Fable is back!

 Marked me down as 'mixed'

I doubt there was a single soul alive who doubted that the Fable game, teased a few years past, was going to make it to this year's E3. Microsoft spoke often about their thoughts on the game, it was highlighted as a key exclusive they want to leverage in the future; and Xbox aren't Ubisoft so the game actually had a chance of being shown! (Yes, I'm naively still waiting to see any proof that Beyond Good and Evil 2 is still being worked on.) As such I'd say it's a little redundant to come out and give the world another 'proof of life' trailer like the original announcement, especially when people are desperate to see what this new Fable hopes to bring to the fold to revigorate the franchise and maybe, finally, live up to the hype for one in the franchises troubled life.

We must all remember hearing the promises of what Fable would be everytime a new entry came out. Watching a tree grow out of an acorn, building meaningful relationships, choices and consequence shaping the land around us- Fable 2 is probably the only game that didn't disappoint and that was only through merit of the game director holding off from promising anything outlandish in the first place. Honestly I'm not even sure why this was the franchise that Xbox chose to revive except perhaps out of guilt for the way that they ended up killing off Lionhead Studios. People seem addicted to the hype of what Fable could be purely within the mind of it's unhinged creator Peter Molyneux, who last I checked was slumming it up in a pathetic crypto-game landgrab scam. (So if you're wondering that is how far this 'visionary' has since fallen off the wagon.) But you know: perhaps that's the reason why a new Fable was such an exciting prospect for people. A fresh start, free from Peter, to bring all the elements of Fable that did work out to the forefront! The irreverent British humour, the colourful fantasy landscapes pulled right out of a storybook, the vast amount of interactability with the inhabitants of Albion- there's an undeniable heart to this franchise that simply yearns to be nourished!

That first trailer reintroduced the storybook fantasy world with a touch of the irreverence, what with how that fairy got swallowed by the frog, this second one doubled down on the humour and tripled up the Britishness. Not least of all because we got Richard Ayoade, of all people, to be the face of the trailer! I have to admit I never quite expected one of our dead-pan kings to come to the world of video games, and I'm even more shocked to see a Richard Ayoade boss fight play out before my eyes but I'll admit, the absurdity factor of it all did give me a bit of a chuckle to see. Seeing a comedy icon depicted as a 'Jack and the Beanstalk' style giant farmer attempting to squash the protagonist as she dives and weaves around his kitchen pots and pans does seem very Fable to me, whilst upping the ante that crucial piece more than the original did. I'd call it a successful showing for proving what I can only assume the team wanted to prove- that they all know the assignment.

Of course there were other bare basics of the game hinted at throughout the trailer. Fighting bandits in the dark of the woods is a no-brainer, that's a staple of every high fantasy game afterall. (It's a wonder why bandits even exist anymore in Albion, everytime a Hero comes along their entire kind gets genocided!) However we did also get a nudge and a wink about more series specific interactions such as socialating at the pub, drinking and celebrating about the village populace, and of course the most important aspect of any Fable game- kicking chickens into the middle-distance. No demonstration of the ability to grab someone's face and stick it in your arse whilst you blast them with a fart, but honestly if that doesn't survive around to this new face of the franchise I won't be upset in the slightest.

Folk for the most part have been lukewarm on what they've seen due to the fact that they were promised by Xbox that we'd be getting an absolute minimum on the CGI gameplay front for this presentation. Perhaps that reaction can be something Playground games can pat themselves on the back for, however, because the fidelity of the trailer appears so high that a lot of people genuinely haven't realised that the footage is pretty much all rendered in engine using a Series X. I mean the trailer literally starts with that disclaimer but I think the logic centres in our head just tune that out once we see the actual movement in front of us and just assume no video game would really look like that. Fable's engine looks how I wish Avowed gameplay's looked. The lighting has that photorealism angle with the level of quality only a Forza studio could reliably produce, if the actual game can match that level of visual fidelity we might have an actual looker of a Fable game for the first time since... 2, probably.

But there's still that inherent disconnect. We already knew that Fable was coming, what we wanted to see some unfiltered gameplay so we can envision what the game will be like to get our hands on. Especially considering the fact that from what we've heard there's not going to much more coverage regarding any 2024 releasing games until the year is out; which means we're not going to see Fable for the rest of the year and can't possibly come around to learning what the game will be like from the odd interview tidbit here and there. And that's a decent matter to bring up, Fable has worn different masks across it's history and I, for one, would love to see how this new face turns up. Visuals are only the thin membrane layer, afterall, I need to know if this game has that special sauce to keep me, someone older than a child, invested.

What worries me most about Fable, however, is the unshakeable feeling that it is a franchise from another era of RPG game design. When Fable was still popular, that fluffy period of role playing game where glittering trails leading you towards your every objective was perfectly acceptable, minigames were appreciated, min-maxing was hardy ever a consideration. Right now we have RPGs split into minute genres- CRPGs for the min maxers, action RPGs for the explorers, JRPGs for the grinders-where does Fable fit into those demographic? On one hand I really respect Fable returning to bring Role Playing back to the underserved kid-friendly everyman audience, and on the other I can imagine an audience who grew up with the franchise being upset if it doesn't fit with their aged and evolved world views. I'm disquiet about it's chances. 

But not in the terms of raw quality. Playground Games have always known what they were doing with the Forza games and had their hand in establishing that brand as the premier racing franchise of our age, if they could bring even a fraction of what they learned during all of that to Fable then we might be in for a very unique style of RPG we've not quite seen before. One critique, however. Did we really have to just call it 'Fable'? Really? After Mortal Kombat 1, Modern Warfare 2 all of these soft reboots after soft reboots- would it kill us to come up with a new name? But hey, maybe the intention is to make that one game so good that no one even thinks about the games from the past, and therefore the inherently connected disappointment that is Molyneux. God how I'd love it if the franchise were to outgrow it's infantile father.