With every new Fable game, we’re inundated with lofty promises. Each new announcement is met with some version of the characterization: “Ambitious as hell, potentially unto its own detriment.” The new Fable Legends doesn’t disappoint in that aspect.
I was lucky enough to get a very early look at the game, and it looks — yes, precariously ambitious, but also — pretty freaking awesome.
It’s a massive departure from previous installments, which have only really dabbled in multiplayer. The desire was clearly there, even if the execution wasn’t all it could have been.
With Fable Legends, the creators wanted to place the joy of cooperative multiplayer at the heart of the experience. The optimal set up is this: Five players hooked up via Xbox Live (as of now, it is an Xbox One exclusive), four of whom will join forces as a team of four Heroes. The fifth player — and this is where it gets a little crazy — takes on the role of “The Villain.”
The concept is essentially to make The Villain a sort of Dungeon Master figure in the game. The Villain takes control of enemy forces though an RTS-style top-down map view. Since the visual style is solidly in the Fable world, the Villain’s view almost resembled Lionhead’s old Black and White games.
Besides just being clever about monster placement, The Villain has an arsenal of other skills at her command. These skills are often activated through the summoning of certain special monsters which confer special abilities like Artillery strikes or explosive proximity mine placement. The Villain can place “totems” to confer buffs on all of her minions, which the Heroes can then destroy.
The Villain’s primary goal is to split the Heroes up, because they are strongest when they work together. So he can raise gates and barriers to block their progress (and also impale/damage the Heroes with the gate’s spikey bits if his timing is good). The Heroes can destroy the gates, but its a good way to disrupt the team both in terms of displacement and time wasting.
As for the Heroes themselves, there are a number of hero types, both ranged- and melee-focused classes with classic Tank, DPS, and Support style roles. At present, the team has 6 playable characters, but the long term goal puts the number of options in the 12 – 16 range. Each character has their own skill and stat progression, and access to a number of different skills. When embarking on a mission though, you’re only allowed to bring three of your available skills with you. That way, you have to organize and work with your team mates to develop an optimal cooperative load-out. There is versatility in the characters, but only to a point. A sword-and-board hero will always be a sword-and-boarder, but based on her equipment load out, she can orient more towards offense or defense as needed. The ranged characters play more like a traditional FPS game (technically TPS). There is no automatic health regeneration, so you will likely need a healer for a proper run.
The combat is fast and flashy, with lots of explosions and spells flying every direction, it felt a little chaotic and hard to track, but that’s probably just because we were thrown into a demo with little foreknowledge. Much like Left 4 Dead or Borderlands, when Heroes go down, you can run over and revive them — but it does take a while to do, so you’ll need to be relatively safe to give it a try..
Since there’s no innate health regeneration, it’s important to play the early areas well. Sort of like in Left 4 Dead, the healing is limited, so you need to do well in the first stages or else you’ll be too resource-starved to handle the bigguns at the end.
Besides these mission instances, the creative team is determined to make this a thoroughly Fable experience. Complete with chicken kicking, comical villagers, seducable NPCs, and on and on. The equipment system will be more reminiscent of Fable than Fable 2, that is: You will be able to customize your character’s appearance, but your equipment will also confer stat bonuses, etc.
Each of your heroes will level individually, and you will loot chests for items and such. The Villain also has a level progression system, but instead of looting treasure chests you loot the corpses of your slain victims— er, friends. You loot the corpses of your slain friends.
There will also be an AI system which can take control of any one of these five positions, you can play four player co op and let the AI handle the villainry, or you can play single player and let AI control your three hero comrades.
Despite the dungeon-crawler-y aspect of the missions, the creators insist that you will still enjoy the full narrative joy that you would expect from a Fable title. As for the setting: In the previous Fable games, you were seeing the sort of death of the Hero in the world of Albion. For this title, the creators have gone back to long before the time period of the original Fable, and back to a sort of Golden Age of heroes. So don’t expect the steampunky, gunpowdery style of Fables 2 and 3, but do expect a return to fantastical fairy tale themes..
It looks very promising from a purely gameplay standpoint. The primary weakness of the game that I’ve identified is this: There is no couch-side co-op. So in order to play with your friends you’ll either need to drag your Xbox One and TV over to each other’s houses, or more likely: sit alone in your house and interact via voice chat. This won’t be an issue for a lot of folks, but I see the lack of couch-side as a serious drawback. Besides that, though, I will be eagerly awaiting further news from the folks at Lionhead.