Last week Microsoft held a conference call that allowed members of the press to partake in a 30 minute interview with members of the Fable: The Lost Chapters development team. While we'll have hands-on from the game coming your way very shortly, we took the opportunity to clarify some questions we've had about the preview build, and take a look into the future of the series.

One of the minor issues we had with Fable: The Lost Chapters on PC was the ease of use the mouse and keyboard awarded. While some may view this as a positive, the ability to use a mouse and keyboard makes precision aiming a very simply task. However, the development team has confirmed that while most of the game will remain the same difficulty, there have been a few tweaks to ensure that PC owners can't simply breeze through the game.

Speaking of breezing through the game, hardcore players of the original Fable found several ways to exploit the system and create a super character that could obliterate all in his path. The development team is aware of this, and they've taken the necessary steps to remove several of these exploits. In fact, every known exploit has been removed or adjusted to keep players working for their experience, and training has been revised to keep the game relatively balanced.

While the Xbox original was a very well received RPG, one thing many fans complained about was how short the adventure was. In Lost Chapters, the development team has added one-third more content, to ensure the game will last longer. There are now more people to talk to, and more items to find. In addition, Fable is a game where the player can do anything they want. They can experiment with everything in the game world and really take their time as they work through the game.

The Xbox and PC versions of Lost Chapters will be virtually identical, but the PC version will support better visuals with higher resolutions. When asked about a possible Xbox 360 Fable in the future, the development team didn't have much to say, but anything can happen, and with the tremendous success of the original, it's a safe bet we'll see something on the Xbox 360.

One of the main debates about the Xbox 360 has been the lack of a standard hard drive in the Core Package. So we asked the Fable crew is they felt the lack of a hard drive would have an impact on development of a new Fable for the X360. The team informed us that the original Fable, and Lost Chapters uses the hard drive for streaming textures. The 512 MB of RAM and the power of the CPU would be doing most of the work, so not having a hard drive wouldn't be much of a limitation.

With the recent news about the Grand Theft Auto Hot Coffee mod, we decided to ask the Fable team if that affected anything in the game. Since Fable gives players a choice between good and evil, and that choice has proper consequences, the game has not seen any changes. In fact, in Germany, where the team felt they might have some issues, the game was well received due to the ability to choose your path, and accept the consequences of becoming evil.

Fable: The Lost Chapters will be hitting store shelves later this month for the PC. The development team is very pleased to be able to reward PC owners for waiting patiently, with the additional content featured in Lost Chapters. The future is still a mystery for the Fable team, but it seems like a given that we'll see an Xbox 360 version in the future, and the team would also love to do a massively multiplayer version of Fable. Only time will tell what's next for the team, but hopefully we'll get an official announcement on their next project at X05 or E3 2006.