Perfect Stu
01-23-2003, 03:08 PM
Fable, a word meaning a story relating to legendary persons and exploit. A word which can be applied to the content of Big Blue Box's forthcoming Xbox epic, and, may well end up referring to the staff of the Lionhead satellite studio.
Indeed, having spent a full day in the company of joint MDs Dene and Simon Carter and the rest of the team, its impossible not to be deeply impressed by their vaulting ambition and epic scope. For Fable (formerly known as Project Ego) is no ordinary game. Part RPG, part fantasy adventure, part arcade-action, part life-story, Fable is a conscious effort to redefine a genre and set a new benchmark for the way adventure games can be.
Ordinarily, such high-flown concepts would remain unfulfilled, and it pains us to recall how many great ideas have ultimately offered nothing but disappointment, disillusionment and broken dreams.
So what makes Fable different? Why should we buy into the fantastical vision of the Carter brothers, who dare to tread where so very many have stumbled and faltered? History offers several useful pointers, with both brothers and other staff members being ersthwhile employees of Bullfrog, the developer headed by Peter Molyneux, which has pawned some of the most adventurous and successful titles ever.
Ah yes, Mr. Molyneux. Fable's existence is, in no small part, tanks to Molyneux, who aided the Carters in setting up Big Blue Box, making them a satellite studio of his own Lionhead. And in terms of development, he ha has been heavily involved in advising, suggesting and simply casting a fresh pair of eyes over the progress of Fable.
The original concept for Fable was conceived many years ago: "When I was 12 and Dene was something like 17," Simon tells us. Over the years, the myriad disparate parts have slowly come together, forming a coherent whole, and with the advent of Microsoft's Xbox, the brothers finally had a medium capable of expressing their ultimate vision.
The aim is thus: to create a massive adventure that rewrites the RPG rule book, allows unprecedented freedom and connects with the player in a way gamers have yet to experience. Piece of piss, then?
The basic story revolves around a twelve-year-old boy who returns home to find his father murdered and his mother kidnapped. Faced with unbearable loss he must embark on a mammoth quest to uncover the source of these horrific crimes, and, without realising it at first, ultimately save the world from forces of unthinkable darkness.
The game is styled with a rich, fairytale aesthetic, a conscious move on the developer's part to complement the unique content with unique visuals. "We wanted to avoid the Tolkien stereotype of having Orcs and things," Simon says. "Nobody's really gone for the whole fairytale/folk tale thing before and it's worked for us."
Indeed, Simon describes it as very 'Brothers Grimm'. "The sort of place you could send Hansel and Gretel and know they wouldn't come back from." "Because nobody likes Hansel and Gretel!" Ian chips in, before cackling maniacally.
The environment that's currently up-and-running - a woodland scene - is rich in foliage and alive with fantastical detail. And through the course of your adventure you'll encounter a haunted wood, marshes, ice, snow, rocks... "It has a very European feel to it," asserts art director Ian Lovett. "You're not gonna wander through deserts or end up in Morocco."
But BBB has also looked closer to home for inspiration, with the immediate area around the offices offering up more than its fair share of visual ideas. Indeed, as Lovett points out: "The opening scene from Gladiator was filmed down the road in Tilford."
If you've been following the development of Project Ego/Fable, you'll know that one of the big draws of the game is the concept of character development, facilitated both by the freedom of choice available and the lifetime's span of the narrative.
Beginning as a twelve-year-old boy, your hero-in-the-making is very much a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which you must leave your own unique imprint. Every decision and action has an effect on the development of your character, both physically and metaphorically.
Run around lifting heavy objects and become embroiled in fights and you'll develop rippling muscles. Choose the lazy path, avoiding labour-intensive exercises and you'll grow into a scrawny, palsied adult. Sneak through life under cover of darkness and your skin will remain pallid, frolic in the sunshine and you'll make George Hamilton look like a snowman. You even develop an hilariously well realised beer belly, should you choose to follow the path of lager. You get the picture.
And although this is a great achievement technically, (we were shown how all these features can be changed in real time at the push of a button) it's the effect they have on the game that is the really clever bit.
Become a burly, muscle-bound chap and people will quake in your path. Equally, a scrawny, sickly man is likely to provoke derision, with kids pointing at laughing at your hilarious disposition. It's like having your dignity surgically removed. Brilliant. And the parameters for exploration are seemingly endless, offering up countless unique ways of playing through the game - each, importantly, as valid as the other. Thus, you can be a cowardly villain, murderous beast, noble hero, lazy oaf, or nervous scaredy-cat - amongst others - and still make it through to the end. The replay potential here is obvious.
