Text-based games, management RPGs, and visual novels – of whatever kind – rarely make the most exciting previews. It's just not easy to build a rich interest in the world and characters of a story you can only get the slightest taste of. I'm very pleased to say that a few hours with Sovereign Tower broke that trend entirely.

Whosoever turns the key in the giant magic lock on the tower becomes king. So, as the mystically-appointed lord of the tower, your poor faceless wanderer becomes a very important person overnight in what developer Wild Wits calls a "story-rich, Round Table management RPG." It's an entertaining concept that draws its characters and dialogue equally from fantastical tradition and modern life. Couple that with a deliciously detailed art style and a sense of what's most entertaining to do in both management games and visual novels.

That's enough to sell it, I think, but it also has some nice surprises and a weird little twist on the genre as a whole. I had a pretty darn good time with it, and I'm looking forward to more.

King of the Castle

In each turn of Sovereign Tower, you have to do two things: accept audiences, then assign knights from your round table to various quests. Taking audiences is a simple concept: Sit on the throne and deal with problems people bring you. The decisions you make there can alter the path of the story, bring up new quests for your knights, or avoid problems. They'll also affect the sovereign's standing with the realm's four factions: the Nobility, People, Merchants, and Scholars.

Some problems go away if you just throw money at them, and the taxes you get at the start of every cycle can pay for some of that—but those are the same taxes you use to pay for stuff like cool new swords and horses and magic potions, so do you really want to spend them on boring stuff like bridges or whatever? Probably not.

That sounds pretty normal, but it's the weirdos that show up to need things from you or to join your kingdom that make it memorable. I encountered a stinky jester, proud emissaries unable to admit they couldn't solve their own problems, clever peasants, annoying nobles, and even an assassin. Talking with them solidifies the personality of your blank-slate Sovereign, raising their stats in Audacity, Tyranny, Wisdom, and Kindness to unlock alternate decisions in future events.

The Knights are the flavor that'll really have to carry the game, and from what I saw they might do it. I met a huge guy that acted like a child, a very fancy boy, an extremely overdramatic guy, a nice lady who loved forest critters, the most goth knight ever, and even a straight-up actual wolf. Each of them had their own unique little events and dialogue that popped up from time to time, each of which affected your sovereign's relationship with them. They also had history to learn, as well as more straightforward stats, all of which affect their performance on missions.

Figuring out which knight would be best for each quest was an actually interesting choice. Equipment like a specific horse to ride, a sword to use, or a magic potion can give them temporary stat boosts, but it's often the bonuses or penalties from their personality traits that make the difference between a failure and success or between mere success and an outstanding victory.

For example if you're doing something that's a bit of public relations? Probably should send the more charismatic knight, but not the really arrogant one. Watching each knight's background and figuring out which of the little highlighted keywords apply to the current mission is a fun bit of understanding the characters.

And there's a real penalty for failure. Your knights each have an armor score, which if it goes to zero means that knight's, well, dead and gone. Your blacksmith can only fix one knight's armor each cycle—so you need to be reasonably sure that the task you're sending a knight on is one they can at least survive if they fail.

Shining Armor

None of the characters, nor the entire game as I saw it, would have nearly as much personality without the visual art on display in Sovereign Tower, and I've got to take a moment to run through the influences and elements that make it up. Starting with the simple choices of colors to draw from: The warm pastels, earth tones, and jewel tones are lovely, then they're combined with copious golden shades and tints to express lighting. It's a palette of colors that's something between stained glass or rich watercolor on thick paper.

The characters are drawn with a lot of emotion and movement, too, for what are otherwise relatively flat portraits. You can feel the shrug in how Urusla stands, for example. You can see the carefree attitude in the angle of Angelica's head. And, well, everything about Gideon tells you exactly who he is and how he behaves. It's not just great illustration work in that you can feel the motion, it's that you can immediately start to feel who the characters are just from how they look.

It's clear that these are artists who understand how to work their chosen medium, and if you'll put up with me for a nerd moment, it is deeply reminiscent of the Art Nouveau period in design from France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Particularly the advertisements, posters, and calendars of justly-famous artist Alphonse Mucha. It's a fitting choice, too: Mucha's work often used the kind of medieval romantic and even fairytale themes that Sovereign Tower seems to use in its stories—I imagine he'd approve of being the inspiration here.

I think that's where I'd place this whole game's artistic style, too: It's a blend of medieval fantasy and Arthurian romance setting, the art of Mucha, and the writing of a wryly clever modern comic book. There's basically nothing to dislike in that.

The Clever Twist

It's not a surprise to people who like this kind of game that there are going to be secret events and pathways through the story to uncover, as well as desperate outcomes and painful prices to pay when choosing poorly at certain decision points. I found that Sovereign Tower must have more than a few, since I managed to stumble into at least two hidden story outcomes while playing just by assigning an unexpected or suboptimal knight to a specific quest.

The frustration with these kinds of events, however, is that they can give you unwanted outcomes or change the story when you weren't expecting them to or were aiming for another outcome. The only choice you've got at that point is often to play the entire visual novel over again just to see a new path or the immediate consequence of a tough choice.

The real good choice that Sovereign Tower makes is to have a built-in do-over mechanic. See, there's a demon that lives in a cage in the tower basement, which I'm sure isn't scary or plot-relevant at all because the demon helps you do something very useful: Step back in time. Don't worry—the demon assures me this is because it has absolutely no bad intentions and is bound to help you—much like all the other magical things that live in the tower.

With the demon's help you can turn back time, especially when some choice you've made would lead to a disastrous end. I expect you'll also be able to use the power to avoid the worst ends in the game, and I'm betting most players will want to use it at least once or twice to avoid making whatever NPC they've chosen to romance not mad at them about something. There's also the hint, given in the trailer and screenshots for Sovereign Tower, that you'll be able to use the demon's power to unlock alternate dialogue in situations you've seen before—tagged with an "Omniscience" stat that surely won't upset or alarm people who don't realize you're time travelling.

