Lionhead Studios may have admitted to working on different kinds of unannounced games aside from Fable, but it is still firmly focused on current projects bearing the series’ name. This includes Fable Legends, a four player online cooperative title taking place before the first game which lets players assume the role of Heroes or Villains.
Studio head John Needham spoke to Eurogamer about the online aspects of the game and stated that “the things we can do in the cloud with Fable and the things we can do with matchmaking and different online modes” were inspired by the likes of Journey and Dark Souls.
“I always mention this, but I love Dark Souls, where you’re invading other people’s worlds, and games like Journey, where people are organically coming in and out of your game world. Having that kind of infrastructure behind the Xbox One gives you a lot of flexibility to do highly innovative online. They definitely inspire us, for sure.”
The online focus of Fable Legends ties into Needham’s role for Lionhead, which includes “selling the studio on games as a service and the power of online. That was goal number one, and rallying the studio around, look, we can make a fantastic Fable experience online. This is not an IP that has to be a single-player experience.
“That was the number one message I wanted to deliver to the studio. We made great strides getting to Gamescom, having something playable, having something that was really fun for the studio to play. It’s really sold everyone on the concept.”
Fable Legends is exclusive to the Xbox One and currently has no release date.