Gamers should get ready for more spin-offs designed for Xbox Live

Mar 21, 2012 20:11 GMT  ·  By

At the Game Developers Conference 2012 in San Francisco developer Lionhead and publisher Microsoft have announced that they are working on a new spin-off for the core Fable series called Heroes, which is the first and probably not the last game to be linked to the core universe of the series without advancing its main story.

Ted Timmins, who is one of the designers working on Fable Heroes, has told The Official Xbox Magazine in the United Kingdom that, “There has been stuff that’s come out of Creative Day before, ideas that went into Fable games, but never something like a full game.

“Hopefully if this is a success then Lionhead will do this more often. We’re all massive Fable fans, everyone that works at Lionhead, we’ve lived and breathed it for the last 10 years. To keep expanding it is something that everyone there wants to do.”

Fable Heroes was prototyped at the Lionhead Creative Day, a sort of game brainstorm where developers can quickly show off their ideas, and Peter Molyneux liked the concept well enough to push it into production and give a team of 20 people a chance to make it real.

The initial development period has been 3 months and after that Molyneux saw Fable Heroes again, with Timmins adding, “they said ‘great – have another five months’.

“The whole of Lionhead’s been really supportive, and it’s not very often you get to be lead designer on a Fable game. To go from a creative day project to a 4-player XBLA game – it’s been quite a turnaround.”

Fable Heroes will be launched on the Xbox Live Arcade service later during the year.

Peter Molyneux has recently announced that it was leaving Microsoft and Lionhead in order to work on new projects, apparently social, at a new company called 22 Cans.

The two companies have insisted that the Fable series will see more launched in the near future.