Overall, from the art and the writing, I'm pretty intrigued by Sovereign Tower and it's going on my list of games to watch out for. Sure, the game mechanics are pretty simple, but when the story and characters are interesting in this way I'm glad the game rules are getting out of the way to let me entertain myself—failing and succeeding on my own terms.

If you’ve been looking to grab some Amazon devices for a super low price, you’ll want to check out Woot’s sale. From Ring Doorbells to Echo Smart Speakers, everything is an extra 20% off. That’s not the only great deal at Woot, as you can grab a Samsung Frame TV for the lowest price we’ve seen. Moving on to Amazon deals, a LEGO F1 model car kit, Razer’s Black Shark V3 Pro Headset, and Tom & Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology are all seeing healthy discounts. Check out all the top deals below:

TL;DR: The Best Deals Today

20% Off Already Discounted Amazon Devices

Already discounted Amazon devices are an extra 20% on Woot today. When you use the code DEVICES20 at checkout, you’ll see an extra 20% taken off the price at the Amazon-owned company. It’s an awesome sale with items selling out quickly. In fact, a few products I had saved were already gone by the time I went back. Still, whether you’re after a Kindle device, Ring security cameras, Echo smart speakers, Fire TV sticks, and more, there are plenty of deals you’ll want to hop on. Many of these devices are either Amazon refurbished or in like-new condition, but you’ll get a nice 90-day warranty for peace of mind.

Score Over $10 Off A LEGO F1 Model Car Kit

Razer Black Shark V3 Pro Headset for Xbox Hits Lowest Price

Samsung The Frame 4K TVs Hit New Low Price

3 Months of Audible Premium Plus for $0.99/mo

Tom & Jerry: The Golden Era Anthology (1940-1958) Is Discounted

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Last Ronin Box Set Is Lowest Price Ever

Save $200 on a Motherboard and Memory Combo

Save 23% on Magic: The Gathering Avatar: The Last Airbender Beginner Box

Get a 100W GaN USB-C Charger for Only $15

We’ve finally gotten our first good look at Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord, the latest animated series in this ever-expanding franchise. Shadow Lord follows Sam Witwer’s iconic villain as he sets about rebuilding his criminal empire in the era of the Empire. And while he may be the star of the show, there are a few other familiar faces popping up in this series.

Let’s take a deep dive into the new Shadow Lord trailer to break down both the returning favorites and the new additions to the Star Wars ranks. How does this series fit into Maul’s complex storyline? Here’s what you need to know.

Sam Witwer as Maul

Naturally, the former Darth Maul is the star of the show with this new series. For a character that was seemingly killed off in his first appearance back in 1999’s Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Maul has certainly taken on a second life thanks to The Clone Wars and other animated series. Shadow Lord aims to fill in some major blanks with Maul’s story and connect the dots between the end of The Clone Wars and Maul’s cameo appearance in 2018’s Solo: A Star Wars Story.

For those who haven’t been following Maul’s journey over the past decade-and-a-half, the character made his unexpected return in The Clone Wars, where we learned that he survived his duel with Obi-Wan Kenobi through the power of sheer hate. Maul was restored to some semblance of sanity and health and set about building a criminal empire called the Shadow Collective with the help of his brother, Savage Opress, and the Mandalorian faction known as Death Watch.

And yet, fate still hasn’t been kind to Maul in the years since. He narrowly survived a reunion with his old master, Darth Sidious (though Savage wasn’t so lucky). In the final Clone Wars story arc, “The Siege of Mandalore,” Maul was defeated by Ahsoka Tano and taken into Republic custody. He narrowly escaped after the events of Order 66 played out, and that’s pretty much where we find him now in Shadow Lord. He’s a free man again, but his criminal organization is in shambles, and the newly formed Empire is hunting him along with the other surviving Jedi.

As the series opens, Maul’s journey to rebuild the Shadow Collective takes him to a new Star Wars planet called Janix. This advanced planetary metropolis has mostly been a free player in the larger galactic order up till now, meaning there’s a lot of opportunity for an ambitious crime lord looking to re-stake his claim on the underworld.

“It's one part Gotham, one part Metropolis and a hundred percent Star Wars with all these different levels and layers,” Executive Producer Matt Michnovetz told StarWars.com. “It's a city essentially built into a crater on this planet that is untouched by the Empire. It's got a functioning democracy and law enforcement doing a good job of policing their own community. It's a rich environment for crime and gangsters, but so far there's been a very peaceful accord between all of them in the interest of business.”

Shadow Lord is set early on in the reign of Palpatine’s Empire, at least in Season 1. The question is how much time the show will ultimately cover. Will we see Maul grow to become the master of the powerful Crimson Dawn organization, as he is in Solo: A Star Wars Story (which is set about 10 years before A New Hope)? Will the series advance even further to reveal what happens after and why Maul becomes stranded on Malchor in Star Wars Rebels? There are a lot of blanks the series can fill in with this character, even if we already know how his story ultimately ends.

Gideon Adlon as Devon Izara

Maul: Shadow Lord will introduce a number of new characters to the Star Wars canon, but probably the most important of these is Devon Izara. From what we can glean from the trailer, Devon is one of the Jedi who survives the Jedi Purge, only to find herself on the run and battling against Stormtroopers and the Sith Inquisitorius.

It appears that Devon becomes an unlikely ally of Maul’s in this series, despite the two characters coming from opposite sides of the Jedi/Sith tracks. As Devon is sure to learn, the old rivalries don’t necessarily matter in this new era where survival is everything.

“Devon is a young person who's living through challenging times and realizes that the future she once thought she was going to have is no longer possible, and so she has to adapt,” said Michnovetz.

Maul is certainly fond of recruiting minions to become his latest Sith apprentice. He did it with his brother, and he tried to do it with Ahsoka on Mandalore. We suspect he sees a similar opportunity in Devon, a chance to shepherd an impressionable young Force user and, in turn, forge himself into a true Sith master capable of exacting vengeance on Sidious.

