Play Fable 3 Without Windows Live

[Renita Lukins]

Youwill be called upon to rally and fight alongside your people, ascend to the seat of power, and experience the true meaning of love and loss while defending your throne. In your quest to seize power and defend your kingdom, the choices you make will change the world around you, for the greater good or your own personal gain. Who will you become? A rebel without a cause, the tyrant you rebelled against, or the greatest ruler to ever live?

A fake version of xlive.dll that allows you to play fable 3 single player without having games for windows - live installed. It fairly obviously isn't compatible with any multiplayer elements, and you wont be able to download any dlc/patches in game, whether free or otherwise.

This has been tested only on versions 1.0 and 1.1, on a retail disc edition. I've no idea whether or not it'll work on a download version, and forward compatibility with any future fable 3 patches isn't guaranteed. This is not a crack, and an internet connection is still required for the initial online activation.

The benifits of not using gfwl are faster loading and saving times, an increase in fps, (albeit not the 5-30% you typically get from removing securom,) and no out-of-place looking gfwl screens popping up all over the place.

If you haven't already, install fable 3 normally. Run it once and fill in your activation code. Let it perform its 0-day release check and online activation gunk, then get as far as the g4wl sign in screen, click the red x and then click quit.

xuidl / xuidh:

Two 8 digit hex numbers, in 0x00000000 format. These combine to make offline user id that will be used. This is what is used to segregate savegames, etc. The default is 0x10001000 for each. (xuidl is the least significant 8 bytes, and xuidh the most.)

ShowMessages:

Valid values are 0, 1 or 2. Default is 2. If 1, any xlive messages are shown in a messagebox. If 0, they're ignored. If 2, they're rendered in game in a very crappy but fullscreen-safe way. I advise against setting this to 1 while running fullscreen.

UseDLC:

This option is experimental, and may or may not work!

Valid values are 0, 1 or 2, default 0. If 1, enables the use of the free DLC. First download a copy of the free DLC, then copy it to '\data\dlc\content'. After downloading from gfwl it'll be in '\Microsoft\XLive\DLC\\content', but you can copy the files from someone else if you don't have a gfwl account. Copy across all files in the content directory; there should be 40 of them in total.

The paid for DLC (understone, etc.) is not supported.

Note that after using this option, your save will become dlc dependent, and cannot be loaded without the dlc present. Due to the experimental nature of this option, I strongly recommend backing up your save games before switching it on.

Setting this to 2 works identically to 1, except that instead of a single folder being used called 'data\dlc', you get 10 to use named from 'data\mod0' to 'data\mod9'. This is to facilitate packaging mods as dlc, which allows for easy installs. (Or at least, easier than trying to repack levels.bnk)

LoaderPatch:

Valid values are 0 or 1. Default is 0. If set to 1, removes the check in fable 3 that it's been launched from the launcher, but it triggers some other securom checks, such as forcing the game into low detail mode. It's really only for me, for testing purposes to stop securom whining about the debugger; I don't recommend using it in a real game.

Fable does a lot of checksumming and checks on save files before letting you load them, so you can't just copy/paste save files around and expect them to work. To switch a save over to the fake gfwl, open it up in the save game editor and use the option to recalculate checksums. Note that if you were previously playing online, and were using anything other than the free DLC, then the gfwl remover will not be able to load your save.

fable also has an independent xuid check, so view the save you're opening in the save editor, note down the 'remote xuid' value, and set the xuidl/xuidh values in gfwl's ini appropriately, and make sure you put the saves in a matching directory. (Alternatively, edit the save to use the default xuid of 1000100010001000, which saves you having to worry about which is the high or low part.)

And remember: If this goes wrong you'll corrupt the save games for real, and even if nothing goes wrong, you'll be unable to load the newly saved savegame using g4wl, so again, BACKUP THE WHOLE SAVE FOLDER BEFORE STARTING!!!

v0.4

Added an option to change your xuid

Included instructions for importing g4wl savegames

Added an option to display xlive messages in a win32 dialog

Renamed SuppressLoaderPatch to LoaderPatch and flipped the logic

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Now, i star to play fable 3 a couple of weeks ago, after beating the game i start to play with trainers...after finish the game a couple of more times, i downloaded the "fable complete edition" i dont know if it is the real name, the thing is that edition of the game come's with out the "games for windows live", and if i am correct all the trainers work with gfwl, my question is: does anyone knows of any trainer that can work with out gfwl or know how to make it work?.