But Big Blue Box expects you to become quite attached to just the one hero as you guide from age 12 to a maximum of 50 or 60. And even when you finish the game (which should take you between 15-20 hours,) you are free to roam the game world, going back to complete mini-tasks and continuing to grow and interact with a tremendously vital universe.
Such a complex idea requires a structure, of course, and Fable's structure comes in the shape of 'Chapters' which portion out the action. Each chapter helps guide the central narrative along, with freedom in between to explore the myriad side quests and separate elements available.
Your hero's aging occurs in-between chapters. With each 'day' lasting roughly 48 minutes, you won't see the ageing process in real-time. Furthermore, if you fall in love (oh yes!) and decide to have children, the hassle of birth and nappy-changing is happily skipped over, again between chapters.
But how does it play? Well, Big Blue Box describes it as an "arcade RPG." It doesn't want it to be like Final Fantasy , with daft numbers appearing over peoples heads and the like. Indeed, we were greatly surprised to find the combat operates very much like Capcom's Onimusha.
With one button for attack and one button for block, combo attacks are achieved through careful timing, and moves are very reminiscent of the Capcom title, with graceful sword-swishes, killer thrusts into the chest and other swanky moves that wouldn't look out of place in a Jackie Chan flick. Furthermore, the magic system, which the team is largely keeping under wraps, offers an extra dimension. We were shown one spell, for example, which slowed time down, Matrix-style, allowing you batter sluggish foes.
BB is currently trying to work out the finer points of this system and would only reveal that: "the use of magic is directly tied into your health levels." Intriguing.
One current area of immense promise is that offered by Xbox Live. "There's been talk of having things available through Xbox Live," Lovett tells us. "And because of the way it's built it's certainly a possibility and something which Microsoft is very keen on. It's all a question of time."
But that's not to say BBB isn't a self-contained unit in itself: "Fable has a proper narrative with climactic end, then you can carry on." Simon states. If after the end that downloadable content could be used to add extra quests on so on.
More intriguing is a plan to allow users to save their character data onto a memory card and upload it into a friend's Xbox, with the hero entering the world and becoming a living, breathing element of it. Awesome.
And there's so much more to say. So much so, that we'll end out in-depth look here, and tempt yo back with a detailed look at the characters of the game tomorrow, focussing on how they are designed and how they function in the game, followed by exclusive interviews with the team and still more exclusive shots. Enjoy."
-from CVG
Indeed, having spent a full day in the company of joint MDs Dene and Simon Carter and the rest of the team, its impossible not to be deeply impressed by their vaulting ambition and epic scope. For Fable (formerly known as Project Ego) is no ordinary game. Part RPG, part fantasy adventure, part arcade-action, part life-story, Fable is a conscious effort to redefine a genre and set a new benchmark for the way adventure games can be.
Ordinarily, such high-flown concepts would remain unfulfilled, and it pains us to recall how many great ideas have ultimately offered nothing but disappointment, disillusionment and broken dreams.
So what makes Fable different? Why should we buy into the fantastical vision of the Carter brothers, who dare to tread where so very many have stumbled and faltered? History offers several useful pointers, with both brothers and other staff members being ersthwhile employees of Bullfrog, the developer headed by Peter Molyneux, which has pawned some of the most adventurous and successful titles ever.
Ah yes, Mr. Molyneux. Fable's existence is, in no small part, tanks to Molyneux, who aided the Carters in setting up Big Blue Box, making them a satellite studio of his own Lionhead. And in terms of development, he ha has been heavily involved in advising, suggesting and simply casting a fresh pair of eyes over the progress of Fable.
The original concept for Fable was conceived many years ago: "When I was 12 and Dene was something like 17," Simon tells us. Over the years, the myriad disparate parts have slowly come together, forming a coherent whole, and with the advent of Microsoft's Xbox, the brothers finally had a medium capable of expressing their ultimate vision.
The aim is thus: to create a massive adventure that rewrites the RPG rule book, allows unprecedented freedom and connects with the player in a way gamers have yet to experience. Piece of piss, then?
The basic story revolves around a twelve-year-old boy who returns home to find his father murdered and his mother kidnapped. Faced with unbearable loss he must embark on a mammoth quest to uncover the source of these horrific crimes, and, without realising it at first, ultimately save the world from forces of unthinkable darkness.
The game is styled with a rich, fairytale aesthetic, a conscious move on the developer's part to complement the unique content with unique visuals. "We wanted to avoid the Tolkien stereotype of having Orcs and things," Simon says. "Nobody's really gone for the whole fairytale/folk tale thing before and it's worked for us."