Whether he ultimately proves successful in turning Devon to the Dark Side will probably be one of the key questions in the series. But some fans are already speculating that we’re about to see Lucasfilm add another popular Expanded Universe character to the modern Disney canon. The theory is that Devon will eventually become Darth Talon, another Force-sensitive Twi’lek and a major villain from the comic book series Star Wars Legacy.

In those comics, Talon is active more than a hundred years after the fall of the Empire, but that hasn’t stopped the fires of speculation from burning. And it’s worth remembering that George Lucas himself was a big fan of Talon and reportedly wanted her included in the canceled Darth Maul video game. Maybe he’ll finally see a version of that desire realized.

Wagner Moura as Brander Lawson

While Maul will face plenty of opposition of the lightsaber-wielding variety (and we’ll get to those characters shortly), it looks as though one of his main new antagonists in the series is a humble cop named Captain Brander Lawson. Brander is a police detective on Janix, one who has so far managed to keep the peace in the chaotic early years of the Empire’s reign. Maul’s arrival surely threatens that fragile peace.

Brander wears a uniform similar to that of Kyle Soller’s Syril Karn in Season 1 of Star Wars: Andor. That gives us a clearer picture of what his place is in the law enforcement hierarchy. He’s not an Imperial officer, but part of the local Janix police force. We suspect that, as much as Brander and the Empire are aligned in their desire to see Maul brought to justice, he’ll be butting heads with them as they start to assert more dominance over the Janix sector.

Richard Ayoade as Two-Boots

Richard Ayoade is adding another Star Wars role to his repertoire with Shadow Lord. Just as he voiced the droid Q9-0 in The Mandalorian, Ayoade will play a different droid character called Two-Boots in Shadow Lord. Two-Boots is Brander Lawson’s faithful partner and companion. He gets his name from - you guess it - the unusual pair of boots he wears on the job.

Star Wars fans will get a chance to become acquainted with both Brander and Two-Boots before the animated series premieres in April. They’re also central figures in the Marvel Comics prequel series Star Wars: Shadow of Maul.

“This is a sci-fi story, but it's also a crime story,” writer Benjamin Percy told Marvel.com. “It's a story about cops, criminal syndicates, a neon-lit, shadow-alleyed city that hides many sins and secrets. I'm teamed up with an artist who's already a Star Wars veteran and legend: Madibek Musabeckov. His art is gritty and grounded and perfectly matches the noir tone. We've been in close contact with Lucasfilm—reading scripts and watching episodes of this fantastic new animated series—and our story will serve as a prelude to what viewers will see play out on the screen.”

Vanessa Marshall as Rook Kast

Maul will have at least one other ally in his early quest to rebuild his shattered empire. It turns out some Mandalorians are still loyal to him, even after the fall of their world. Vanessa Marshall will reprise her role as Rook Kast, the leader of Maul’s Mandalorian super commandos. She’s likely a fugitive from the law, like Maul himself, and sees an opportunity in Maul’s criminal scheme.

A.J. LoCascio as Marrok

We first encountered the mysterious Marrok in Ahsoka Season 1, where he was one of several lightsaber-wielding villains going up against Rosario Dawson’s Ahsoka Tano and Natasha Liu Bordizzo’s Sabine Wren. Marrok proved to be a silent but deadly mercenary, and we eventually learned that the reason is that he was resurrected as a zombie by Nightsister magic.

But at this earlier stage in the Star Wars timeline, Marrok is still (as far as we know) an ordinary flesh-and-blood member of the Sith Inquisitorius. He even carries the esteemed rank of First Brother. He’ll even have actual dialogue this time around, with A.J. LoCascio cast in the role for the first time.

“The Empire is consolidating the galaxy from the core worlds out, and the Inquisitorius is stronger than ever,” Michnovetz said. “They're hunting Jedi and other Force users, doing all kinds of nasty work. The galaxy at large is sort of dealing with this slow rise of the Empire and different groups have different understandings of what the Empire is. The same thing goes for the Inquisitors. They’re secret mercenaries that show up out of the darkness.”

We may even learn how Marrok dies his original death in this series. The safe bet is that either Maul himself or Devon gets the upper hand on this character.

Clancy Brown (?) as Eleventh Brother

Marrok won’t be the only Sith Inquisitor to appear in Season 1 of Shadow Lord. We also catch a glimpse of Eleventh Brother, a character who previously appeared in the anthology series Star Wars: Tales of the Jedi and Tales of the Empire. We assume Clancy Brown will once again voice Eleventh Brother.

Like Marrok, it appears that Eleventh Brother has been tasked with hunting down Maul and bringing him to Imperial justice. Unlike Marrok, though, we know he won’t be getting killed off in this show. That honor was already claimed by Ahsoka in Tales of the Jedi.

The Other Shadow Lord Characters

Disney’s press release for Maul: Shadow Lord drops several other key names. We know that the cast also includes Dennis Haysbert as Master Eeko-Dio-Daki, Chris Diamantopoulos as Looti Vario, Charlie Bushnell as Rylee Lawson, David C. Collins as Spybot, and Steve Blum as Icarus. For now, it’s hard to put those names to faces we see in the trailer, but let us know in the comments if you have any ideas.

For more on the future of the Star Wars franchise, find out what to expect from Star Wars in 2026 and see why we only need one thing from Lucasfilm’s new Presidents.

Jesse is a mild-mannered staff writer for IGN. Allow him to lend a machete to your intellectual thicket by following @jschedeen on BlueSky.

Why pay $250 for the new AirPods 3 when you can get the 2nd generation model for way, way cheaper? Vipoutlet through its eBay store is offering open box 2nd gen Apple AirPods Pro earbuds for just $108.72 with free shipping when you apply coupon code "VIPOUTLET2026". This is the second generation model with USB Type-C and MagSafe charging case. Vipoutlet has over 600,000 eBay feedback with an average 96.2% rating.

Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Gen) for $108.72

Open box with 90-day warranty

Forza Horizon 6 is set to release for Xbox Series X|S and PC on May 19 — unless you buy the most expensive edition, which comes out May 15. This latest installment of the reliably excellent Microsoft racing series whisks drivers to Japan to get their speed on. It’s available now to preorder in a number of editions (see it at Amazon). Below, you can find out what comes in each one, how much they cost, and more. Let’s put the pedal to the metal and take a look.

Standard Edition

Deluxe Edition

Xbox

• Get it at Xbox Store (digital) - $99.99

PC

• Get it at Steam - $99.99

The deluxe edition includes the game, the preorder bonus detailed below, plus the following:

• Car Pass - 30 new cars, with one new vehicle made available each week starting May 19.
• Welcome Pack - 5 special pre-tuned cars and a Car Voucher, which can be used to claim any car available from the Autoshow. You’ll also receive 3 tickets to redeem any Common or Rare clothing items.

Premium Edition

Xbox

• Get it at Xbox Store - $119.99

PC

• Get it at Steam - $119.99

If you want everything possible included with the game, plus early access, you’ll want to preorder the premium edition. It comes with the game, as well as the following:

• 4 day early access (May 15)
• Car Pass
• Expansion 1
• Expansion 2
• VIP Membership
• Time Attack Car Pack
• Italian Passion Car Pack
• Welcome Pack

On Game Pass Ultimate

Premium Upgrade Bundle

• Get it at Xbox Store - $59.99

If you have Game Pass, but you want to get all the extras included in the Premium edition, you can purchase the premium upgrade bundle.

Preorder Bonus

Preoder any version of Forza Horizon 6, and you'll receive a "pretuned and exclusive" Ferrari J50 in the game.

What Is Forza Horizon 6?

Forza Horizon 6 is the newest installment of Microsoft’s open-world racing game. You play as a tourist who joins the races as a novice and works the way up the racing ladder. It’s set in Japan, with a variety of biomes scattered around, from the skyscraper-dense, neon landscape of Tokyo to winding mountain roads and snowy vistas. It features over 550 real-world cars, which is the most in any Forza Horizon to date. That includes special Forza Edition cars fitted with extreme modifications, as well as rare Aftermarket Cars you can collect.

What About the PS5 Version?

Games that used to be Xbox exclusives are no longer Xbox exclusives in this brave new world we find ourselves in, which means Forza Horizon 6 is coming to PS5. Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't announced a release date for it. But with Forza Horizon 5's excellent sales numbers on PS5, you can bet it will arrive on Sony's console eventually.

More Preorder Guides

Chris Reed is a commerce editor and deals expert for IGN. He also runs IGN's board game and LEGO coverage. You can follow him on Bluesky.

If you're a Windows user who's looking for a PC version of the Apple Mac Mini, then this deal might be right up your alley. Amazon is currently offering Amazon Prime members the Kamrui Hyper H1 AMD Ryzen 7 6800H Mini PC for just $359.10 shipped with coupon code "KAMRUI119". This is a great opportunity to pick up a complete tiny PC package that includes everything - the CPU/GPU, RAM, storage, and OS - for less than the cost of a Mac Mini.

Kamrui Hyper H1 AMD Ryzen 7 6800H Mini PC for $359

Includes 32GB of DDR5-4800MHz RAM, 512GB SSD, and Windows 11 Pro

The highly anticipated next expansion for Pokémon TCG's Mega Evolution series, Ascended Heroes, is (as per usual) increasingly hard to get hold of right now. Preorders are unavailable at most major retailers, and if you missed The Pokémon Center's latest drop, then you're hard out of luck. Well, not entirely.

Trusted resale marketplace TCGplayer has just launched its selection of Ascended Heroes sealed products (see here), giving plenty of fans another opportunity to secure the new cards, albeit at a significantly higher price than MSRP.

I'll leave a link to everything that's now available in TCGplayer's presale, ready for the January 30, 2026, release. But, if that's not of interest to you, then we can swiftly move on to discussing the latest market price data on display for Ascended Heroes' sealed products.

Just to note, while Ascended Heroes will certainly be available from January 30, several products will be part of a staggered release instead. To get you up to speed, here's when to expect everything:

January 30, 2026

• Booster Collection (2 Pack)—Erika/Larry
• Tech Sticker Collection

February 20, 2026

• Elite Trainer Box
• Pokémon Center Elite Trainer Box
• Mini Tins
• First Partners Deluxe Pin Collection
• Premium Poster Collection—Mega Lucario or Mega Gardevoir

April 24, 2026

• Booster Bundle
• Mega Meganium ex Box, Mega Emboar ex Box, or Mega Feraligatr ex Box

With that out of the way, let's dig into the latest market price data on everything available right now at TCGplayer, whether it's actually worth the increased cost versus MSRP, and how it compares to the other sets from Mega Evolution so far.

Super Mario Bros. Wonder is a delightfully inventive and downright trippy video game. One of the earliest hallucinogenic bits you encounter are talking flowers. If you’re a fan of the chatty flora, you’re in luck: you can preorder a plastic Talking Flower of your own right now. They’re available at the Nintendo Store for $34.99, with a release date of March 12.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons got a big 3.0 update earlier this month, which alongside a lot of new content for everyone included a Nintendo Switch 2 upgrade with some fancy technological buffs. One of those was the ability to play with up to 12 total people on the same island, up from eight in the original version.

Sounds fun, right? Wrong. It's a nightmare. A nightmare once again spawned by Nintendo handling online functionality in the most ridiculous way possible.

I was so foolish and naive a week ago, when I first had the idea to get 12 of us together for an Animal Crossing session. It would be easy, I thought! So easy, I originally didn't even plan on writing anything about it! Let me just call up...11 other people I know who are still playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons.

Who also have Nintendo Switch 2s.

And somehow we'll manage to find an hour we can all do this, despite everyone being busy adults.

Okay, harder than I thought, but we did it! Last night, a group of 12 of us all logged on at once with a plan to meet up on my island. We considered using the Game Chat functionality, but decided against it due to lack of compatibility with Bluetooth headsets, the function's friending requirements, and the fact that you can't take screenshots while Game Chat is active. Discord it was, then, apparently still the second-best place for Nintendo Voice Chat (after the podcast, of course).

