Fable Legends Interview

The folks over at Edge Online have wrangled up an interview with Lionhead Studios CEO John Needham about the forthcoming Fable Legends and how it will stay true to the Fable franchise while also expanding it in other directions. A handful of paragraphs to follow:

(The trick with Legends, and the question we’re constantly asking, is: ‘˜Is it Fable?’ Even with the connected aspects,) he tells us. (That’s why Fable Anniversary’s launch in February was perfect, because it grounds us we want to make sure we’re maintaining what makes Fable great. Now we’re looking at all these great online features we’re building into Legends. We’re bringing both of them together, taking what’s great about Anniversary and [Fable] II and III and bolting on features that make it a great connected experience.)

Like so many other contemporary developers, Needham cites games like Dark Souls and Journey as inspiration for Fable Legends’ connected aspects, games in which (people are flowing in and out of your world organically very natural online modes,) he tells us.

Legends is step change for Lionhead in scope as well as approach. It’s a longterm project so large that it has made further spin-offs like Fable: The Journey redundant, says Needham. (We can do other styles of Fable games, and keep them within Fable Legends. My plan is that Legends is essentially a platform for almost everything Fable going forward. It’s a long-range plan, of five to ten years, where we’re going to build and keep building onto Fable Legends. That’s the nature of games as a service you keep adding systems and features and content.

(There are lots of examples in the MMOG world of keeping players engaged for that length of time, with new content constantly flowing into the game, and bolting on new [modes] into your game to keep it fresh. It all comes down to listening to your community, building content into the game that they want, and then iterating upon that.)