Once you’ve slaved away on making an ideal concrete, pushed your game through the hell that can be game development, and come through on the other side with a product with the blessing of the great publishing gods, your game now has the ability to outlive generations and become a mainstay no matter how many consoles come and go.
Heck, it’s why I still dust off my busted game boy to play Donkey Kong, or dig through the nightmare in my attic to find my Nintendo 64 just to play Frogger (#dontjudgeme). Some games really start to gain value the longer time passes with them in your possession, due to equal part replay value, and equal part, “Damn that was a really good game!” However there is really no clear cut way to put a time limit on when a game begins to lose it’s replay value, or how to accurately take that into consideration when your game is both in and out of development.
Fable Legends: shaking up the franchise
The boss of Lionhead studios John Needham recently told GamesIndustry International that they expect their upcoming title Fable Legends to have a 5-10 year lifespan on the Xbox One once it drops, which is a fairly ambitious idea.
In order to do so, Needham states that Fable Legends will make use of the Xbox One’s suite of features and services, such as the cloud.
“This is the next big Fable game that is going to be out for five to ten years so it needs to be big, it needs to be interesting. There needs to be a lot of stuff to do, it needs to integrate all the cloud and Xbox One features so we keep our community alive and growing. So yeah, it’s big and ambitious, but it needs to be because it’s going to be around a long time.”
Incorporating Online Play
The Fable franchise is notable in the sense that it was one of the first RPGS I can vividly remember that literally offered hundreds of choices to the player, complete with rewards and brutal consequences. Fable Legends will return to the games roots, and allow players the chance to become a villain, and take three heroes with you on every one of your quests. As of now Lionhead all of this talk has just alluded to the addition of online play, with no details yet on how exactly we can expect that to affect the world of Albion.
“We’re pivoting, we’re taking all of this great Fable talent that we have in the studio….[and] taking classic Fable gameplay and classic Fable lore and bringing it into a next-gen experience on Xbox One…We love games like Dark Souls with these really unique online modes and we really want to play with that in Fable Legends and the other games we’re going to make here.”
Lionhead Studios delayed Fable Anniversary last week for the Xbox 360 until February 2014, and Fable Legends does not yet have a release date.
