Lionhead goes back to Albion’s roots to conjure up the most ambitious Fable ever. By Chris Schilling
This most quintessentially British of game worlds was no longer such a green and pleasant land. The Industrial Revolution had transformed Bowerstone into a factory town, all belching chimneys, filthy slums and open sewers – grim with one ‘m’ instead of two. While Lionhead’s reluctant to admit it, when it talks about trying to recapture the magic of Albion, it’s not just referring to taking Legends back to a time when Will users were more prevalent either. “It’s an opportunity to reset things, and try a new direction,” says studio director Stuart Whyte.
It’s a good time for a change. The studio’s figurehead, Peter Molyneux, left upon completion of Kinect spin-off Fable: The Journey in 2012, by which time Lionhead had already begun prototyping its next game. There is a sense in the studio of one chapter having coming to a close, and a new one about to begin. “The Fable storyline had naturally ended with Theresa dying off,” says executive producer Geoff Smith, “so it made sense to go back beforehand. But we did also want those beautiful British fairytale environments. We wanted to go rural.”
“The idea of going hundreds of years prior to [The Journey], back to the start of the formation of the Guild, and this land where there’s loads of magic and it’s actually really dangerous out there, seemed like a super-exciting place to be,” says Whyte.
Indeed, there’s an element of danger at the core of Fable Legends, because it represents a bold step outside of Lionhead’s comfort zone. This may still be a roleplaying game, and it still takes place in Albion, but it sees a traditionally singleplayer-focused series move firmly into the multiplayer arena. No one’s calling it a MOBA (studio head John Needham comes closest, branding it a “multiplayer online quest adventure”), but we hear League Of Legends mentioned more than once during our visit. Is this shift, then, partly dictated by industry trends? “That’s definitely fair to say,” Whyte replies. “There’s a load of gamers at Lionhead, so yeah, some of those [trends] are kind of built into the DNA of what happens at the studio.” And if the game’s asymmetric approach to multiplayer, which sees four heroes battling a lone villain, doesn’t seem radical now, it was certainly unconventional when development began. “There are number of games now talking about four-versus-one modes,” Whyte says. “None of them were out there when we started this process.”
It’s a more logical step for the series than it initially seems to be. Lionhead did, after all, tentatively explore the idea of cooperative adventuring as early as Fable II, even if Smith admits it “hadn’t really done a good job with it”. The studio knew Albion was a good fit for a multiplayer game, it just needed to find the right formula, something that was more than simply an iterative improvement on the existing Fable template. One day, the idea of a dungeon-masterstyle fifth character was mooted, and quickly that character was conceived as the villain of the piece. Prototyping began, and immediately Lionhead knew it was onto something.
To direct the new game, this British team turned to an American. David Eckelberry has a background in both Dungeons & Dragons at US game maker Wizards Of The Coast and MMOGs with Lord Of The Rings Online developer Turbine. By October 2012, Lionhead had secured its ideal dungeon master. Eckelberry is modest about his expertise, though he recognises that his experience with the technical demands of online multiplayer games allowed him to help the studio solve the kind of challenges it hadn’t previously encountered. “Also, dealing with multiplayer dynamics is a very different kind of problem,” he says. “Whether it’s multiplayer balancing or fairness, I’ve had to deal with that a lot in my past, because RPGs are a unique thing to balance. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the people who have to balance shooters at Treyarch and Activision and [343 Industries], but I still think it’s an easier job – you’re balancing apples and apples.”
Which isn’t to say that Lionhead would decline to benefit from someone with the knowledge of what it takes to build a multiplayer-focused shooter: one of 343’s level designers spent a week at the studio playing the maps the team created in the game’s original Unreal Engine 3 prototype – which used an adapted version of the Fable: The Journey toolset – and advising the Lionhead team accordingly. A team accustomed to building worlds for lone heroes (all but two of the current level designers have worked on every Fable game in some capacity) suddenly had to learn a new skill, and this meant an intensive course in map design.
