Sources Discuss Lionhead Closure, Rejected Fable 4 Pitch

[Rednog]

Yes to Fable 4. No to the Victorian Era. Do a prequel to The Lost Chapters.

I like how Lionhead takes a bizarre shot at 343.

Bizarre... ? Have you SEEN Halo 5? It fucking sucked ASS. And this is coming from a long-time Halo fan so you know I mean it. The thing is though, I don't know if Microsoft forced those terrible design decisions or if that was all 343.

But that's your opinion.
The facts are that Halo 5 was the biggest launch in the franchise and made a ton of money, made hardware sales, was received well critically, and made a ton of money from micro transactions.

Halo 2 Sales: 8 Million
Halo 3 Sales: 14.5 Million <- Best Halo game just in my opinion. But oh look, it sold the most.
Halo 4 Sales: 9.41 Million

Halo 5 Sales: 1 Million

And sure, it can be said that Halo 5 shipped consoles. But so did Forza and Rise of the Tomb Raider which sold apparently just as much. As to critically, it depends on who you ask, but I don't fucking care what ANY critic says since I objectively know that Halo 5 is much suckier than even Halo 2. Microtransactions though, you probably have a small point with that in terms of money made, as depressing as it is to admit.

So yeah, in conclusion, Halo 5 was a failure in almost all fronts.

If you look at the Halo 5 link it's only source for 1 million is an article that says Halo, Tomb Raider, Forza, and Gears of War all sold over 1 mil. Don't know why the wiki editor would attribute that to exactly 1 mil copies sold. Even the source itself says no one is sure of the exact numbers for 5.

 

[Shoggoth2588]

I was never going to play Fable Legends and I am never going to play Fable the Journey but I am one of those people who played Fable 3 more than once and what they wanted to do for Fable 4 sounded promising. I like how the Fable series was constantly moving forward through time and it would have been neat to see if Fable 5 or Fable 6 would have essentially just been a game wherein we're in the 90's but there are Golems, Goblins and, Reaver. Question though, remember that very first trailer and feature-list from the original Fable? Has ANY of that ever been used in any of the Fable games? Rival NPCs, trees that grow in real time...that would have been nice in a new Fable.

 

[Arnoxthe1]

In any case, going back to the OP, yes it does make sense that they're taking shots at 343/Microsoft since Halo 5 sucked, no matter how many freaking copies Microsoft managed to sell.

 

[MCerberus]

On one hand, we know that this is a studio founded on unrealized hype.

No. It's a studio founded on Peter Molyneux getting ideas shot down by his team, and his team not being fond of the fact that he made big announcements (which weren't agreed on) in interviews.

The devs at Lionhead were quite good at their jobs. The major issue which Lionhead suffered from is that Peter Molyneux was just more of a dreamer, rather than a designer.

I feel that Peter stabbed his team in the back a bit whenever he promised some features, such as trees growing in real time. His team was constantly having to adapt. Overall though, Lionhead employees were big achievers. Fable 1-3 are good AAA titles to have under the belt.

Sounds like we're saying the same thing mostly. From the end-user standpoint everyone I believe realizes that the source of the hype isn't the devs failure. It was always Peter running his mouth. After reading the Eurogamer article (I'll see if I can get a link, but warning, it's a wall big enough to make Trump supporters weep) it doesn't even seem like he was even reading from the wish-list, but rather just mouthing off with the dev team just sort of looking on with stunned dread.