The plan was for an hour-long session from 9pm to 10pm last night, but I recalled that the cutscene for people landing on the island was a bit lengthy, and we'd have to watch it 11 times, so I logged on half an hour early to open my island so we could start filtering in. I was hopeful that with improved Nintendo Switch 2 loading times, it might not be so bad. And it's true, the actual loading times were notably faster, though most of the wait for people to land is a combination of said cutscene ("We'll be making a water landing, but that's OK because this is a seaplane.") and everyone saving the game each time, so we didn't really shorten the wait by that much.

But all that was to be expected. Here was where the nightmare began.

At 8:35pm, my friends began trickling in. We managed to get three people in before the entire session crashed, booting out everyone who had showed up so far and shutting my islands gates for me. I reopened at 8:46pm and we started again, this time creating a "queue" in our Discord text chat so everyone didn't try to flood in at once. At 8:58pm, one of my friends got an error that kicked her out alongside one other person, but everyone else stayed, so we brought them back and continued down the line.

At 9:19pm, I typed in Discord, "WE DID IT" as person #12 seemingly landed successfully.

At 9:21pm, as person #12 strolled in, another error occurred and two other people got kicked out. At this point, my husband (who was playing Ace Attorney next to me) started rolling his eyes.

At 9:24pm, one of the people who had been kicked out tried to rejoin, errored out, and the whole session crashed again. Every single person got booted back to their islands and my gates were closed again, just as we were finally about to taste success.

Please enjoy this timelapse video, courtesy of our intrepid Wiki writer KBABZ, of 40 minutes of us trying desperately to get everyone onto the island, only for the unthinkable to happen right at the very end:

I was undaunted. By golly, we got all these people together, we were going to hit each other with nets and drop recipe cards for each other! We started again from the top. This time I forbade everyone from doing anything once they landed aside from standing still in a line next to the airport. No menuing. No talking to villagers. Nothing. Folks started coming back in at 9:27pm. At 9:37pm, the fourth person to join crashed the island again. At 9:39pm, almost 40 minutes after our planned start time, we began yet again. Everyone posted cat pics in the Discord channel for emotional support.

This time worked. Finally, at 10:05pm, after multiple crashes and false starts, we had 12 people on my Animal Crossing island.

I'm happy to report that after the 90 minute ordeal that was getting 12 people onto one island, online play actually worked great. We all exchanged gifts, took a pic in the Town Square, explored the island, and got coffee at Brewster's. People wrote on my bulletin board and sent me letters. Some borrowed my Wario costume from the hotel. A couple people decided to play pranks, burying junk and trapping my villagers with holes. It was genuinely a pretty great time. It just, you know, took way too dang long to set up.

It's baffling to me that Nintendo's infrastructure for Animal Crossing is still set up this way. Yes, the island landing cutscene is very cute, and I do think the sea plane line is pretty funny. But why on earth do we need to sit through it 11 times, with everyone who's not traveling collectively watching a mostly-blank airport-themed loading screen? Why does everything on my island need to completely freeze and exit menus so someone can come in? Why does Group Stretching require me to be Best Friends with everyone on my island? How much worse would all this have been if we had used Game Chat? Mario Kart World doesn't have this problem!

The best explanation I can think of is that Nintendo genuinely didn't intend for anyone to use this feature in the first place. Animal Crossing: New Horizons' 3.0 update is fun, sure, but it's not creating the same massive surge in interest that existed in 2020 when we were all locked at home and had nothing better to do than ponder whatever it is that Dodos do. You're unlikely to ever need to collect 11 friends and drag them to your island all at once. Heck, given how hard this was to schedule, I'll be lucky to get four one of these weekends.

Anyway, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is still very fun to play with friends, but it's still a massive pain in the butt to actually set up the circumstances for that play to be possible. Next time I'll just get everyone together for Jackbox.

We're still checking out the big 3.0 update and all the fun new stuff that's been added. We've catalogued some of the surprising little changes, including the ability to strafe and jump, and we've got tips if you, like us, are returning to your island after a long hiatus. Oh, and check out this Zelda stuff added in the 3.0 update!

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Blogroll image screenshot courtesy of KBABZ.

Today, Game Freak's upcoming action game Beast of Reincarnation reemerged at the Xbox Developer Direct, with a lengthy segment showing off traversal, combat, its cast of characters, some dang good music, and more. Also, great news, it's apparently out this summer.

Beast of Reincarnation is a fascinating new game, and an anomaly in Game Freak's portfolio. Game Freak is, of course, best-known for developing Pokemon, a series that's grown in scope as it's transitioned to home console releases but has also seen notable declines in performance and visual quality. But Game Freak has also been increasing its other independent endeavors in recent years, with games such as HarmoKnight, Tembo the Badass Elephant, and Pocket Card Jockey.

But aside from Pokemon all of those have been fairly small-scale endeavors. Though we haven't gotten our hands on Beast of Reincarnation yet, this looks far more ambitious. It's a full-on action game, for one, with what seems to be pretty complex and multi-layered combat and movement. It's also, if the trailers are any indication, really pretty, and a departure from Game Freak's historically more cartoony style. That's led to plenty of questions as to what led Game Freak to make something like this in the first place, and whether or not the studio can pull it off. At least from what we saw today, there's reason for optimism.

I sat down with Kota Furushima, game director of Beast of Reincarnation, to chat about some of these topics, as well as get some further details on what exactly the game will be. Here's our full interview transcript, very lightly edited for clarity:

IGN: Beast of Reincarnation seems very, very different from anything Game Freak has done before. How did this game come to be?

Kota Furushima: So, it all started, I wanted to get something going. It was an original project. I wanted to try something completely different and new, unlike other stuff we've made. And it just so happened that internally, here at Game Freak, we have a program we call the Gear Project, which is sort of an internal contest run by our president, Satoshi Tajiri, to make original IP within the company. So, I entered my design doc into that contest, and I was able to get permission to start working on a project.

