What can we say? Well, better not to say anything and to pretend as if there has been no change whatsoever. Welcome to the new Ego Maniacs! There is little difference if any, but we do have a new forum and a new domain name. Now we will start trying to pester Lionhead once again to see if we can poke out any new info for us, although it seems highly unlikely.

Hope the change won’t affect and/or traumatize you for to long. There is much to come soon and we shall maintain you alert of all the new happenings. Salut!

Click Here, to check out the new forum!

This year at GCDC in Leipzig, Germany, Peter sprayed his seductiveness with words towards the general public. Although Fable 2 was not a keynote participant in what he was describing, there are a few things said, in particular about how he plans combat on being for the future of gaming.

According to Game Spot:

Molyneux’s goal is to make combat in games less repetitive, less dependent on the player memorizing button combinations, and more dramatic. He believes that Hollywood, rather than real life, is the place to look for inspiration when thinking about combat in games, a point that he illustrated by contrasting footage from Kill Bill with a movie made by role-players running around a forest with wooden weapons. “Real-life combat is rubbish” exclaimed Molyneux at one point, before going on to explain that while the swords in Kill Bill were invariably sharp enough to dissect enemies, those in most games (including Fable, which the audience was shown a brief clip of) behave more like blunt or only quite sharp objects. There are exceptions of course, Dead Rising’s zombie-slicing katana being a recent example that springs to mind. But Molyneux’s assertion that it should be possible to kill an enemy with just one well-placed swing of a sword definitely appeared to get members of the audience thinking.

Peter finished off by presenting an amazing concept art of Fable 2… the second one we have seen till now.

Click Here, to read Gamespot’s full GCDC coverage!
Click Here, to view the large image!

The second Fable 2 milestone has now been released and with a first look at a concept art of a dense forest. Although Lionhead still seems very reluctant to spill any intense news on its current state of productions regarding Fable, Sam still managed to give us something to digest on while awaiting more news to come.

“One of the areas Charlton showed me was [CENSORwood], only one of the many areas in Fable 2. For those of you, who played Fable 1, think of all the Greatwood regions, add them together and you come close to the size of [CENSORwood], and mind you this is only one region! Since we are planning to allow players to leap off cliffs for example, we have to be extra cautious with the design, as every effort has to be made to make sure that players don’t get stuck.”

With this we can also speculate on the unfortunate division of sections, which will mean that we will meet loading times once again. Yet maybe this new engine and that of the Xbox 360 might allow Fable 2 to finally apply the one large yet single loading time at the beginning of the game as promised with Fable.

Click Here, to read the entire milestone article!

It’s been a while and we will probably need to spend a while longer to receive any concrete and significant information on Fable’s upcoming sequel. Peter Molyneux reinforces his past mistakes on speaking out to soon about the game, using the acorn growing into an oak tree example, yet he also tingles our mind with a very broad yet exciting clue:

“Those things are normally what goes into a sequel, and then, there are the big surprises. And there’s a very, very, very big surprise in what Fable 2 has got, which I hope will be very unexpected. This is me in my PR mode, I must admit, but I haven’t seen this particular thing – and it is one of the really big pillars of Fable 2 – done well in any game. In fact, it was done very well in one game, and that game is now almost 30 years old. That’s a clue…”

He finishes of by clarifying that one of his most important objectives is to make sure that Fable 2 will be absolutely beautiful. We think that will be one point which we wont be disappointed with.

Click Here, to read the entire article…

Eurogamer has some details from a discussion with Peter Molyneux, on the upcoming Fable 2 and the as-yet-unnamed ‘Project Dmitri.’ The site comments on Molyneux’s obvious enthusiasm for his work, and manages to get a few tidbits of information from the designer on these in-production titles. From the article: “I think it’s exactly what Lionhead stands for - it’s uniqueness, it’s originality and it’s taking something and doing something with it that no-one’s done before. And that’s really what the core of what the whole of Fable is. Fable 2 should be everything you expect, then 10 times more that you don’t expect — and that doesn’t just apply to this one feature … I almost said it then! — that applies to the whole game.”

