This is a suggested multiplayer mode for Fable III. As we've yet to hear most of the features of Fable III, I'll be describing it in Fable II terms so there will be some assumptions made about the gameplay. In this mode four players compete in a large area to gain renown enough to claim the crown and become king of Albion. Each player will start with a pool of experience to build a mid ranged character with, and will choose from the henchman models (to speed up the game and cut down lag). The players decide how much renown will be needed to win a game then are placed in the world at the corners of the map with rusty weapons. Finally safety will always be off in this game mode.

The Map corners are a graveyard full of shadows, hollow men and a Banshee, a bandit camp full of bandits, highwaymen and Spire Soldiers (Commandant with a highwayman hat), a forest full of hobbes, balverines and beetles, and a dungeon full of beetles, shadows and bandits.

The Village is situated in the centre of the map, and is the place to get quests, buy weapons and potions and interact with villagers. The village is full of repeatable quest givers as well as villagers and shops to buy better weapons, augments and potions from. Each player has their own house marked on the map for them. Players are invisible to each other while in the village.

Quests all start in the village and take you outside to any parts of the map. These are traditional bounty hunter, civilian displacement, etc quests. Once you've completed the quest you'll gain a quest item which must be returned to the quest giver in order to gain the trophy which gives you renown based on how difficult the quest was. Players can take one quest at a time and the same quest giver will give more difficult quests as each is completed. Multiple players can take the same quest and, if a quest giver is killed by someone on that quest, then the quest is failed and all players on that one have to come back and get new quests. Escort missions can be failed by the escorted character dying at creatures or other player's hands.

Kingmaker is the most powerful weapon in this mode, almost twice as powerful as anything sold in the village. It is held in a silver key chest randomly placed on the map. The chest will only show up when one player has all 25 silver keys needed to open the chest, at which point all players will be alerted that it has shown up and will be shown on the map where it is. Each player starts with 5 silver keys and 5 more are hidden around the map.

Death occurs by losing all your health obviously. You'll be returned straight to your house in the village when you die with no sitting out, but your body will stay where it fell. Returning to your body will give you the option to bury it. If another player finds an unburied body they will have the option to steal the highest powered trophy (transferring it's renown to them), currently carried quest item, all of their silver keys, or their most powerful weapon. This means players must watch their backs whenever other players are around, even if they've agreed to team up with each other for a little while.

The Crown is hidden behind a demon door (which doesn't have a portal when opened) that will only open for someone with the agreed amount of renown. Retrieving the crown and making it back to the village with it wins the game, but once a player has the crown in their possession they will be marked on the map for all other players and a message will go out that a coronation is due to begin.

I think that this sort of design could create some epic competitive multiplayer mayhem with players screwing each other over left right and centre as they struggle to get ahead. It provides tactical opportunities along with the regular Fable feel and action in a frantic race for the crown.

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Fable - The Musical Design Process
"Ladies and gents, we're still alive
By the skin of our teeth - now it's killing time.
Angel in my pocket, d by my side.
We ain't going nowhere 'cause heroes never die."

bravo that was quite the master piece and i do believe that the player would agree you are a genious.

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if only there was enough swag to give to all mates here and back home

You certainly put a lot of thought in to your ideas. And I really like them, I think fable III could do with some sort of player Vs player mode along this style, or even as teams.

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sounds , but about the silver keys - it sounds very difficult to collect all 25 if you have to wait for other players to die before you can take their keys. can we attack other players outside the village? if not, then there should definitely be far, far more keys (maybe an extra 30 keys for every player) because no one will waste time collecting them if they only get a sword, albeit a powerful one.

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Every time I make a really post, a dev posts right after me, and my masterpiece is swallowed up in the wave of posts that quote and respond to the dev

JTGreat:

I hope I can be an online prostitute.

Thanks for the compliments guys. I have a lot of ideas cause I lead a very boring life and daydream a lot. That's why my next post here is about how Zoe Wannamaker and how if she does more Fable games she'll be arrested for pulling the plug on life support patients while muttering "Death is not your destiny today" under her breath.

