Fable Legends Previews and Interview

It’s time to chalk up some more Gamescom-based coverage for Lionhead Studios’ Fable Legends, and this time it comes to us in the form of two separate previews and a brief interview for the Xbox One-exclusive action RPG.

Metro starts us off with the first preview:

The attending developers seem to imply that all of the game’s missions are purposefully short and the demo appears to have only been shortened a little for preview purposes. A bit of background story is included and involves you trying to get to a monument of a moon on a stick, which it’s believed will grant wishes. Or in other words ‘˜walk forwards and fight monsters’.

The monsters in question are curated from a range of Fable’s usual bad guys, with the goblin-like hobbes being particularly prominent. They ambush the group at one point, revealing themselves from a hidden wall space, but we don’t note them doing anything especially clever to warrant the attention of four overpowered heroes.

With Xbox360Achievements following close behind:

Fable Legends is designed to be a ‘play how you want to’ kind of game. If you want to play alone with three AI sidekicks, you can. If you want to play with three other buddies and create a foursome, you can do that too. In fact, you can do any combination, whether it’s two players and two AI, three players and one AI, and so on.

That’s not it though; there’s a twist! Players can also take on the role of the villain, essentially choosing how the combat arenas shape up, deciding on where and how the enemies spawn, where the traps are placed, and so on. Controlled either via a controller or via SmartGlass, players can take on their friend’s 4-strong team, take on a team of AI opponents, or like the Heroes, can take on whatever combination of the two they so wish. We see this in action briefly, as Lionhead switches sides for its demonstration, as the Heroes approach the Moon On A Stick and the villain has placed a huge Ogre in a cave to impede their progress.

And then there’s this brief interview on OXM UK, in which game director David Eckelberry dodges a question about an online connection being a necessity:

“I don’t know the answer to that,” Eckelberry confessed to us in a Gamescom interview, but added: “The fact that we want to do a lot of things, a lot of systems on a servers, characters on a server…If it’s online we can monitor you and make sure you don’t edit your character file, or do something nasty there.

“Because if you’re playing single player, all your accomplishments in the game are going to eventually matter if you’re playing against a villain player, or alongside other heroes,” he went on. “If you’ve somehow cheated your way to victory – so that’s a concern for us.

“If you’re somehow cheating, online is a way for us to track it, because your performance can be measured in the Xbox Live cloud.”

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