Fable Looks ‘Fantastic’, Has The Witcher-Like Combat, Says Corden; Character Selection Reportedly Available

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One of next year's most anticipated games is undoubtedly Fable. The fantasy RPG franchise originally created by Lionhead is returning fifteen years after its previous mainline installment, and fans are understandably excited.

Since IP owner Microsoft canceled Fable Legends and subsequently shut down Lionhead in 2016, they had to pick a new studio to reboot the series from the ground up. As we've known for a few years, that studio is Playground Games. The British team has crafted some stellar games in the Forza Horizon IP, but that's a racing game; could they deliver the same level of quality with an RPG?

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That's certainly the biggest question mark at this point. According to Windows Central's Jez Corden, though, there's not much to fear. Speaking in the latest episode of the Xbox Two podcast, he claimed to have seen some footage of Fable that looked fantastic, featuring combat modeled after The Witcher series, probably due to Playground having hired some former CDPR employees.

I very recently saw some Alpha gameplay footage from Fable. I have no idea when it was from, I don't know if it was earlier in development or if it was recent, but it looked fantastic. You can tell that this game has CD Project Red DNA. Playground Games picked up a bunch of developers, I believe they picked up the combat designer and you can kind of tell. I'm not saying it's 100% one-to-one with The Witcher because it's not, but you can kind of tell with that melee combat, the pirouettes, the dodging, the seamless hack and slash into an execution, which looks really cool. All that stuff is there; it looks super polished, super good. If this was early gameplay, then it probably looks even better now.

Beyond that, there was a lot of mixing in of different weapon types. There was pulling out a bow and arrow and also dropping spells I saw a spell that lifted a group of dudes off the ground and slammed