In my vision of this players can kill each other and loot the corpses when out of the village. I limited the looting so that no-one gets too far ahead or behind that way, and made players invisible to each other in the village so that they couldn't screw each other over while frozen in place at shops. That way someone determined could get the Kingmaker sword for an advantage, or they could at least invoke panic in the other players when they get alerted to it.

I appreciate all suggestions and ideas on this, especially as I haven't played online multiplayer in about a decade (I left due to most players being ten year old americans who scream "***" and quit when losing) so this probably doesn't hold up to much these days. I'd love to see what kind of multiplayer modes you guys would want as well.

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Fable - The Musical Design Process
"Ladies and gents, we're still alive
By the skin of our teeth - now it's killing time.
Angel in my pocket, d by my side.
We ain't going nowhere 'cause heroes never die."

This is a superb idea! How large is the map? Is it like the size of bower lake? Because bower lake isn't very large... Is it like one place like bower lake with more places attached (with loading screens?)
More multilayer ideas? The fable I arena when you fight whisper but with online players

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Holy Sh*t this is epic

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-DR T JR-

I got MY Lavos Spawn From
Luna's Lavos Spawn Adoption Agency!

sim656:

You certainly put a lot of thought in to your ideas. And I really like them, I think fable III could do with some sort of player Vs player mode along this style, or even as teams.

Nothing more need to be said

Love
Arowanna

These are ideas. But you forgot the game where you have 5 minutes to see who can shoot their friends in the nuts most.

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My idea of area size is about one and a half times the size of Bower Lake - big enough to explore but not too big to quickly learn the layout. The village would be two times the size of the Gypsy Camp. I'm thinking a tower like Garth's, a walled graveyard about the size of the one in Left 4 Dead's second mission, Thag sized bandit camp, and a dungeon/lair that goes down into the earth, each with their own big boss creature for higher level quests. No loading screens anywhere, enemies restock automatically with a bonus to their count whenever anyone accepts a quest in their area, so players can make it more difficult for each other by taking the same quest then hanging back. Oh and treasure chests around the landscape which restock for a player whenever another one has used them.

I'd play Nutcracker. My babe and I love couch multiplayer where we can ambush each other with stuff like that. Maybe some sort of laser tag inspired dungeon with plenty of corners and columns to hide behind and roll between, and mist limiting visibility. 1 point per torso shot, 2 points for limbs and heads, 10 points for groin shots. Great idea.

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Fable - The Musical Design Process
"Ladies and gents, we're still alive
By the skin of our teeth - now it's killing time.
Angel in my pocket, d by my side.
We ain't going nowhere 'cause heroes never die."

this is awesome we need to get lion head to look at this i look forword to seeing if anything we say will be included

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if only there was enough swag to give to all mates here and back home

By now the design document for the game is complete and they'll be implementing things and testing options out. I hear they're looking for people to work on the GUI at the moment but it's unlikely that ideas on the forums will make their way into the main game, although DLC is always an option.

When I put up ideas like this it's because I think they'd go well in the game, fit in with the world, and be fun for me to play and I'm interested in the different views the community has on them. The ideas may not make it into the game I'm talking about, but if a designer reads these forums (and comparing Dragon Age and the Fable II wishlist says that some designers read these forums at least) and sees an idea that's almost fully formed and has reception then they may be inspired to do something similar for later projects. No-one's going to turn down something they think is a idea just because someone on the forum thought of it, and I like to think they have a big board of our ideas to put together and try out when they're bored. But there are approval levels and meetings about features that whittle down some ideas and change others completely as people add new things in. During that process an idea like this may turn into a multiplayer competitive rescue the princess mode, then that gets cut for space/time/budget and eventually you hit a point where the idea becomes jump 5 times in a row and get the Mario achievement along with a cutscene of the princess thanking you for rescuing her and a soundbite of the old Guildmaster saying "It's-a me. Do you have any potions?". Also directionary concerns may cause a mode like this to be cut. This is competitive multiplayer while Fable seems focussed on cooperative multiplayer and if one were to get in the way of the other they'd go with their focus each time. It's just how game design works.

