And if you like this sort of tasteful take on retro RPGs, you might enjoy SKALD:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1069160/SKALD_Against_the...

You had me a "Ultima-4 inspired game" :)

It's free, it plays like Ultima 4 but modern (nice colors, animations, more than 26 possible actions :) ). I think I'm in love.

Thank you for posting this!

nice, I saw this game somewhere recently but didn't realize it was free. "Verified" on Deck , too! thanks for recommending, will give it a shot!

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Populous! That's a name I haven't heard for a long time. It was so much fun building out the land, smiting people, and then saving the day after earthquakes, etc. Good times.

I have yet to see a modern version that was half as interesting.

I’ve never understood the people who took him at face value but I’ve also never understood people who didn’t like the guy.

He made some of the most interesting and original and fun games out there. What, he can’t puff up his chest once in awhile? If anything I want more games from him.

(for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curiosity%3A_What's_Inside_the... )

One of my favorite things in game journalism is still Rock Paper Shotgun kicking off an interview with Peter Molyneux by asking him if he's a pathological liar.

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/peter-molyneux-interview-go...

Peter Molyneux is the king of bullshit. He's back again with another God game.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2024/08/peter-molyneux-is-bac...

He's a dreamer who won't shut up. Nearly everything that comes out of his mouth is bullshit hype.

I'm a huge fan of the games he has been a part of so I was familiar enough with his antics to know that Curiosity would end up being nothing, but he really outdid himself here, Peak Peter Molyneux behavior.

Yeah i lost all faith when he did this shit. But he made it even lower with his NFT game

I absolutely loved that game on Xbox. It's the only reason I own an original Xbox.

It came out when I was just branching out into the world without my family around, and seeing a game where my choices changed my appearance was kind blowing to me.

I still love this game, though the replayability was definitely overhyped. It's pretty much the same every time.

I remember the house buying as being very basic. You could buy a house, fill it with items, sell the house, steal all the items from it, and buy it back for less, as many times as you like. I also remember being rather frustrated I couldn’t pull the sword out of the stone by becoming max good, to I gave up and became max evil, much to the disappointment of my character’s wife.

As an early teen I didn't understand enough to be impressed, but I was certainly fascinated for a good few weeks.

Fable 3 killed Lionhead.

The reboot has already passed the point of teaser trailers. The new studio is Playground Games best known for the Forza Horizon games. (The alternating "silly" open world titles between Forza Motorsport "serious" racing titles.) Given the success of Forza Horizon and their cadence at regularly delivering it, this Fable reboot probably won't kill the studio, but might push them back into the "only do Horizon games, please" box.

The Saints Row reboot had some writing on the wall that it might be the last one from the developer anyway, and it was reflected in the design. The Chicago-based Volition (for several decades under several publishers, and even through a messy divorce/remerger) was forced to move to Austin, TX to be closer physically to other teams under the same publisher (notably Gearbox). The reboot attempted to be a love letter to their new forced home, but a lot of "their creative heart wasn't exactly in it" was visible on too many levels, and it was easy enough to guess that when a publisher forces a move like that they may be looking for easy layoffs and eventual team mergers.

There is a new Fable coming out in 2025.

https://www.xbox.com/en-US/games/fable

I bought an xbox only for fable 3. But that one disillusioned me complelty :|

I really hope they take the feeling of Fable (that what made me like it in the first place) and roll with it.

And if they make it great, It was Peter Molyneux fault...

True enough, way beyond my old-school favs of Goldeneye 007, Perfect Dark, and GTA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Video_game_companies_...

>Boo to associating Britain with heroic failure

Not sure which part of it is a failure. Even the articles said > it was successful enough that Lionhead was bought by Microsoft in 2006, and its two sequels also sold well.

Bullfrog, Rockstar North, Climax, 4J, Rocksteady

I mean, GTA is one of the biggest game franchises on the planet, which is hard to see as anything other than a success. Gouranga!

This, so very much. Nowadays I go to great lengths to avoid reading any reviews or opinions on media I want to consume. Regardless of whether it is a book, movie, tv show or game.

I ask my partner to order books for me or to check what other entries are in a series because it is basically impossible to look up something like this without being jumped with summaries, ratings, opinions and similar that rob one of an unbiased experience.

I'll always remember the 2017 "King Arthur: Legend of the Sword" movie. I watched it at the movies with zero expectations and thoroughly enjoyed it and thought it was great. Much later I read some article or something on it and apparently people agreed it was terrible. I don't think I would have enjoyed it nearly as much if I had heard about it beforehand.

It's the bones that make them crunchy

(You should probably spoil the surprise, because few of the readers of your comment are going to track down & buy a 16-year-old RPG, and spend the necessary 10 or 40 hours to reach that point and learn what the surprise is and how it illustrates anything of interest about the Fable games.)

In that era of gaming, just waiting a few years meant sequels were better just due to extra computing power, so yes, Fable II was better in most ways (although I'd argue the main story was worse). It was still trying to define many gameplay mechanics that are just standard fare for western made action RPGs. One can play Fable and Morrowind, then look at Skyrim, and see how it owes about as much to Fable as to Morrowind.

It's harder now, because so much of the genre seems to have frozen. The graphics are many times more realistic, and animation blending has come a long way. But ultimately making changes is now so much more expensive, that significant novelty is difficult to find in games that also push what could be done, the way it was back when the first two Fable games could try to push ahead in all direction at once

I liked Fable 2 well enough, but I think that the first game was far superior. The story is pretty interesting in the first game (if basic), whereas in 2 I felt it was kind of a mess.

Lionhead made amazing games, and it’s annoying that Molyneux had to hype them until they were certain disappointments.

I liked Fable, and while Black and White committed the sin of being two RTS games without multiplayer it remained really interesting and just a fun experience. But the game that really had me was The Movies. Its story mode was fun, but the movie maker within the game was really something different for a young teenager’s imagination. That is a game I’d really want to see rebuilt with modern tooling and hardware.

The Guardian story misses out Louise Murray’s role in rescuing Fable

https://www.eurogamer.net/lionhead-the-inside-story

"Your health is low. Do you have any potions? Or food?"