I should mention too, to clarify, it wasn't so much that I was trying to do something different than what we've done before. I started with the concept of the feeling that I wanted to get across to the users, the feeling of loneliness, isolation, and warmth, and the game design that we have now kind of coalesced naturally around that concept.

How long ago was it that you entered this in the contest?

Furushima: It was about six years ago.

Beast of Reincarnation does seem to be a significantly larger game than some of the other, I guess, non-Pokemon projects you've worked on before. Did the studio have to scale up significantly for Beast of Reincarnation?

Furushima: The team is quite large, as you can imagine, but I will note that it's not all folks internally here at Game Freak. We managed to seek out a lot of partner companies to work with us, companies, studios that are able to realize the vision of this game in the way that we wanted to make it, so we're lucky to have a lot of people working on it externally as well.

[PR reached out post-interview to clarify that the internal Game Freak team working on Beast of Reincarnation is "relatively small" while still playing a core role in leading the project through direction and management.]

Can you tell me about the original pitch that you entered into the contest, like what that original sort of design looked like?

Furushima: So, it was pretty simple at first. The general concept was the idea of taking a journey along with a companion. That was the main pillar of the game, and you started thinking about the feelings you wanted the player to have, and gradually, the design sort of began to coalesce around that idea of the journey with the companion.

Was there anything in particular that inspired you throughout the development of the game, other games, film, art, music, just any other art in particular that you were thinking of, as you worked on Beast of Reincarnation?

Furushima: Yeah, absolutely. I mentioned I'm a big fan of science fiction movies to start with, and because I wanted to create this new world that no one had seen before, I started really putting a lot of thought into the way world building is done and science fiction. Blade Runner was a specific one that I can mention, that does such a good job of world building. I wanted to try and create my own world in a similar sort of fashion.

So, Beast of Reincarnation, I know, was originally announced under the Private Division label when it was part of Take-Two, and then Private Division got acquired, renamed, and is now being run by different people. I'm curious if all those changes impacted the development of Beast of Reincarnation in any way.

Furushima: There's probably not much I can say about that, to be honest.

Okay, tell me a bit about the structure of Beast of Reincarnation. Is it a linear, story focused game? Is it open world, Metroidvania, something else?

Furushima: The way we created this game, it is about a journey with a beginning, middle, and end, right? It kind of conjures up images of a road movie sort of thing, so it's not open world in the purest sense. The game is comprised of different stages, but these stages I would not describe as linear either. There's quite a lot of room for exploration, a lot of radiation between the different environments and things of that nature.

What are you primarily doing in these different stages? Are you primarily fighting creatures? Are you doing more exploration? Are there puzzles? What are the main activities that you're doing as the character?

Furushima: You're doing a lot of different things in the game. I think there are no traditional puzzles to put block progress, for instance, as you saw them, but there are definitely puzzle adjacent segments of the game. For example, this game takes place in a world that's been largely destroyed, so you could come to a part where you want to get across a chasm, and the bridge has been destroyed, so you have to start thinking, "How can I get across there?" Now, luckily, Emma, the main character, has a lot of abilities at her disposal. She can extend at the vine or plant, I don't know what you call it, her hair actually. I mean, she can use that, for example, to cross a chasm instead of a bridge, right? So she has certain abilities at her disposal that can help her get through this world. Of course, battle is a huge part of the game, as well as exploration. There's definitely parts where you want to see what's off the beaten path as well.

How challenging is the combat? I'm curious if there's difficulty settings or if a casual player could pick it up and feel comfortable with counters and things like that?

Furushima: First of all, I should say that, yes, there are three difficulty settings in the game. As many people to play it as possible, there's going to be story mode. There's a little bit easier, there's normal mode, and then of course there's hard move where enemies are significantly stronger.

Even in the normal mode, it's important to note that the game is not just played through the single character of Emma. She, of course, has her companion Koo. Koo also has actions that he can use in conjunction with Emma. There's a lot of freedom and variety of what you can do in the game. Beast of Reincarnation is, of course, an action RPG. Players have the freedom to think of their own strategy and the way they're going to tap all certain situations, how to best utilize Emma's abilities and Koo's abilities to suit their own play-style with which they're most comfortable.

Can you give me an example of a type of play style you're referring to? Are we thinking the difference between close range and long range? Is it more magical or physical?

Furushima: There's a lot of variety in the game. As far as the main actions of the player that Emma is going to undertake for attacks, she largely relies on her Katana for close range attacks. She also has the ability to attack a long range with bows, crossbows, and those sorts of weapons. Koo, of course, relies primarily on what we call bloom arts, which are kind of plant-based attacks in the game. You'll find yourself up against some pretty big enemies, and the rhythm of a lot of the combat does center around pairing, countering, and things of that nature, but you also, again, have an added layer of using Koo and his abilities to your advantage as well, so there's quite a lot of variety there that different people can use in different ways to suit their own style.

What can you tell me about Emma and Koo as characters? Who are they? How would you describe them?

Furushima: One thing to note is, at the beginning of the game, Emma is kind of a blank slate. She has neither memories nor emotions or feelings when you first meet her. Koo, you'll soon discover, is what are known in this world as malefacts. He has this blight, or this corruption about him. You will notice in the game, too, that Emma herself is also a blighted one, and although this does give her special abilities, the downside of that is, of course, she's not treated well by other humans. She's living a very isolated lifestyle, essentially banished. What we have here, typically in this world, Emma would consider a creature like Koo to be an enemy because he is blighted. She typically fights against these sorts of enemies, so there's a bit of irony in this game, that she ends up teaming up with Koo and they go on this journey together.

What can you tell me about the music in Beast of Reincarnation? I really enjoyed the music that I heard in the trailer, and I was curious who was composing it and what the vision and style was.

