Fable Anniversary without all these preconceptions, but equally it’s not going to work universally in the game’s favour. It’s amazing how quickly things that were features in one generation of games become expectations in the next.

Many of Fable’s big ideas - morality, particularly, and freedom of choice, and the way the world and its inhabitants reacts to how you behave - have become expectations for RPGs in the modern age. It’s easy to forget that having the choice to either do good or do bad was once a Thing, or that once an NPC spouting a few contextual lines about how great or terrible you are used to be super-impressive. You can be good or evil in so many games that it’s become a worn trope. However, the choice of whether to fart at a barmaid or propose to her is still a choice that’s uniquely Fable. It laid the groundwork for the more expansive and prettier worlds of Fable 2 and 3, setting the series’ hallmarks in place: simple-but-fun fighting, building a reputation, a beautiful green world, and that vaguely Monty Python-esque Albion sense of humour.


This remake is long-delayed, and on first impressions it’s not difficult to see why. Old-fashioned looping animations remain, but all the assets have been re-fashioned to look more at home on the Xbox 360. The cut-scenes feature compressed audio that sounds just like it did on the original Xbox, but elsewhere villagers’ quips and overheard arguments are clear and crisp. The art style, meanwhile, all big heads and hands, is familiar, if not as well-realised as it is in Fable’s sequels, despite extensive reworking of the character models. If you’re coming to Fable Anniversary as a curious explorer into the series’ past, don’t expect it to look as good as the subsequent two games, even if it is a massive visual upgrade over the original. It’s in widescreen, for a start.

Two more modern additions come in the form of a revamped interface, which makes rifling through the inventory feel less like trying to find a loose debit card in an overstuffed handbag, and a companion app that uses Smartglass to show you the map in real-time, tracking your location in the world. It’ll also bring up comparison screenshots to remind you what the world used to look like in 2004, and offer tips from the official strategy guide if you want them. It’s a foreshadowing, perhaps, of Fable Legends’ deep tablet integration - SmartGlass has been broadly under-utilised so far, but that isn’t stopping Microsoft’s own studios from dreaming up uses for it.

The original Fable drops you into a simpler world and a simpler situation than its sequels. You’re a young boy, you and your village are beset by a tragedy, and so you train up as a hero and venture out into the world. It’s hugely cliched, more so than Fable 2 or 3, but what saves it is its irreverent tone. The hero’s quest itself was never the inspiring thing about Fable. It was always about all the stuff you could do outside it - the marriages and divorces, silly emotes, pie-eating and beer-drinking and arguments to be overheard. Speaking of which, it is wonderful to hear British characters that, for once, don’t sound like reluctant Californians who’ve watched one episode of EastEnders to inform their accent.


Playing through the game’s opening hour, a lot of that is still tantalisingly out of reach - Fable’s opening act takes its time teaching you the basics (at one point it actually teaches you how to pick up an experience orb). But being back in this early Albion is oddly comforting; it looks different, but it’s so recognisably the same. It’s such a pleasant and memorable world, one that’s helped define the Xbox, and I’m looking forward to shaping it and my hero with ridiculous actions. And hairstyles.

I’m still not sure exactly how well Fable’s action-RPG core will hold up nearly ten years on - back in 2004, I remember much frustration with combat targeting, camera angles and other basics, and I’ll have spend more time with the game to gauge how they’ve been improved - but it’s already clear that Lionhead has done an impressive job with the visual update. It’s Fable’s personality, though, that will hopefully prove truly ageless.

http://www.ign.com/videos/2014/01/20...bruary-release

http://www.ign.com/videos/2013/06/04...sary-announced