Lionhead is dead now, and with them, the hopes of us getting a Fable 4 have been shot to hell, too. Which is a damn shame, really- while Fable 3 and Fable The Journey were terrible, the original two games were great, and more titles along those lines would have greatly fleshed out the appeal of the Xbox One’s exclusive game lineup.
But a Fable 4 was planned once- and in a fascinating and extensive report that Eurogamer have published on troubled and recently shuttered studio Lionhead, it was going to be a bit of a departure from any other game that we had seen in the series yet.
“We wanted to hit the late Victorian proper far out Jules Verne shit,” Lionhead’s John McCormack said, describing the pitch. The game was going to be set in “this kind of weird f**ked up London environment. And that was going to be Fable 4, and it would be darker and grittier,” McCormack said. “And because it was R-rated it would have the prostitutes and the humor. I was like, ‘Man, this is going to be f**king brilliant, and everybody was really into it.”
Ultimately, the pitch was shot down by Microsoft, who instead tasked Lionhead with working on the Windows 10/Xbox One cross platform free to play title, Fable Legends– a game that never made it to completion, and culminated in the closing down of its parent studio.
Microsoft still retains the rights to the Fable IP- but with Lionhead gone, and Microsoft themselves not being the best at IP management, the chances of us seeing a proper new Fable game of the kind that fans would probably want in the future are slim to none.
