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Fable II is an upcoming role playing video game exclusively for the Xbox 360, which is being developed by Lionhead Studios and will be published by Microsoft Game Studios. It is a sequel to Fable and Fable: The Lost Chapters. Announced in 2006, the game has recently been announced for 2008, "maybe when the leaves have a slight brownish tinge - but are still on the trees."The game will take place in Albion, 500 years after Fable's setting, in a colonial era resembling the time of highwaymen or the Enlightenment. Guns are still primitive, and the entire area is broken into 20 large regions and more developed (large castles and cities in the place of towns).Unlike in the original, the player may choose to be either male or female.
Thethird thing the Lionhead boss wassorry for was the current state of theFable 2 code he was about to show us. Clearly, the game's still alittle way from being retail ready, even though the white board in thecorner of the room says there are only seven days left until "contentcomplete". Menu items are missing, shaders and shadows flicker in anun-finished fashion, and our hero's dog is bizarrely glowing pink.
It doesn't matter though. Unlike most other game developers who controland obsess over every morsel of code and gameplay the press see,Molyneux's just desperate to lay his creation in front of us and letits innovations sell themselves.
"I probably shouldn't saythis," he says glancing towards the burly American PR man lurking inthe corner, "but on May 16 we're going to be content complete, whichmeans we're going to have art and assets locked down."
It'sthis kind of disregard for the iron games PR machine that makesMolyneux - and a visit to Lionhead - so very refreshing. They'll takeyou on a full tour of the office, walk you through the developmenthalls of games we'd be shot for uttering the names of, and cheekily letyou take the Fable 2 joypad reigns while marketing men wince in thecorner.
But despite the code being blotched with pink glitchesand bugs, our first glimpse at the Fable 2 world isn't bad at all. Thegame kicks off with a gorgeous FMV sequence, cooked up outside ofLionhead by professional CGI studio Blur.
Needless to say, itlooks terrific; a sparrow flutters through the snowy fields of Albion,majestically soaring towards the epic city of Bowerstone, just as thecamera tosses and turns alongside the animal in a spectacular digitaldisplay. This is on par with the Halo 3 CGI commercial.
Naturally, Molyneux is keen to ethicise how the tiny bird's actions inthis gorgeous sequence snowball the events of the entire game.Specifically, a single bullet-time bird dropping that spirals down tothe ground, plopping on our young hero's head. They've got a lovelysense of humour in Guildford (more on that later).
"The worldin Fable 2 is twenty times larger than the first game's", boastsMolyneux, spiralling the camera down to the now massive Bowerstonemarket. It really is a significant jump between the Xbox original and360 metropolis.
[TABLE][TR][TD][/TD][/TR][/TABLE] We hate to bring it up again,but the first thing that came to mind was GTA III Liberty City versusGTA IV Liberty City - it really is that much of a difference in scopeand scale in Fable 2.
Although the original Fable was, for itstime, a technical juggernaut, it never made us feel like a stuntedmidget in a sprawling medieval universe like we do in the sequel. Fable2 is truly epic (a word we promise not to use again in this preview).
"There's a hell of a lot more sandbox," Peter says of the world."There's also the fact that every single building, even the dungeons,are buyable."
FMV flashiness over, Pete's now in command of afamiliar small child - though better proportioned than we remember -standing in a snowy side street of the cobbled Bowerstone market.
"I like giving the player a feeling of familiarity at the beginning,"notes Peter, introducing our hero's equally pint-sized Sister Rose, whoplays just as big a part in Fable II's story as your sibling did in theoriginal.
It's a beautiful, striking-looking game, but whatfirst catches our eye is how clean everything looks. There's no HUD tospeak of, no health indicators, no item counts, not even a mini-map.
"If we're going to make a game that's really going to be dramatic,making people feel like they're not just looking through a portal atthis world is really important. One of the problems with that is themini-map," says Molyneux.
"We had one of those ghastly,distasteful things in the top corner of the screen, and our levels weregetting so detailed that we realised that our mini-map was gettingbigger. So we said, 'let's just get rid of it'. There are other gamesthat don't do it. So we replaced the mini-map with this little badboy..."
[TABLE][TR][TD][/TD][/TR][/TABLE]Lionhead's solution is a sparkling trail on screen that Peter's callsthe 'breadcrumb trail' - a subtle glittering line on the floor thatguides you straight to your objective destination, easing out the needfor a hulking mini-map.
Basically, the glittering guidelinelaid out for you dynamically adapts to guide you to whatever characteror quest item is relevant at the time. But as Peter shows, you canstill run off the path and explore whenever you want, and the trailwill change on the fly so you don't get lost in Fable 2's giganticworld. "You can also turn it off in the pause menu," he says.
"If you want to follow the story, follow the breadcrumb trail. If youwant to be more of an adventurer, go off path - the trail will updateitself." If you go exploring a lot, says Pete, the trail will look lesssignificant, a less bold.
It's just one of the ways Lionhead isditching clunky user-interfaces and making Fable 2 look a whole lotmore elegant. The bread trail leads our young hero through the snowyBowerstone market - which doesn't look a world apart from a VictorianEastenders - eventually reaching a crowd of shoppers huddled in frontof a market stool.
