This Week in Gaming: May 5-11 Highlights

One of the franchises that came out largely unscathed by excessive multiplayer capabilities was the Fable series. While Fable III did boast co-op capabilities, Lionhead Studios has never done anything quite on the scale of what it is attempting with the newly announced Fable Legends . The franchise’s next-gen debut, an Xbox One exclusive, is an ambitious online jump for the series, allowing up to four players the opportunity to work together in order thwart another player taking on the role of the vill

Yet despite that success, there have still been no substantial announcements on what the studio has planned for Bill Willingham’s comic series. If a cryptic tweet from Telltale’s Twitter account is any indication, that may be about to cha

id Software’s debut title was Wolfenstein 3D, a violent first person shooter with unprecedented graphics. You play as B.J. Blazkowicz, an American spy attempting to bring down the Nazi party. As he searches for plans to a cruel experiment, he is captured and imprisoned inside their headquarters at Castle Wolfenstein. B.J. escapes and finds out the operation is to create an army of zombified mutants. To beat the game, B.J. faces off with Adolf Hitler who is equipped with a robotic suit and heavy duty weaponry. Wolfenstein 3D sold more than 100,000 copies within its first year and has since been named one of the top games of all time. It is the basis of all FPS games combining fact-paced action, technical advances and graphic violence. It propelled id Software and Fablechronicle.Com shooting games into the future.

The comment is an odd one as thus far, Fable Legends looks like it has a very direct approach to online play allowing you to set up games with friends, while both Journey and Dark Souls had more passive systems that limited interaction with other players. They were powerful multiplayer experiences though, and if Fable Legends can figure out a way to incorporate some of their elements into the game, it could be a great compliment the co-op heavy gamep

Should the listings indeed apply to Fable 4 , Lionhead’s «reimagining» may well arrive in the form of a next-generation, free-to-play MMO. For one, The Journey , as mentioned, already took a significant departure from the Fable foundation with its implementation of Kinect-based gameplay and a more linear narrative. And when Lionhead hired former Cryptic Studios CEO John Needham to head up operations this April, parent company Microsoft was quick to extoll his «deep understanding» of «subscription-based, massively multi-player, client-based console and free-to-play online [experience

In an interview with Digital Spy , Head of Lionhead Studios John Needham explained that this new online direction for the studio isn’t going to be exclusive to Fable Legends . Following the departure of Peter Molyneux , Needham — who has an MMO pedigree — took over the studio in his stead. With that pedigree, he said that all future games from the studio will boast «connected» aspects. Being candid about his roots, Neeham said, «We’re online game guys, that’s the studio. We love online games, we love interaction with real people, and we want to bring that magic to Fable» . He explained that interaction between characters and NPCs is what made the world of Albion a special place to play in. The goal of Fable Legends is to experiment with that dynamic and see what would happen if you substituted those interactions and brought in real players to the

When Telltale Games announced that they would be bringing Fables , an adaptation of the Vertigo graphic novel series to gamers everywhere, it was hard to know what to expect. That was before The Walking Dead made the studio one of the most impressive in the realm of video game writing , not to mention undisputed masters of episodic relea

Talking further, he said that while they hadn’t quite figured it out, the team is trying to use the Xbox One’s cloud servers to matchmake players with friends and strangers. Although he didn’t explain how this would work, he did alluded to influences that the team are drawing f

To get a full sense of just how much time has passed without any update, we have to go all the way back to E3 2011, where the studio’s Jurassic Park adaptation was on display. While dinosaurs were the main attraction, the developer did adorn their booth with a poster for their upcoming King’s Quest reboot , although they weren’t speaking on specifics (since that project doesn’t seem to be progressing, we no know w

Online is an integral part of video games in the modern age. For better or for worse, the last generation of console was dominated by online gaming with competitive matchmaking becoming a norm for most AAA game titles, helping make the eSports culture more mainstream. The popularity of series such as Halo , Call of Duty and FIFA meant that for many gamers, online play was the main reason to keep playing a game. The consequences of this were that several publishers became slaves to the trend, putting (forcing?) in needless multiplayer modes that took away from certain game as a wh