It's a grey January morning and the rain batters the windows of the taxi taking me from Guildford train station to Surrey Research Park. Typical English weather, then, as I head to the home of a developer which has been making typically English video games for a decade.

1 Occam Court is an unremarkable medium-sized building surrounded by wet grass. A nearby lake adds a whiff of the countryside to the place, despite it being down the road from Guildford Town Centre. Inside over 100 staff beaver away on the Xbox's premier exclusive role-playing game series, among other things.

This is my first visit to Lionhead, which I am ashamed to admit. No time for moping; there's a form to sign and a trophy cabinet to admire. A couple of Interactive Achievement Awards; three BAFTAs; four custom Xbox 360 consoles; a special disc to celebrate 1m sales of the first Fable game; a special edition that was never released because of a manufacturing problem; and a giant coin behind a smaller coin, the former a treasure once hidden as part of a promotional stunt, the latter the reward for fans who found it.

The Fable franchise has an impressive history. In September 2004, after nearly six years of development, the original Fable launched on the original Xbox. It was a global hit, going on to shift 2m units. 2008 saw the release of the hotly-anticipated follow-up, Fable 2, for the Xbox 360. It was an even bigger hit, selling 3.5m copies. Two years later, in 2010, Fable 3 turned up, but it failed to hit the heights of its predecessor. In 2012 we had the downloadable spin-off Fable Heroes, and then, later that year, the disappointing Kinect-exclusive Fable: The Journey.

This September Lionhead celebrates the tenth anniversary of the Fable series. To mark the occasion, next month it will release the appropriately-named Fable Anniversary, a high definition remake of the original game, powered by Epic's Unreal Engine 3 and due out on Xbox 360. It is, according to its creators, a labour of love for the studio. For me it's one hell of a nostalgia trip. Listening to Oakvale's remastered music and admiring the Heroes' Guild's gorgeous HD visuals rekindles memories not just of my first foray into the lush world of Albion, but all those original Xbox games I spent so many hours playing.

It's also a fitting send off for the old-school Fable, that traditional, single-player role-playing experience whose days, it seems, are numbered. The next full-fledged Fable game is Fable Legends, an online, multiplayer-focused Fable game built using the fancy Unreal Engine 4 for the Xbox One. If Lionhead has been going through a transition over the last couple of years, then 2014 marks the point of no return, and Fable Legends, whenever that comes out, will signify its end.

Through the lobby and past a Demon Door lift is what has been dubbed Memory Lane. It's a corridor with red carpet and a wall with vinyl prints of images lifted from all the Fable games ever released. There's even a picture of one of Fable's infamous male prostitutes. On the other wall is the machine used to press the first Black & White disc way back in 2001. It hasn't been used since.

Memory Lane is new and incomplete. More images will be plastered on the wall, and other walls, throughout the studio as its long list of games inches ever longer. Ted Timmins, the enthusiastic, passionate lead designer of Fable Anniversary, tells me Lionhead's white wall space is an endangered species. Soon, there will be pictures of Fable everywhere. There can be no doubt: this is the home of Fable.

There's more new stuff to see. Lionhead's recently had a state of the art audio facility installed. It's made up of five sound design rooms, each set up to support the Xbox One's 7.1 surround sound capabilities. Lionhead's dining room has table tennis and foosball tables for its hundreds of designers to unwind with. On one wall are photographs entered into the Microsoft-wide Photo Club competition. Lionhead artist Adonis Stevenson won last year, I'm told. On the other wall a smorgasbord of Fable fan art, a visual reminder of what this is all about.

I'm not allowed upstairs, where developers are making Fable Legends and other, unannounced games, so instead head outside of 1 Occam Court into the drizzle (Ted has a Resident Evil Umbrella umbrella picked up at PAX last year to hand, just in case) and toward Alan Turing building, the other half of Lionhead Studios. This is the home of Lionhead boss John Needham's first-party publishing business, and Lionhead Incubation, where new game ideas are massaged in advance of full production.

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