Furushima: So, starting with the concepts of the score, again, the music is very much focused on the game's core concepts themselves, out of loneliness and isolation and learning to rely on people, that sort of motif and sort of feeling. So there's all sorts of different types of songs in the game. There's some focus on amplifying the trusting relationship that Emma develops with Koo. Some focus on the loneliness and despair of the world itself that's been destroyed. Then, we have the bosses in the game, which are called Nushi. Their music tracks tend to focus on more kind of traditional, Japanese sort of instrumentation. They give it a difference as well, so there's a lot of variety in the game.

I know Game Freak has a lot of history of delving into mythology and nature, especially with all the Pokemon designs they've done over the years to create really interesting creatures, and I'm curious if we'll see any particular myths, legends, or types of creatures in the world of Beast of Reincarnation.

Furushima: I think what you'll see in the game is a lot of the natural environments, whether it be the plant life, the flora, and the fauna in this game, the animals and the plants are very much based on the plant life and animal life that we see here in Japan and we've seen here in Japan throughout our history. Sakura, cherry blossoms would be a good example of that. It definitely has a sort of a local feel, in terms of the creatures that you'll meet.

Game Freak has received some criticism in the past few years for the performance and look of some of its 3D open world games. Beast of Reincarnation looks to be fairly ambitious. What would you say to those who are concerned that it might struggle in the same ways?

Furushima: I think when it comes to Beast of Reincarnation, and I guess we would regard it as the scale and the ambition of the title, when we approach game design, we're not looking to make, say, a title of a certain level of quality. We're looking to deliver a very specific game experience, and visual fidelity and graphics, this is something that supports that game experience, everything that goes into that. That includes things like bug fixing, optimization. Everything is there to serve the gameplay and the experience. Our focus is on that gameplay experience. Part of that, of course, is making sure that it performs really well, but our attention is more on getting the experience over to you and making sure that our vision can get to your hands and your hearts.

We just got our first lengthy, proper look at Beast of Reincarnation, the upcoming game from Pokemon developer Game Freak that, at least based on what we saw today, seems to be their most ambitious non-Pokemon game yet. But as a Pokemon fan, that does leave me with a big question: is Game Freak up for this?

Having sat wearily through Pokemon's Nintendo Switch era, I've now seen multiple releases in a row that suggest to me Game Freak has some serious struggles with home console optimization. I've written about it before, but several Pokemon games in a row have struggled with bugs, crashes, extremely distracting framerate issues, or just being generally kind of ugly. Pokemon Legends: ZA, the most recent entry, is significantly improved, but still a far cry from what Beast of Reincarnation seems to be promising.

Because that's just it: Beast of Reincarnation, at least in today's trailer, looks really nice. The environments seem lush and detailed, the action appears fluid and precise, objects and environments seem like they have texture and depth and detail. Even if you don't normally care about graphics (I sure didn't until Pokemon Scarlet and Violet), there's no denying that you need a game to run well for action combat with counters and fast reaction times to function. If Game Freak hadn't had a couple concerningly stuttery Pokemon games in a row, I wouldn't even be asking this question! But here we are.

So ask I did. I spoke with Kota Furushima ahead of today's presentation, and noted the criticisms of the performance and look of Game Freak's recent 3D open world games. I pointed out that Beast of Reincarnation seems fairly ambitious. So what would he say to those worried it might struggle?

Here's what Furushima said:

I think when it comes to Beast of Reincarnation, and I guess we would regard it as the scale and the ambition of the title, when we approach game design, we're not looking to make, say, a title of a certain level of quality. We're looking to deliver a very specific game experience, and visual fidelity and graphics, this is something that supports that game experience, everything that goes into that. That includes things like bug fixing, optimization. Everything is there to serve the gameplay and the experience. Our focus is on that gameplay experience. Part of that, of course, is making sure that it performs really well, but our attention is more on getting the experience over to you and making sure that our vision can get to your hands and your hearts.

I'm not sure that's a fully satisfying answer, but I also was warned up front that Furushima wasn't interested in speaking about Pokemon even vaguely during this conversation. Which, fair enough. And I don't think Furushima is necessarily wrong here. Pokemon is still dang fun to play, as demonstrated by my recent reviews of it as well as the sheer number of people still buying it year after year. They did prioritize the experience, in that sense. I'm just still a little concerned that they aren't concerned about the ways in which that experience can be marred by technical jank.

Regardless, I want to believe. Beast of Reincarnation looks lovely, and we'll know for sure where it stands on both experience and ambition this summer. You can read the rest of my interview with Furushima right here. And you can catch up on everything announced at today's Xbox Developer Direct right here.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

It’s a new year for Magic: The Gathering, and it’s shaping up to be a busy one with no fewer than seven sets on the roadmap. Still, if you’re looking for great cards from 2025 and before, there are some great price drops to be had at TCGplayer to see in the new year, as well as some climbers across great cards.

That’s to say nothing of Stranger Things Secret Lair cards creeping up in price, too. Come with us for a trip to the Upside Down, with this week’s Climbers and Crashers.

Climbers

Fable, the upcoming open-world fantasy RPG from Playground Games, has 1,000 fully voiced NPCs, and, if you do the right things, you can marry every single one of them.

The long-awaited fairytale follow-up to Lionhead’s original Xbox trilogy was showcased at the January 2026 Xbox Developer Direct, and finally gave us a good look at its gameplay. But, there’s more to learn yet, as IGN spoke to the founder of Playground Games, the studio crafting the Fable reboot.

When speaking about the characters that inhabit the world of this new version of Fable, Playground chief Ralph Fulton told us: “They are handcrafted, and there are a lot of things about the way we have built the living population, which I think you could be forgiven for saying is just nuts. I think we maybe once thought we could procedurally generate them, but we abandoned that idea quite a long time ago because we wanted to craft every one of these NPCs from their name, to their appearance, to their personality traits, to that moral worldview that I talked about, to where they work and where they live and what their family unit is because it's important to the player that they can get to know unique crafted NPCs.”

“There's 1,000 of them in the game”, Fulton continued. “You can go and speak to every single one of them in fully voiced conversations. You could marry, it'll be a bit of work, but you could marry them all. You can have kids with them, you can hire them, you can fire them, they are just great fun. And also they act as this sort of Greek chorus, if you like, reflecting your choices and your morality back at you. So, as you walk around, that's classic Fable, isn't it? People catcalling you in the street, telling you what they think of you. It's a brilliant thing in our game as well, but it's a great way of tracking how popular your decisions have been, your choices have been.”

