While there may have been a bit of a furore over whether or not Fable II’s much-anticipated online co-operative mode would be available when the game ships, it seems the storm can be quelled, somewhat.

The game disc will not ship with online co-op enabled, but a patch will be available on the first day of the title being available, so you will probably be prompted to update once you pop in the disc. That’s the plan, anyway. According to the Lionhead blog:

“Remember a couple of days ago (or was it a week) where on a blog it was mentioned that Fable II would be shipping ‘without’ Online Co-op? And remember we said we were busting our balls to get it ready in time for a ‘Day One’ release? Well - news folks! It looks like we’ve done it…for all of you who are connected to Xbox Live, when starting up your copy of Fable II (on 21st October in USA, 24th October in Europe and 18th December in Japan). So all of you getting upset and all, you wouldn’t even have noticed… Sort of. Well done to the team.

Taken into account we don’t fail certification!”

Lionhead chief Peter Molyneux tried to assure the fans, regarding the patch:

“It’s still not 100 percent at the moment. It’s in certification. They are checking to make sure everything is OK,” Molyneux said. “We have never had anything fail certification before so that’s a good sign. I’m super, super hopeful. That was our plan to make it a day one patch.”

Molyneux goes on to explain the difficulties of including online co-op from the beginning:

“The problem is when you are dealing with multiplayer very often, and especially this was the case with Fable, the whole of the single player experience has to work perfectly. Because if you link two single player experiences up and anything goes wrong than the games just fall out of sync.”

“That’s why you need this extra bit of time because you need to finish the whole of the game. This is actually something we did on the PC for years. You always did a patch, so it was very accepted that you went back home and you loaded the game up and it was patched.”

Right on?