Once in a while, we’ll get a video game that’s so pathbreaking that it serves as an inspiration for a slew of other games. This may be in the form of a particular mechanic, art style, and in some cases, even an entire genre. For instance, FromSoftware‘s Dark Souls series is responsible for the advent of the Soulslike genre.
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So, when a developer is working on a new game, it’s not uncommon to look at such popular titles in order to take inspiration. One such upcoming game is Fable. We know almost nothing about it, except what we’ve seen in the trailer and that it’s scheduled to launch in 2025. With the launch window slowly approaching, it seems more details are being revealed.
Fable Takes A Lot From The Witcher Series
It seems that Fable will take a lot of inspiration from The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. While we’ve heard inklings of this before, it was reiterated by Jez Corden on The Xbox Two podcast. Corden claims to have seen Alpha footage of the game and was blown away by how “f***ing fantastic” it looked at such an early stage.
You can tell that this game has CD Projekt Red DNA,” said Corden on the podcast. “So, the developers, Playground Games, they picked up a bunch of developers [like] CD Projekt Red, and I believe they picked up the combat designer, and you can kind of tell, you know. I’m not saying it’s a 100 percent one-to-one with Witcher, because it’s not.
“But you can kind of tell that melee combat – the sort of pirouettes and the dodging and the dodge-rolling and the seamless hack and slack into an execution, which looks really, really cool – all that stuff is there. It looks super polished, it looks super good, and if this was early gameplay, then it probably even looks better now than from what I was shown.
He went on to say that the combat involved a lot of mixing of weapon types – seamlessly using swords, bows and spells. There was reportedly also a spell which allowed players to lift up enemies and slam them to the ground, like the Force powers in Star Wars Jedi: Survivor.
As for the enemies themselves, Corden said that he saw one that looked like a giant chicken, and also a werewolf. The combat reportedly looked very tight and featured a number of weapons, including a giant mallet. The animation quality and acting also looked really good for an alpha build of the game. However, he did state that he has no idea when the gameplay footage was from, nor who the original source is.
This isn’t the first time that Fable has been compared to The Witcher. In March last year, we reported that there was talk of the game’s inspiration, and “The term ‘Witcher-like’ was thrown about a lot”.
Fable (2025)
Fable 4 is an upcoming RPG for Xbox and PC. It will reboot the classic series, this time developed by Playground Games – best known for its work on the Forza series of racing games.