With Fable Anniversary set to launch on February 4 you don't have much longer to make your decision as to whether or not you'll be picking up this recreation of the original Xbox title. In our exclusive interview with Lead Designer Tim Timmins we asked him what's new besides updated graphics?
"That’s a great question," he admits, "I think it’s the one that the fans have been asking the most, why is a game that I already played or spent money on ten years ago, why should I now jump in?"
Timmins stresses that simply overhauling the graphics was a gargantuan task saying, ". . .We've worked very, very hard to make the visuals look like a game you’d buy in the shop now, and to try to bring every single piece of artwork up to date. We've had a hundred artists working very, very hard to make that happen."
What people most often overlook is something they can't even see: sound. "When you move past the visuals, obviously sound is really, really important and not only have we gone from 4 by 3 to 16 by 9 widescreen TVs, a lot of people have also moved from stereo sound to surround sound."
"In the original Fable, we only supported stereo," Timmins states, "Russell Shaw, who is the original composer of Fable 1, he still works at Lionhead. I know whenever I've gone to visit him at his studio; he always has the biggest smile because we've removed all of the compression artifacts that unfortunately you had to have on the original Xbox. Now, with being able to uncompress things, everything sounds in HD and I think that really leads to that really immersive experience."
We can't wait to hear the soundtrack in beautiful high definition surround sound. Oh the nostalgia.
