I can still feel the scars left on my heart by Fable Legends. The game was Dead By Daylight, but with Fable lore instead of horror characters, and it was conceived four years before Behaviour Interactive's asymmetrical adventure breathed its first gasp. Legends would have seen four players cooperate as heroes and one villain attempt to take them down, and would have been a showpiece game for Xbox, utilising the then-new SmartGlass features and would have been an exclusive killer app. It was free-to-play, yet would have cost $75 million to create, in the aims of a ten year lifecycle. I played the ill-fated beta in 2016 and was thoroughly confused as to what it was trying to do and what it was meant to be, and shortly after similar feedback from players the world over, it was cancelled for good. Now the new Fable seems to have the same problem.
Fable 4 does not use gimmicky SmartGlass technology, won't be free-to-play, hasn't mentioned anything about cumbersome currencies, and there's no whispers that Microsoft want this to be a ten year, constantly evolving game. You might say then that it sounds completely different to Legends, that I'm foolish for holding onto the pain of the past. But I don't think Legends' main problem was any of those things, although they were definitely red flags considering the ginormous red canvas of 75 million smackeroonies being funnelled into it. Legends' major flaw was that it didn't understand what Fable was or why people liked it. Neither, it seems, does Fable 4.
The latest news we have out of Microsoft is that Fable 4 is trying to be "Witcher-like", which doesn't feel like all that definitive an ambition when The Witcher 3 borrows from so many other RPGs itself, nor is it one that fills me (or many of the Fable fans) with much confidence. Fable has always been built on British humour, a playful tone, fantastical steampunk, dark characters mixed with an almost-pantomime level of villainy, and a feeling of tragedy that is always, in some way, surrounded by silliness.
Legends was set hundreds of years before the Heroes Guild was formed, and there was not only a lack of this incredibly iconic presence in the game, but there was no sense of community (baffling, for a co-op game) and no magic melding with technology to allow for typical Fable tropes like blacksmiths and blunderbusses.
As for what it means to be Witcher-like, we just don't know. Obviously, The Witcher 3 is very popular and successful, so I can understand wanting to build off it. For any studio making a new RPG, looking at what made The Witcher 3 such a phenomenon and figuring out a way to use that in a way unique to your own fresh IP is a decent start. But if you're making Fable 4, there's a different popular magical RPG series you should be using as your foundation - it's Fable.
If you don't think Fable's formula works in the modern day, if you think its tropes and tones are dated, if you think its humour isn't cool enough anymore, then why make a Fable game at all? Legends felt like it was a completely different game just using the name 'Fable' for its prestige, and actively resented the label. At its budget, it might never have sailed anyway, but you wonder whether using Fable's name then quite clearly not being Fable hurt more than it helped.
We haven't seen what Fable 4's 'Witcher-like' influence is, and it's possible that it can merge what CDPR did with Fable's own foundations, but it does feel as if that fear has been around for a while - is Fable a product of its time, and can its essence survive being updated for the modern day. If not, is there any point making Fable when it's not Fable?