Lionhead Studios talks Fable: The Journey – Video Games Update
Ever since its first reveal at the Microsoft’s electronic entertainment expo (E3) press conference in 2011, gamers have been raging over the direction which Lionhead is taking the Xbox exclusive role playing franchise.
The first Fable was developed by Lionhead and released for the original Xbox in 2004 as it quickly became a hit with the fans. It became one of the reasons to own the console. The game was re-released as Fable: The Lost Chapters with an expansion pack included
in 2005 for the PC and the Xbox. The games did very well with the critics and sold well in the market.
An eagerly awaited sequel, Fable 2 came out for the next generation on the Xbox 360 in 2008 but did not live up to the massive hype created by Peter Molyneux, the head of Lionhead Studios at that time. The game got a mixed reaction from the gamers, some
loved it but many were disappointed and felt that Molyneux did not deliver on all the promises.
The series hit rock bottom after the third installment which was released in 2010. The game did not feature any graphical improvements over its predecessor as it ended abruptly. Once again, Fable fans were left hanging by Molyneux who did not deliver on
what he had promised for the game.
Just when fans thought that the series could not get any worse, Microsoft announced at E3 2011 that the next Fable game, titled Fable: The Journey, will be a Kinect only on-rails shooter instead of an open world role playing game (RPG). Core Xbox 360 gamers
are not particularly fond of the full body motion controller because of the inaccurate aiming and the input lag due to USB data transfer bottleneck.
Lionhead had completely alienated the majority of its fan-base as gamers believed that The Journey was just an attempt to make some quick cash while catering to the casual crowd.
After the departure of Molyneux, Garry Carr, the new creative director of Lionhead, said, “We realised [after E3 2011] that people didn’t think that we were building a long-form game. This is the biggest Fable game we’ve ever made by far, you travel around
on horseback most of the time and they go pretty fast. If you’re racing 30 miles through the world, you’ve got to build a lot of world. It’s three-times the size of the last Fable we made and it’s a beautifully rich game.”
It doesn’t change the fact that it’s still an on-rails shooter and not a proper RPG. Hardcore Fable fans will most likely be disappointed and might end up skipping this title hoping that the series returns to its roots for Fable 4.
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