhead has designed. The four heroes I saw all played very differently - Prince Charming was closest to classic Fable gameplay, with the camera hanging back above his shoulders, where the archer was viewed through an over-the-should, third-person-shooter perspective. The warrior woman, meanwhile, was the tank of the party, where the magician Winter is a support class whose freezing spell stops enemies in their tracks for one of the others to shatter. These are classic MMO roles, but the combat is far from the sterile experience that can sometimes define that genre. It looks accessible, fast-paced and very physical. Playing alone, you can switch between these party members at will.
Lionhead's aim with Fable Legends is to create the most beautiful online fantasy out there, and that looks well within the studio's reach with the help of Unreal Engine 4.
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.
<iframe width="640" height="360" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/H6VsmYKDuKg" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
...
Screens:
Comment