“We still have worldbuilding and storytelling aspects, but also each level has to flow like a replayable deathmatch arena,” explains lead content designer Ben Brooks. “So there was a big learning process for us in adapting to that.” Over six weeks or so, each of the level design team built a new arena every day. At the end of the day, everyone would play one another’s levels, which were then thrown away so that new ones could be built the following day. “The idea was that people wouldn’t get stuck spinning on one thing. We’d [encourage people to] try something mad, because it’s only going to be there for a day, and then ask, ‘Did it work?’ We generated so many maps, and it helped build an instinctive understanding of what worked and what didn’t.” Indeed, the last hour and a half of every working day still involves play sessions for the level design team, though now it is scrutinising more permanent designs.
Meanwhile, the studio’s artists and tech team were busy refining the game’s look. Working on more powerful hardware was an obvious boon for art director Kelvin Tuite, though he was keen to maintain visual consistency with previous series entries, which meant following hard rules that have been in place since day one. “Broken circles, calligraphic lines, sweeps and strokes, and no straight lines,” he says. “Everything is twisted in one way or another. Those are the main outline cues, but the other main thing is that colours tend to be dirty colours. There’s no pure red or pure blue – they tend to be darker rather than saturates, because the lighting will saturate them.” Indeed, such was the importance of lighting that the studio developed its own global illumination system, which it proudly says has been incorporated into Unreal Engine 4 by Epic. “It’s got to look like a standout new-gen game, so a lot of the effort is about that,” says lead engine programmer Ben Woodhouse.
And yet Lionhead’s not aiming for absolute realism to push the hardware. “For me, it’s more that the tools at our disposal – because of the power of this machine – are the kind of things that Pixar use to make a fantastic film,” says Tuite. It’s more about consistency, character and beautiful lighting, he explains, and Xbox One simply allows his team to realise their vision more effectively than before. “If you look at the first Fable,” Tuite says, “they wanted that lush woodland feel to it, but the original Xbox could only deliver so much. What we’re doing now is [creating] what they would have killed for back then.”
It’s certainly true that Legends retains the same distinctive visual hallmarks as previous Fables; this is a handsome game, yet one that’s rough-hewn in the best possible way. It can be seen in everything from the hunched, bow-legged stance of necromancercum-healer Leech to the houses in the game’s hub town of Brightlodge, which are constructed so haphazardly on top of one another that some end up teetering precariously over sheer precipices, anchored only by other structures. Tuite is particularly keen to retain the game’s inherently British feel, which has been inspired by illustrators such as Arthur Rackham and Brian Froud. “This chunky, wonky kind of style is part of what Fable is,” he says. “It’s a world of people who don’t know how to build stuff and rely on magic to hold it all up.”
Legends presents a world that will feel instantly familiar to fans, then, and Lionhead is keen to ensure that feeling extends beyond the way Albion looks. Brightlodge, from which you set off on quests, is described by Eckelberry as “our new Oakvale”, for instance, a welcoming, rustic community with which you can interact using gestures and expressions from a very similar radial menu to that of Fable II. Your quest doesn’t require any human company, either, though you will need partners even for the tutorial mission: you’re no longer the chosen one, after all, but a single hero among many. Three AI allies will join you, and all four of you will face off against a lone AI villain. Indeed, you can play through the entire game without other people if you so choose. “You’ll be able to progress through the story in the way that you would playing through a [regular] Fable game,” says Brooks. “There’s no ‘OK, I’m going to jump to this deathmatch’ option. While it’s always a fourversus-one experience, everyone else can be AI. Essentially, we want people who want to play this through as a traditional Fable game to be able to do so.”
Which isn’t to say what follows is Fable as we currently know it. There are swords and crossbows and magic, sure, but this is a world of area-of-effect attackers, marksmen, snipers, tanks and healers. And yet the cadence of play is more Left 4 Dead than League Of Legends; Valve’s shooter is alluded to throughout our day at Lionhead, and not simply because Legends is about a team of four battling an evil puppet master. There are storytelling interludes that allow for some downtime, holding-room equivalents that give the villain a little time to prepare and position the next wave of enemies while the heroes regroup. And the final arena in each 30-minute stage brings with it a natural escalation, inviting the heroes to complete an objective while the villain attempts to stop them, the latter spawning fresh units as existing ones fall. “It’s the get-to-the-chopper moment,” senior designer Lewis Brundish tells us, and it’s not as unlikely a comparison as it may seem. Fable has traditionally appealed to a wide audience, and no one at Lionhead wants that to change, though some characters will be easier to learn than others. Our first game sees us take control of Evienne, a warrior wielding a magical sword, which she swings with taps of the right trigger, building simple combos while dodging incoming attacks with a responsive left-bumper evade. As with all the other characters, her specials are bound to the face buttons and are gradually unlocked as you finish arenas as well as being subject to cooldown timers. Plague doctor lookalike Leech, meanwhile, proves more of a challenge: his primary offensive move involves keeping a crosshair trained on enemies to drain their life, building up a meter that can be expended on healing allies, though it’s also depleted when you deploy his defensive ability, which conveys temporary invulnerability. The trick is to stay close to an assault-class hero for the boost gained by draining creatures that are currently taking damage. The controls may be straightforward, but there is depth in how powers are combined, and with over a dozen heroes to pick from, those combinations are plentiful.
