Fable Legends Preview

Now that the closed beta of Fable Legends has started, the folks at RPGSite bring us a hands-on preview of the title. Their impressions are positive, though they aren’t convinced the title’s direction was the right fit for the franchise:

While it’s unclear which team came up with the concept first – and it doesn’t really matter – Fable Legends actually shares quite a bit in common with Evolve, Turtle Rock & 2K’s asynchronous multiplayer shooting experience designed as a spiritual successor to Left 4 Dead.

In both games four players take on class-based roles to take on evil – except evil can now be controlled by a player character with a nefarious will and a real time strategy game style overview of the entire are you’re playing in.

Taking up the role of Shroud, a hooded, arrow-firing assassin type with an invisibility move, I and the rest of the team battle against the enemy, who are being manipulated by another journalist. The job for the villain is simple – they want to try to divide and conquer, triggering things in the world to block off certain paths and split the heroes up, as they’re always stronger together than apart. The heroes want to do the opposite, of course – stay together and smash anything the villain throws at them.

This design leads us to an interesting thing about Fable Heroes[sic] – its mission-based structure that feels more like a multiplayer game than a typical RPG. The average quest is around 30 minutes long, I’m told, and the traditional Fable open world is gone. In theory, you can in fact jump into a mission further along in the game’s narrative than you actually are by joining the game of somebody who has made more progress than you – it’s that open-ended.