// KOTAKU — GAMING
Hands-On With Fable’s Combat: Lightning Bolts, Fireballs, And Dismemberment
Fable’s combat has whipped up a storm of controversy after gameplay footage shared by Playground Games made it look, well, underwhelming.
At roughly the 15-minute mark in the video posted last week, the player fights a lumbering giant who seems to soak up hit after hit while barely reacting.
That clip doesn’t tell the whole story, however. After playing a full, combat-heavy quest myself, I’m happy to say fighting is far better than it appears in that single, misleading encounter.
The quest is called “Mud and Death,” and takes place around the middle of the game. At this point, you’ve got plenty of weapons at your disposal, such as a sword, bow, and warhammer, and a bevy of magic powers, including fireballs, lightning, and levitation. All of it can be used to reduce hordes of skeletons to quivering piles of bone in vastly different ways.
In this quest we’re paired with an AI-controlled character named Humphrey (played by Matt King), the washed-up leader of the Hero’s Guild, who leads us into a haunted mine packed with supernatural threats. They’re the ideal fodder for experimentation. During the quest I suspended enemies in the air, spawned phantom daggers that seek out stragglers, flung enemies back with force, and summoned lightning bolts to chain-damage groups. If that previously mentioned gameplay clip looked unreactive, this acted as a direct counterpoint.
“The dismemberment, in particular, is something that’s great,” says Will Kennedy, associate game director at Playground Games. “It’s great for showing off the precision shots that you can do with the bow, and you can shoot them in the head and they become headless, and then you fire them into the air because they can’t see you. You can shoot them in the legs and knock them over and they continue crawling toward you, and that sets them up for ground kills.”
There are plenty of combo possibilities. I used the teleportation spell to pop up behind enemies standing near ledges, then pushed them into the abyss. Others I levitated, then used the lull in action to charge and unleash a fireball, resulting in a fierce explosion.
Not only did I play as a spellcaster, able to slash enemies and summon magic, but I tried the next run as a bowmaster who rapidly shoots arrows with machine-gun speed. It highlights the damage system, which hurts foes more depending on where you hit them.
“They have randomized armor parts on some of them,” says Kennedy, “which means that ranged attacks won’t work on those enemies, but the parts that are exposed to ranged attacks will work. So if you have the skill and the ability to see that, then you can use it. Smashing through them and dismembering them with the hammer is really great.”
It’s not just skeletons who I faced, though. It turns out they’re possessed by wraiths, who bring their own challenge. Each time you take down a skeleton, you need to then pursue and destroy the pale green spirit within as it flies out of its former host and searches for a new one. Here, it’s better to use projectiles and hit from a distance before it settles inside its next boney body.