Yesterday I got to see a full quest from Fable being played live. That demo largely focussed on the city of Bowerstone, the characters in the capital, and the choices that can be made within each mission. While there were a couple of flashes of combat within what I saw, I wanted to reserve judgment on the action until I got hands on with Fable myself. Well, now I have, and I’m pleasantly surprised by what I played. While there’s joy to be found in the devastating thud of a giant hammer, what impressed me the most is how each of its varied magic spells work in harmony with the foundational melee systems. And that’s all before we get to the chickens. It wouldn’t be Fable without chickens, after all.
Although story, world, and characters power a lot of Fable’s charm and will remain just as significant to Playground’s reimagining as they were in the original series, there will be no escaping the rigors of combat here. You’re a hero, after all, and no matter how good you are at talking your way out of sticky situations, you’ll need to get your hands dirty regularly.
“Heroes are sort of humans plus plus, right?” Fable’s game director, Ralph Fulton, tells me. “They're special, stronger, more charismatic, all that kind of stuff. So combat, and obviously the ability to wield control and wield magic is another thing that sets you apart from the regulars. Combat feels like the place where you're going to show your differences most effectively. The golden line will have combat throughout it. I wouldn't say absolutely every quest features a combat beat, although I would say most do.”
When it’s time to get stuck in, Fable doesn’t want to limit your combat options. Unlike more rigid RPGs, there’s no class system to lock into, nor any other species or job parameters that dictate what sort of experience you can have. Instead, you’re encouraged to experiment with all options in pursuit of a loadout of magic abilities that complement your chosen playstyle. To showcase how this works and redefines the experience, I got to play through a mid-game mission called Mud and Death twice. Both times I was equipped with the same massive two-handed hammer and ranged bow, but the selected spells were different on each run: One included, a lightning strike, fireball, animal-transformation, and stealth-shift move behind an enemy’s back in its spellbook, whereas the other had the same lightning strike, a levitation spell that can turn into a ground pound, magical blades that hover before attacking multiple targets, and force push-esque magical shove (in the full game you’ll be able to switch in and out your loadout of spells and weapons on the fly, but for the purposes of this demo it was locked in for me.)
The mission itself was simple, but provided me with plenty of enemy fodder to play around with. Reanimated skeletons stumbled towards me, Ray Harryhausen-style, with the aim of sinking their swords into me. Although they initially seemed a simplistic foe to be unthinkingly batted away, plenty of interesting touches emerged from each I fought, such as how some produce a wailing wraith from their crumpled bones upon striking them down. The most fun thing to play around with, however, is how these undead react to the damage you inflict on them. For example, send an arrow into their knee, and they’ll fall down and start crawling along the ground toward you. Manage to knock their skulls from their spine? They’ll lose the ability to aim and end up firing their crossbow bolts in all sorts of directions.
Lopping off those heads feels great, too. Sharpshooting with a fully drawn longbow is accompanied by a satisfying “ping”, and while rattling a full magazine of repeating crossbow ammunition into exposed cheekbone didn’t give me quite as much gratification, it by no means felt bad. By far the best mode of undead beheading that I got to try out though was swinging that big hammer in a calcium-enriched game of croquet. Both light and heavy attacks are available, and if you hold in their respective buttons, you’ll get charged up versions. I particularly enjoyed the hammer’s charged heavy option, which proved great for crowd control as my hero spun around several times, knocking down anything in their path.
It’s worth noting just how many waves of enemies I faced during these encounters. I initially wondered if this was purely for demo purposes to allow for the breadth of combat options to be shown off completely, but later confirmed with Playground that this is genuinely the number of foes that will appear during this mission in the final game. Anyone who has played Lionhead’s Fable games will recognise this approach, and Playground sees this as a continuation of the original trilogy’s ability to make each encounter feel like a heroic event.
“What the original Fable games did, which was often putting you in one-to-many combat scenarios, felt like that was a great way of shining a light on your capital H heroism,” Fulton explains. “Rather than it being sort of an equal duel, oftentimes it's you against a bunch of enemies. And that seems like a forum for you to be able to go and express yourself and feel like a hero because that's ultimately the fantasy of the game.”
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/fable-combat-preview