In a game where communication is key and a universe whose characters are rarely quiet, it’s no surprise to discover that Legends reserves the A button for conversation. Press it during combat and you’ll hear your hero issue out a context-sensitive remark, such as a warning, revive request, or general observation. Holding areas feature quest-specific NPC chatter and you can press A once more to interject – the responses varying depending on which hero you’re controlling (Brooks says the studio has assembled a “relationship matrix” to determine the dynamics between characters, since not all heroes get along). It’s another way to encourage repeat plays, of course, but it also allows players to determine their personal level of engagement with the story. “There can be as much or as little as you want,” Brooks says. “Diehard Fable fans will go looking for narrative tidbits with all characters, but we expect a spread. Any game that gets fairly popular, which we’re hoping to be, the second half of your fans are people to whom somebody said, ‘Hey, you should try this game’. Whether that’s Madden or FIFA or Halo – I mean, I’m a casual Halo fan, but I couldn’t explain the lore to you – we want that player to have a good time and understand what’s going on, even if they don’t understand the last ten per cent. And I’m OK with that.”
Heroes are, of course, only one side of the equation. “We want both sides to create fun gameplay while trying to win,” Eckelberry says. “Our villain makes the game fun for the heroes while trying to kill them. A good dungeon master is trying to tell a good story and creating a threat that you can barely handle. This guy is trying to make a threat that you can’t.” If Legends as a hero is like playing an RPG with a hint of MOBA, then playing the villain is more akin to a realtime strategy game. “RTS isn’t usually done terribly well on console,” Brundish says, “so we really wanted to focus on how we do something like an RTS with a controller.”
Unit selection has been smartly streamlined, with each group of creatures assigned to a different face button. To command a cabal of melee outlaws to attack, for example, we aim our cursor at the heroes and press X. The right trigger, meanwhile, allows you to launch special attacks, allowing archers to set up smoke clouds and our hardy Pucks to briefly become invisible – beginner’s ambush tactics, perhaps, but not ineffectual ones, it transpires. Later on, we get a little more experimental, shifting mines and raising gates to not so much trap heroes as launch them as they walk by. With a limited number of points to spend on forces, we sacrifice two melee units for an Ogre, trapping it in a room with two heroes and unleashing a potent guff attack. It’s not quite enough: by the end, all four heroes are out of potions and two are down, but their objective is reached.
Not that we should be too downhearted. To Lionhead, this is the most difficult role to master. “The villain is much more ‘hardcore’, if we want to use that term,” Smith tells us. That’s by design, of course, as only one-fifth of Legends players will be able to assume the role. “It’s important we get that ratio right,” he says. “If we made the villain phenomenally accessible, everyone would play the villain and we’d have no heroes.”
Our immediate concern that a minute isn’t a long time to set things up is quickly assuaged. Preset layouts can be quickly modified, and villains will be able to tinker with strategies in their own time, loading them in once they’ve perfected their masterplan for an arena, rather than always having to race against the clock. We observe that a tablet interface seems ideal for villains. “We did experiment with that early on, and we’re still working with that at the moment, but all we’ve got to show at the moment is the controller-based [setup],” Brundish says. Days later, we discover Legends is heading to PC, and will stream to Windows 10 devices. The gains for same-room multiplayer could be immense, especially given the most satisfying feedback for a villain is the cries of unfortunate heroes caught in a devious trap.