Indeed, Simon describes it as very 'Brothers Grimm'. "The sort of place you could send Hansel and Gretel and know they wouldn't come back from." "Because nobody likes Hansel and Gretel!" Ian chips in, before cackling maniacally.
The environment that's currently up-and-running - a woodland scene - is rich in foliage and alive with fantastical detail. And through the course of your adventure you'll encounter a haunted wood, marshes, ice, snow, rocks... "It has a very European feel to it," asserts art director Ian Lovett. "You're not gonna wander through deserts or end up in Morocco."
But BBB has also looked closer to home for inspiration, with the immediate area around the offices offering up more than its fair share of visual ideas. Indeed, as Lovett points out: "The opening scene from Gladiator was filmed down the road in Tilford."
If you've been following the development of Project Ego/Fable, you'll know that one of the big draws of the game is the concept of character development, facilitated both by the freedom of choice available and the lifetime's span of the narrative.
Beginning as a twelve-year-old boy, your hero-in-the-making is very much a tabula rasa, a blank slate upon which you must leave your own unique imprint. Every decision and action has an effect on the development of your character, both physically and metaphorically.
Run around lifting heavy objects and become embroiled in fights and you'll develop rippling muscles. Choose the lazy path, avoiding labour-intensive exercises and you'll grow into a scrawny, palsied adult. Sneak through life under cover of darkness and your skin will remain pallid, frolic in the sunshine and you'll make George Hamilton look like a snowman. You even develop an hilariously well realised beer belly, should you choose to follow the path of lager. You get the picture.
And although this is a great achievement technically, (we were shown how all these features can be changed in real time at the push of a button) it's the effect they have on the game that is the really clever bit.
Become a burly, muscle-bound chap and people will quake in your path. Equally, a scrawny, sickly man is likely to provoke derision, with kids pointing at laughing at your hilarious disposition. It's like having your dignity surgically removed. Brilliant. And the parameters for exploration are seemingly endless, offering up countless unique ways of playing through the game - each, importantly, as valid as the other. Thus, you can be a cowardly villain, murderous beast, noble hero, lazy oaf, or nervous scaredy-cat - amongst others - and still make it through to the end. The replay potential here is obvious.
But Big Blue Box expects you to become quite attached to just the one hero as you guide from age 12 to a maximum of 50 or 60. And even when you finish the game (which should take you between 15-20 hours,) you are free to roam the game world, going back to complete mini-tasks and continuing to grow and interact with a tremendously vital universe.
Such a complex idea requires a structure, of course, and Fable's structure comes in the shape of 'Chapters' which portion out the action. Each chapter helps guide the central narrative along, with freedom in between to explore the myriad side quests and separate elements available.
Your hero's aging occurs in-between chapters. With each 'day' lasting roughly 48 minutes, you won't see the ageing process in real-time. Furthermore, if you fall in love (oh yes!) and decide to have children, the hassle of birth and nappy-changing is happily skipped over, again between chapters.
But how does it play? Well, Big Blue Box describes it as an "arcade RPG." It doesn't want it to be like Final Fantasy , with daft numbers appearing over peoples heads and the like. Indeed, we were greatly surprised to find the combat operates very much like Capcom's Onimusha.
With one button for attack and one button for block, combo attacks are achieved through careful timing, and moves are very reminiscent of the Capcom title, with graceful sword-swishes, killer thrusts into the chest and other swanky moves that wouldn't look out of place in a Jackie Chan flick. Furthermore, the magic system, which the team is largely keeping under wraps, offers an extra dimension. We were shown one spell, for example, which slowed time down, Matrix-style, allowing you batter sluggish foes.
BB is currently trying to work out the finer points of this system and would only reveal that: "the use of magic is directly tied into your health levels." Intriguing.
One current area of immense promise is that offered by Xbox Live. "There's been talk of having things available through Xbox Live," Lovett tells us. "And because of the way it's built it's certainly a possibility and something which Microsoft is very keen on. It's all a question of time."
But that's not to say BBB isn't a self-contained unit in itself: "Fable has a proper narrative with climactic end, then you can carry on." Simon states. If after the end that downloadable content could be used to add extra quests on so on.
More intriguing is a plan to allow users to save their character data onto a memory card and upload it into a friend's Xbox, with the hero entering the world and becoming a living, breathing element of it. Awesome.
And there's so much more to say. So much so, that we'll end out in-depth look here, and tempt yo back with a detailed look at the characters of the game tomorrow, focussing on how they are designed and how they function in the game, followed by exclusive interviews with the team and still more exclusive shots. Enjoy."
-from CVG