Phil Spencer, the president of Xbox, has said that the Fable series has a lot of places that it could go. The series’ development studio, Lionhead Studios, was dissolved by Microsoft last year, which had apparently been the death knell for the series. We may, however, get new Fable games with this news.
The Fable series had always been a rather contentious sort of series, mainly due to the promises of the series’s creator, Peter Molyneux. Molyneux, once the well-regarded creator of the Black and White god game series, has since become the butt of many jokes about promising far too much and delivering far too little.
All three of his Fable games were released with promises about you being able to influence the world to a great degree (such as being able to plant an acorn and have it grow into a tree over the course of the game, the ability to customize your character, and more), but normally failed to live up to these promises.
These, along with his kickstartered game Godus, a new god game where players would supposedly have a persistent world with one chosen player maintaining the world as its “god”. Like other Molyneux titles, the game had a lot of broken promises.
Lionhead Studios was working on a new Fable game, Fable: Legends, but that game despite being in a playable state with a running beta was canceled by Microsoft when the studio was dissolved.
If the new Fable games that Phil Spencer is hinting at actually do exist, hopefully, the lessons learned from previous Fable games, along with a better understanding of development, will allow the games to utilize the potential that they always had.
In the meantime, we’ll likely have to wait and see if Xbox decides to use the license for the Fable series to make new Fable games, maybe even a Fable 4.