Since this is a game in which Microsoft has invested substantially – with an ambitious five- to ten-year plan in place, its publisher hopes this is a fairytale that can delay its happily ever after for a while – there are plenty of extrinsic hooks in place. Villains will be able to recruit new creatures to their cause, expanding their repertoire. Hero players will be able to level up their character and unlock new gear, such as outfits and weapons, upgrading their equipment at Brightlodge’s blacksmith. There will be minigames in the hub, too: could Legends really be a Fable game without the chance to kick some chickens? “But at its heart, it’s got to be fun,” Whyte says. “We talked about Left 4 Dead earlier; what keeps those players coming back? It’s just a great game. So longer term for us, it’s going to be the variety that comes out of the weaponry and the customisation and the hero types, but also the range of the creatures and traps that the villain can have.”
Yet as a story-driven series, the structure is necessarily unconventional. The pitch, then, is to introduce new stories in the form of TV-style seasons, each containing quest arcs, optional side missions, new heroes, creatures and gear. Eckelberry won’t be drawn on details of the main story, alluding only to “a certain antagonist that the villagers are scared of and the heroes have to confront”, but we know that it will be accompanied by light-hearted sidequests. “They’re more just romping, rollicking fun, and wackiness-driven, like you’d expect from Fable sidequests.”
Legends has been in gestation for more than two years at this stage, and Eckelberry admits it’s been a steep learning curve for everyone at Lionhead, but with the first season almost finished, future content should follow fairly regularly. If the finer details need thrashing out, the outline is firmly in place. “An exact time period isn’t possible for me to judge, and we’ve talked about having seasons of different lengths – like how a British season of a TV show is sometimes shorter than an American one. We’d like seasons to have somewhere between six to ten hours of content, at least, and that I imagine takes six to nine months to build. That’s kind of ballpark-y, but that’s our best guess in terms of continuing to release new seasons of content.”
It’s worth pointing out that the figure only takes a single playthrough into account, and the director is confident that players will have plenty of reasons to return. Then again, he’s under no illusions that Legends is a risk, and he’s acutely aware that finding the balance between the immediacy that will allow Fable players to feel at home and the longterm depth and nuance of its multiplayer peers will be a challenge that persists as long as the game does. Indeed, even during development it’s already thrown up unexpected hurdles.
“One of the challenges with multiplayer,” he explains, “is that the game moves only as slowly as its fastest player. So when [one player] runs ahead, [the others] have to run and catch up. Whoever moves first will pull the whole team ahead – the Leeroy Jenkins syndrome, if you will. But it does mean that the pace of the multiplayer game will always be a little bit faster than you expect, and it’s sometimes surprised us, even in the beta environments. But there’s enough elasticity in the design to support a few screw-ups.”
It’s a game that’s aiming to offer something for everyone – and that involves allowing players to play with whoever they choose. So while heroes’ stats and weapons will improve, the levelling curve will never escalate to a point where it prevents a group of friends from playing together. “It’s not meant to be an MMOG,” Eckelberry says. “If I want to play with you in World Of Warcraft but I’ve just signed up to [it] ten years in and you’re a level-100 character, I can’t play with you. Not meaningfully. So it’s all done via matchmaking. Even after that, if I’m playing, say, Inga for the first time, I’m still a better tank than you playing Leech or Sterling, even if you have the best gear ever. That’s not true in MMOGs, but it’s true of Fable Legends.”
Lionhead remains coy about a release date, but the game is under testing as you read this, with a limited closed beta helping the studio to tweak its balancing. As Eckelberry concedes, while there are smart people within Lionhead who can solve problems internally, it’s undoubtedly handy to have several extra pairs of eyes and hands to assist with the fine tuning. But if balance is vital in a game of this nature, the ultimate aim is a very simple one. “We want to make a fair and fun game for everyone,” Eckelberry tells us. “I can’t promise that every hero will be perfectly balanced, but making every hero fun to play as is absolutely mission goal one.”
In some ways that’s no less ambitious an aim than the outlandish promises made about previous Fables, though it’s a much more grounded objective. And perhaps this post-Molyneux Lionhead attitude is summed up by the final mission we play. “This quest is called Moon On A Stick,” says Brooks with a wry smile. It’s typical of the self-effacing humour for which the series is cherished. Legends might well be a departure from established formula, but it’s unmistakably Fable.