Click Here, to read the entire article!
Click Here, to watch the movie!

Sam van Tilburgh, the renown Lionhead community pet has lamed out for us the first community diary (now named milestone), on Fable 2.

So now that the whole story has been set out on paper and agreed upon, the implementation can begin. As you’re probably aware Fable 2 is set roughly 500 years after the original Fable and Fable: The Lost Chapters ended. This allows for some vital changes in the world of Albion, the characters and setting, but also to build further upon the heritage and back story. Eventually you get a story that is not only longer than the story from the original game but also one that’s a little bit more mature! No, we’re not going down the route of GTA (violence-grandeur) but with the current plan some people might be shocked by what we have in stock for Fable 2 players. Story-wise this is a slightly different approach but you’ll like it, it has some rather cool twists to it. And I’m not talking about someone who rescues you at first and then betrays you, we’ve seen that a zillion times before, including in the original game.

There isn’t much new info revealed unfortunately. Yet its good to know that we will be receiving these milestones monthly so we wont be left behind on Lionheads’ behalf regarding new and interesting information.

Link: Fable 2 Milestone!

Supposedly the Fable 2 trailer/teaser is filled will secrets (at least 10 according to Peter Molyneux). This has caused to ravaging discussions by every Fable fan in every community, so we here at Alter Ego have decided to step into this mess and analyze the trailer ourselves very closely in order to see what conclusions we come up with and see if we can uncover anything interesting.

Link: Click Here, to uncover the secrets!

CVG recently spoke to the grand masters of wit behind Fable. Surprisingly the talk was not about the upcoming sequel, Fable 2, but about Fable and Fable: The Lost Chapters. It’s an in depth look (in a Carter sense of things) on how some ideas that made Fable the game that it is came into being.

There were frankly buckets of really stupid ideas we had throughout the development of Fable; things like chicken-kicking competitions and brothels. The nice thing with Fable is it’s the sort of game where, when you have an idea or when you think about something in the normal, everyday world that strikes you as a bit ridiculous, you can think, ‘I wonder what that would be like in Albion?’

With this is mind; are we to expect the same distorted comedy in Fable 2?
Link: Looking Back… Fable: The Lost Chapters

Don’t believe what you’re seeing? Could it be that you’re dreaming. It could… but dreams are rarely this good. Anyways, we are back after a long and grueling slumber and are here to stay. There is a lot to cover (because of Fable 2 of course) and we will be at your disposal again serving you all the info you may or may not want.

We will strive to be much more community oriented this time around, by re including the community spotlights, mailbags, etc. Anyhow, as of now there is little to say but much to do. The site is not complete just yet, but that will be accomplished within this and the next week, so you can expect lots more to be added in these days to come.

Also, the Brown Balverine forums are back up and awaiting members. Be sure to comment on any problems and suggestion that you may have on the site. We will be eager to hear your views and take them into account. We are currently hosted under the IGN vaults, which mean that there should be little to no site falls and the speed should remain optimal if the higher powers will for it.

Well, glad to be back.
Regards,
The Alter-Ego.net team

Robert Cram from MSXbox World wrote a detailed article of what he hopes to expect from Fable 2. None of this is approved, yet it is a good read and it will be a counterpart for new ideas on what is to come.

“I would also like to perhaps see how news of the players deeds travel in Fable 2. Possibly a true word of mouth system could be employed whereby news is delivered by newspaper. Perhaps after embarking on some nasty deeds in one town it would be possible to stop the spread of news by simply eliminating the messengers. There are simply loads of possibilities the team can use in terms of the villager AI and in a recent interview Peter mentions that Fable 2 will mostly be using a new game engine so we shall have to wait and see how things develop.”

Link: MSXbox World article