Fable Anniversary was in full development for 15 months. On 2 June 2014 the game was also confirmed to be coming to PC. Later that year on 12 December 2013 the release date was announced as 4 February 2014 in North America, 6 February 2014 in Asia and 7 February 2014 in Europe. On 13 September, Ted Timmins, lead designer of the game, announced that the game's release date will be pushed back to February 2014. It features overhauled graphics and audio, a new save system and incorporates Achievements.
I just hope that the next instalment of the series is able to do Fable justice.Lionhead Studios announced Fable Anniversary, a remastered version of Fable: The Lost Chapters, for release on the Xbox 360 later in 2013. I can see why it isn’t everyone’s favourite Fable but it is mine and it will always have a special place in my heart. Despite the shallow story and forgettable villain, the game’s world just pulled me in like a hook on the end of a line and I’m sure it did for a lot of other players too. The interaction wheel was sorely missed in Fable 3, which took a lot away from the game. I ended up buying out every property in town and earning a fat sum of gold from it.Īlthough the business tycoon part was my favourite part of the game, Fable 2 really immersed me by the interactions I could have with the NPCs. I spent most of my time just living in the town, drinking with the NPCs at the pub by night and working by day. One town, in particular, was Oakfield which I tended to dwell in quite a bit. I made it my mission to get every town’s economy rating up by a few stars to enjoy better quality goods. Buying out stalls, shops and houses to rent out and watching your purse get fatter and fatter was a game on its own within Fable 2. It was a good way to make a buck here and there but the real fun was the real estate. Wood needed cutting, swords needed hammering. The jobs were mundane but it added so much to the game.
In fact, that is the first thing I do whenever I replay the game. I spent countless hours working at the blacksmith in Bowerstone. It was the first game that made me feel like I wasn’t playing in this world but was rather a part of it. Though still broken up into different regions, each felt unique and players could invest a huge chunk of my time in each area. Aside from the shallow story, Fable’s Albion had gotten an upgrade. Fable 2 took the core of the first game and just expanded on it. The story was a little lacklustre with a forgettable antagonist compared to the first game’s infamous Jack of Blades. The combat was straight forward and was really just a button masher. A lot of the grunt work from the first game was streamlined in Fable 2, which made it more simplistic. Yes, it had some features that it did well and did poorly. I fell in love with the game and the world. I spent the entire ride home reading the little booklet even though I had watched so many videos on it since the game launched a few years before. I still remember that day clearly because I was caught in a hail storm on the way home (which I’m actually glad about because it has caused the day I bought Fable 2 to forever be hammered into my memory.) It took me a few years but in the summer of 2012, I finally got my hands on the game, a whole four years after it initially released. How the NPCs would react to how your character looked and how you could settle down in a town working as a wood chopper, all while building a real estate empire and of course, following the path of a would-be adventurer. I was fourteen at the time and the first thing I noticed from the feature on the game was how captivating the world sounded. I remember reading about it in a magazine. But it was Fable 2 that really knocked it out of the park and is by far the best Fable in the trilogy. Whether you like it or not, Fable is the Einstein (or maybe the Rick Sanchez?) of the formula to the modern role-playing game. At the time of the first game’s release, making choices in games that had an outcome on the story wasn’t anything new but having our choices affect the world that the game took place in was unprecedented. The Fable franchise was revolutionary to say the least.