Fable III Co-op Preview

Joystiq met with Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux at this week’s Tokyo Game Show to both discuss Fable II’s co-op shortcomings and to get some hands-on time with Fable III’s revamped co-op. I’m a big fan of cooperative video games (as long as they still “work” in single player), so this all sounds pretty damn good to me:

“You can join in from the first second of the game to the last second of the game,” Lionhead’s Peter Molyneux told Joystiq at TGS earlier today. In our demo, two screens were set up with Fable reps Dimitri and Louise steering. Their screens show the exact same location in the game, though their respective worlds look much different: Dimitri’s is beautiful and green while Louise’s is industrial and overdeveloped. Joining another player’s game gives you the opportunity to see how much the world of Albion can change. However (and this is the new part!) your hero stays the same.

“Louise comes in as her hero with her complete inventory and everything that she owns and uses,” Molyneux explained. “That gun is still changing when she’s in this world. When she goes back to her world, she takes those changes with here. Any followers, which is like experience, that she earns in Dimitri’s world, she’ll take back. And any gold, she’ll take back. And then gold for co-oping as well.” But it’s not just your hero that teleports into another player’s world; your dog comes along with you.

While you’re in another player’s game with your newly liberated co-op camera, you can venture off and perform your own quests, so long as you don’t go too far. “The only thing is when they leave a level and levels are pretty big then they both have to agree to leave that level at that time. There’s a mining camp, there’s a village, there’s a demon door, there’s a lot of playability in the levels. Some of the levels are four times larger than the ones in Fable 2. It seems like a bit of a restriction but it doesn’t really feel like that.” Worried about someone coming into your game and causing havoc? They won’t be able to kill innocent people unless you turn the safety off.