Now this is something you do not see everyday!

The creator of Fable put up a very rare post in the Fable 2 forums over at Lionhead.

This post gives you a little insight into building ownership in Fable 2.

Quoting from Lionhead Studio Forums.

Buying property in Fable 2 works like this; the player is able to buy any recognisable structure from a hut to a castle. Owning each type of structure brings certain benefits, for example a house can be rented out or you can move your family or friends in there - shops can supply extra revenue for you as you’ll get cut of their profits, owning civic buildings such as churches and cathedrals will increase your renown and if you own a dungeon you can harvest items from them. In addition to this any structure can have small scripts and stories attached to it. So, and this is only an example and not a current in game storyline, if you owned a shop you might be able to sell the heads of Hobbes that you have killed. These scripts and stories potentially could be about anything but will be limited by what you normally do in game so you’ll you won’t find a script or story attached to a building that suddenly transforms Fable 2 into an RTS but you might find that you have to escort an Abbott from the cathedral to a pub (once again an example rather than a confirmed script)

Also ownership changes who you are in the world the more property you acquire, the more of a nobleman you become and if you were able to own enough property (which will be a lot) you end up as the evil emperor of Albion and have domination over all (just to give you an example)

The actual post may be found here.

A while ago Lionhead Studios announced a new exciting competition where the users of The Movies: Online (more commonly known as TMO) where to make a short film based on Fable.

The winner of this quite excellent competition was……

A Split Second by kuroken - Rock solid camera work and exciting editing. Lovely story and great voice acting, splendid narration too! A deserving winner of an exciting competition. You can watch the movie here.

The winner takes home an Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system, a signed copy of Fable 2 (when it is released) and 100MB additional storage space on TMO:

The Three runner-up each got an extra 50 MB of storage on TMO.

The Road Less Traveled by rysto - Good narration and story plot, nice set dressing and examples of modified content. The closing scene could have lasted a little bit longer but overall a very good and touching movie! You can watch the movie here.

Lionhead by Dr_House - Quite a long intro sequence but beautifully crafted nevertheless! An extraordinary amount of modding has gone into this movie it seems which makes it refreshing. You can watch the movie here.

Trents Fable by biggstrek - Absolutely GREAT camera shots and the way it is edited makes the car chase extremely exciting! Go Rogina! You can watch the movie here.

The full article can as usual be found over Lionhead Studios.

Enfin nous y voilà! Ego Maniacs has is now expanding towards the ever growing French community under the administration of Nicolas Tarier (aka Bibi). The site will run under direct compliance with Lionhead Studios, in efforts for obtaining official exclusives, previews, and all goodies soon to be offered.

The site should be running at full capacity by the end of this month to the beggining of next.

Lionhead is on another recruitment drive. This time around they are looking for people to fill the following positions:

Standard Gameplay Scripters         

Various positions for Programmers and Artists  

And for the Fable 2 team: 3 fixed term contracts for Experienced Animators

All the job descriptions can be found over at the Lionhead Studios website here.                                                                   

Fable at E3 this year can best be summed up in a 15 minute video of Molyneux’s presentation over at Voodoo Extreme.

The most interesting development in terms of gameplay mechanic is perhaps the combination of the block and attack buttons - you can tap or hold to attack, or hold to block. Magic and ranged weapons each have their own button as well.

The response of the player’s avatar will be dependent on his/her position with regards to geographic features, NPC’s, and to the timing of the button-masher. In the video we see a clip of the hero making use of a wall to pin someone against. Flourishes are still prevalent although the camera work has been spruced up to make them appear even more exciting, and subtle audio cues are introduced to aid the player in creating combat with an interesting tempo.

The player can also look forward to not having to replay the same sections repeatedly due to death. Instead Lionhead are currently experimenting with methods that will ensure that it is possible to continue playing, although this is currently limited to having the player effectively KO’d.

Sounds good, and it’s nice to see Fable 2 in action again.

At last some decent colour screenshots. These were released at the E3 2007 exhibition today by the Lionhead Team.

For your viewing pleasure…

These are of course screenshots of work in progress, so if these are anything to go by then the finished product’s graphics are going to be more than excellent..well in your author’s humble opinion.The first three screenshots are taken from Bowerstone, which is looking pretty good so far.The bottom two shows the Hero in battle against some foes.Click Here, to view all the Fable 2 Screenshots!