The striking image of a hooded person, crouched mid-air, with a blade coming from their wrist, immediately says 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Assassin’s Creed—the silhouette alone is enough. It was an iconic series with an undeniably distinct aesthetic regardless of whether it was Ezio or Connor on the cover. But then Origins, Odyssey, and Valhalla came out, a trilogy of Witcher-likes that opted for bloated worlds filled with meaningless side quests, tiered loot, and a focus on Souls-like combat that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:stripped away the stealt🦹h of the origin🌸als.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher 3 is a great game, but mixed with Ubisoft’s other open-world successes, it paved the way for a diluted Assassin’s Creed that’s more generic RPG than its forebears—what was once an iconic series is now nothing more than a pale imitation of better games. And yet the next Fable will rep🥂ortedly be another Witcher♈-like, failing to learn from one of the biggest series🌸ไ in gaming that so quickly became stale, blending into the homogeneous mess of other open-world outings.
Games pivoting to be like other games makes the entire industry feel so much smaller as everything begins to blend together into mush. Instead of having a variety to choose from, you have four variati🐲ons of the most successful game from seven years ago, and any originality or personality that a series once had diminishes in this desperation to chase trends. Fable won’t be any different. Fable is a cheesy, child-like fantasy that lets you gleefully sacrifice villagers to grow horns, with floaty combat that sees enemies explode into orbs. It’s a far cry from The Witcher, and so it seems inevitable that this charm will be lost in favour of genericism.
Games are getting grittier, and RPGs especially want to chase that dark fantasy high, but that was never Fable. The second game opens like a Charles Dickens novel with orphans running the street causing mayhem, playing in the snow as the carnival comes to town and hustlers try to peddle scams. There’s a tragedy unfolding that paves the way for our hero to take the centre stage🍌 in a plot of revenge, but it’s painted as over-the-top and more akin to a fairy tale than a realistic depiction of a medieval world, leaning into the surre🌼alness of fantasy. Again, none of which sounds like The Witcher.
It’s a temptation for dormant series making a comeback to try and be award-winning equivalents of Oscar bait that draw from the current success stories rather than trying to push forward their own history. We saw a similar trajectory with 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:God of War, which similarly drew inspiration from The Witcher and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dark Souls, becoming another in a long line of similar third-person action-adventure Sony games. As much as I love the new God of Wars, the death of the hack-and-slash genre among triple-A has only shrunk theꦏ industry’s variety, and Fable’s comeback—if reports are to be believed—will only shrink it further.
The new Fable is being helmed by a new team, and there’s clearly a struggle happening with trying to capture the magic of the originals while carving out something new. But so often, when a series making a return wants to carve out something new, it’s only ever new relative to the series. Assassin’s Creed Origins shoved aside Syndicate and Unity, both of which were unpopular on launch, to try something ‘fresh’, but looking back, it was only fresh within the context of Assassin's Creed. In the wider world of gaming, it was another checklist open-world title that saw you wandering giant empty areas with little to do. Fable could—and likely will—fall into a similar trap, only being ‘new’ compared to the first three games.
However, we’re in a much different place to 2017 when Origins launched. The number of open-world, Souls-inspired, Witcher-like RPGs and third-person action adventures is staggering. Another will get lost in the noise and have too much competition that it will have to be truly exceptional to stand out. Just look at 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Horizon Forbidden West. As successful as it was, it fell out of the zeitgeist almost immedi🐟ately. Even th🦄e brand recognition of Fable won’t be enough, and could actively work against it as fans return to a long-dormant series hoping to find a renaissance of what they once loved, only to stumble on another in a long list of generic copycats.
The next Fable looking exactly like its predecessors won’t work either, but growing a series with the times doesn’t necessarily mean adopting tired trends and riffing on better games. Fable can and should reinvent itself to carve out a space in the mo♈dern gaming landscape, but it should do so on its own foundations, not that of other games.