In a completely in-game sequence, Peterstrolls up to the crowd to see what's going on, and then in a veryAssassin's Creed-esque moment he simply holds down the left trigger towhisk the camera over to points of interest - in this case the salesmanyelling cockney slang over the crowd of shoppers. At any time you cansimply walk away from the action, and carry on exploring.
"We're not forcing you into any cut-scene in the game. There's no such thing as a cut-scene," says Molyneux.
This sort of seamless integration of narrative and gameplay is all overthe place; when dealing with a salesman or quest-giver, the bread trailcreates a circle around the character. Walk inside and you'll initiatethe quest chatter, a dialogue box will pop up to confirm deals, or youcan watch the whole thing in a more traditional, cinematic angle byholding the right trigger.
[TABLE][TR][TD][/TD][/TR][/TABLE]It looks really great, and could take a lot of the pain and work out ofthe RPG questing. The other thing that has more of an effect on thenarrative, notes Molyneux, are character emotions, which are back inthe sequel via a radial menu on the left bumper. To demonstrate, ourboy hero farts on a town guard, who instantly gifts us with +13 hatred.
We've tip-toed around the plot up to this point, but it's fair to say there's a heavy narrative behind what's going on.
"There's hell of a lot more story," notes Peter, interrupting a ratheremotional story sequence on the big HD telly. "In Fable we didn'treally spend enough time on the story," he admits.
We won'truin anything, but the first 45 minutes of Fable 2's opening contains apretty hefty spoiler sequence, which once again sends your herocharacter off on a mission of revenge, sword practice and making surethe dog's been fed properly.
So after fiddling with some menus,we get a bit more into the meat of Fable 2. We're older, packing heat(a big old elephant gun) and standing next to a gigantic lake thatlooks more Oblivion than something we're used to from this series. Ourdog (still glitch-pink) is also enjoying a small trot in the grass.
We were warned at the start of our demo, again in another apology, thatthe frame rate isn't quite right yet. But here, in a bustling gypsycamp in the forest it's already rock-solid - and there's lots going on.
Shop keepers man stools, children run about (some we spottedwere re-enacting the story from the first Fable) and in typical seriesfashion there's a few hussies loitering about, eager to tell us how"'andsome" we are. Yep, this area's a bit more Emmerdale than theBowerstone's straight-out-of-Eastenders townies.
[TABLE][TR][TD][/TD][/TR][/TABLE]Combat, explains Pete, moving on to a nearby cave infested withnasties, comes in three distinct flavours; sword, gun and magic. Aswith the first game, the more you use either type of combat, yourcharacter will change to look, for example, all beefed up with blueveins for a magic user, or gritty and bruised for a swordsman. You'llfind it very difficult to stick with just one though, we're told.
As our hero approaches the cave, with the mutt cowering nervously athis feat, he unsheathes his sword and steps inside. As has been boastedin the past, every move in a battle is handled by just the A button.It's a bit difficult to grasp exactly how well this works from aspectator seat next to Microsoft's most muscle-clad PR, but one thingthat helps explain it are the context-sensitive moves, of which theirseem to be many.
Stepping further into the rocky cavern, thebaddies inevitably turn up; little fat gremlins called 'hobs' who eventhough in concept are the most generic drones ever, carry tons ofcharacter in Fable 2's Monty Python art design.
Molyneux startsbusting out the sword flurries, spin-attacks and all manner of widearea attacks, sending the little fatties flying. It looks liketargeting works in exactly the same way as the first game; with enemieshighlighted in red, leaving timed button presses to run the actualprocess of fighting.
To demonstrate our earlier point oncontext-sensitive moves though, Molyneux takes the fight into a verynarrow corridor, where his sword swipes suddenly become far shorter and'stabby'.
Then he starts springing off the walls to executestab moves and picking up objects to throw. It all looks very advancedfor a system that uses a single button, but hopefully it'll work whenwe come to playing Fable 2 for ourselves.
And, with anotherapology, that's all we're allowed to see today (and expectedly thatstill didn't stop Molyneux attempting to show us more).
[TABLE][TR][TD][/TD][/TR][/TABLE]The impression we got from watching the game in action, and speaking tomembers of the development team in multiple positions, was that, firstand foremost, fans of the first game are going to be very, verypleased.
The core elements that made Fable loved by fans;personality, choice and painless RPG systems, have all receivedsignificant attention - and of course the scope and scale of everythingin the game world has shot up to current-gen proportions.
Buton a secondary level, we couldn't help but notice the consistenthallmarks of a game trying to reach a bigger audience. The minimal HUD,menu-light adventuring, mum-friendly 'breadcrumb trail' and thedrop-in, drop-out co-op all scream "casual gamer" (or about as casualas action RPG players get) and the phrase was definitely on the tonguesof developers during our tour.
Mr. Molyneux fields ourquestion: "RPGs are one of the most complex game types there are. Ithink we should take that challenge of having casual people, who havenever played games before, mixed with core people - why shouldn't wehave a game like this where both those types of people can playtogether?
"I think if you look back at really, reallysuccessful games, a lot of those games are where the core playersreally are satisfied. GTA IV - you know core gamers are satisfied.Other people just love playing around in that world, and I'd love Fableto be one of those games as well."
Whether he gets those extraplayers or not, from a core gamer's perspective Fable 2 looksfantastic, and we don't think Peter will need to be apologising toFable fans come Christmas.
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