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Fable - The Musical Design Process
"Ladies and gents, we're still alive
By the skin of our teeth - now it's killing time.
Angel in my pocket, d by my side.
We ain't going nowhere 'cause heroes never die."

hmmmmm point it's a shame really but they would clash with each other but theres always a chance it could happen some were else

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if only there was enough swag to give to all mates here and back home

this should be implemented

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-DR T JR-

I got MY Lavos Spawn From
Luna's Lavos Spawn Adoption Agency!

The main problem with this idea is that technical limitations were not considered. No loading screens, an area bigger than bower lake with a big dungeon under it, 4 player support...it's not going to happen.

It would also need a hell of a lot of script support and testing.

Interesting idea though.

Seriously Gradius you need to change your name to Buzz Killington I assume this idea was more of a discussion rather than an actual idea to be implemented though

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Chick'n Kick'n:

1st Option: There are 4 pens like in the "Perfect world" sequence, each one is separated and has 10 chickens outside each one, The 1st player to get 10 chickens in thier pen wins, or the most when time runs out.

2nd option: There is a scoreboard the same as the one from Oakvale TLC, and players take it in turns to take a kick onto the dart/chicken-board, after 3 kicks each the person with the most points wins,

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Someone once said i have ADD, that means i get distracted really ea..OMG SQUIRREL!

@Trinitykill

You are a mastermind
I love odd mini games in games, l4d2 did this in the carnival and I went ecstatic.

To bad the OP's idea would take too much work, though if they just spent time on simply that and made in a nice DLC I would buy it, though it would probably be at a pricey cost.

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"Ahoy gentlemen, you may call me Wax."
"The Sam is a Lie"

And that's the difference between experienced game developers/dream crushers and experienced game players. One of us knows exactly how many hours work something like this would take compared to the pay-off players would get, and the other just wants more cool stuff in the game and doesn't care that all the ideas would mean five discs running simultaneously on seperate Xbox 360s.

Yeah this is more intended to start a conversation about multiplayer modes or features and what people want than as an actual working feature, although it got a better reception than I thought it would. I'm thinking multiplayer (in between weird Zoe Wannamaker day dreams) so was wondering what others wanted in that area. I'm thinking that both cooperative and competitive things are needed to keep things interesting.

One idea I had was to allow revolution. One player plays the game as normal then, when they're king or queen, another player can attempt to cause a revolution themselves. They'd approach the factions that aren't happy with the king player, making their own promises and set up problems for the king to try and sort out. The big problem with that is that it's a campaign mode that would take days or even weeks to play out meaning not many people would see it through. One way to sort that out would be to have any second player who takes that option be cast as a member of a revolutionary group and not just a single person trying to overthrow the king, with the king's job being what is measured in those games although that offers little incentive for the revolutionary players. Perhaps they could rob treasury caravans and take the gold back to their own games or something.

Mini games spread around the land are a idea for competitive multiplayer without coming out of the world itself. Maybe they could add a gambling feature where two players can put items and gold in the pot (with the game figuring out the values and making players even it out) and whoever does best takes the pot. Maybe players could bet on the most of a certain type of kill in a region as well or most experience earned.

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Fable - The Musical Design Process
"Ladies and gents, we're still alive
By the skin of our teeth - now it's killing time.
Angel in my pocket, d by my side.
We ain't going nowhere 'cause heroes never die."

I say add loading screens. Most MMO players realize that loading screens only give a minor time advantage to the first person through them. Technical limitations could be managed with separate loads for each of those areas. Scripting would still be an issue though. ^_^    I'd really love something like this. I'm sure LH could figure out something, either with this idea or something along the same vein.

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http://criticalhitgameblog.blogspot.com/

All in all everything is just ideas. Weather they get used is up to lions head. but we shall all hope and talk about what we want for the games and if we are lucky they will hear us. lol so scream my brothers and sisters scream to your hearts content!

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if only there was enough swag to give to all mates here and back home