It doesn’t sound like it will be easy to just pop the question to anyone you see wandering around Albion, then, with the way you’ve chosen to role-play as your hero dictating who may react positively to an offer of engagement. What if you’re playing as a goody two-shoes knight of the realm, but then a local necromancer catches your eye and captures your heart shortly after? Will you be tempted to delve into the dark arts in the name of love? Search deep within yourself; only you have the answer.

Fable is a series that lived and died by its morality system, so it's great to see an emphasis on this sort of character building returning to the reboot. But, Playground doesn’t simply want to revive the same type of obvious ‘good vs evil’ decisions seen in the Lionhead games, instead opting for a more fluid approach to how you work your way through its story’s many choices, and, in turn, how its world reacts to your decisions.

“We talk about how our morality system is more about shades of gray,” Fulton revealed. “It's more about the subjectivity of morality that, honestly, we see in the world today. There's no objective good, there's no objective evil. You couldn't get everyone in the world to agree that something is evil or that something is good. That just doesn't happen. That diversity of opinion, I think, is really clear these days. And therefore we've sort of taken that and probably in quite a gamey system-y way, we've taken that and built it into this reputation system that we talk about in the piece, which allows you to build reputations based on the things you do within Albion.”

“You could do big things once or little things lots of times”, Fulton explained. “And if people see you doing that, it contributes to you building a reputation in that particular location. But then the key thing is how the people of Albion react to that, and they react to it based on the individual, almost unique worldview that they each have. And I think that's probably a more nuanced view of morality, but it's super interesting, and it's also just packed with potential in gameplay terms.”

For more, check out IGN's interview with Playground studio head and Fable director Ralph Fulton in full. And be sure to check out everything announced at the Xbox Developer Direct. Fable is due out fall 2026 and will arrive simultaneously on Xbox Series X and S, PS5, and PC.

Simon Cardy is a Senior Editor at IGN who can mainly be found skulking around open world games, indulging in Korean cinema, or despairing at the state of Tottenham Hotspur and the New York Jets. Follow him on Bluesky at @cardy.bsky.social.

Fable is back, and back in a big way. Microsoft's reboot of Lionhead's much-loved fantasy role-playing series has had its moment in the Xbox Developer Direct showcase, leaving fans with plenty to chew on. Ahead of the reveal, IGN's Ryan McCaffrey sat down for a chinwag with Playground founder and general manager Ralph Fulton to expand on what was shown and discussed during the livestream. So, put down those chickens and settle in for our big interview on the Fable reboot. And when you're done with that, check out everything announced at Xbox Developer Direct.

IGN: So, Ralph, I wanted to start here. Number one, that was super impressive. We'll get into it. As a Fable fan, that made me very happy. But I wanted to start here, which is the beginning. How did this come to be? How did Fable come back? How did it get to be you guys? Did you pitch Phil? Did leadership come to you? Give me the origin story on this project.

Ralph Fulton: Yeah, it's almost lost in the midst of time now. It was such a long time ago. Like I say in the piece, we've been working on this game for a really, really long time. But the origin story began, I would say, in the year after we shipped Forza Horizon 3. So, I'm sure you know off the top of your head, that was 2016, 2017 kind of period. And I imagine you'll also remember that by that game in the series, the team had really hit its stride, knew exactly what it was doing, understood the franchise, had really gelled and come together as a team and really knocked that game out of the park.

IGN: Yeah, I think that's the first one we gave a 10 out of 10 to, was the third one.

Ralph Fulton: And in every respect, that was the hockey stick moment, just inflection point for that series. And we were still an independent studio back then. We talked about what the future looked like. And honestly, the intent to build a second team came out of a desire we had to learn and grow as developers, almost to challenge ourselves to see if we could go and achieve that same thing we'd done with the Horizon team in a different genre. And there was a little bit of, "Can we do this?"

IGN: Yeah.

Ralph Fulton: And I think that's super healthy. I think that as a developer, you should always be trying to challenge yourself and expand your skill set. So, that's where the idea came from. And obviously because we'd been working with Xbox for really since our inception as Playground Games, we had great relationships with them. We knew a lot of people there. The obvious first conversation for us was with them where we said, "Hey, look, we're looking to build a second team. We want to work in a new genre." We felt like the transferable skills that we had from the Horizon games were an open world. We had learned a lot about building open worlds technically in terms of streaming, in terms of game design and game flow and all that good stuff. And in lots of ways that are maybe surprisingly car agnostic. There's a ton of things about Horizon games that are about the cars, but there's a ton of principles that we'd learned there, which we felt were transferable. And I don't remember who said the word Fable first, but as soon as I heard it, I was like, "That has to be it. That fits so perfectly." It's a series that we adored here and still do.

And the conversation went from there and it went pretty fast. I think everybody felt... certainly I know the folks we spoke to on the Xbox side felt really strongly that if a studio were to start working on Fable to pick that up, it had to be a British studio. And the fact that we had this great working relationship, the fact that we were making this game that was increasingly important and successful, and had this ambition to scale and to grow, it went pretty fast after that.

IGN: That's awesome. Can you talk about the multiplatform piece? You know what's best for your game and what you're up to versus what other studios are up to, but within that example, Horizon 6 is Xbox first and PlayStation later. This one's multiplatform straight out of the gate. Can you talk about why those discrepancies between each of your games?

Ralph Fulton: Yeah, and I think it goes to the strategy all up, which is that every project team is deciding these things, deciding what's right for their particular title. And even within Playground, we have two projects which have made slightly different decisions, although the endpoint is the same. And I think as a game developer, the most important thing to me is that the greatest number of people play my games as possible. That's what we're in this for. I think that's true of most developers. We want the largest number of people to experience our games and enjoy them.

And therefore the platform piece is really a natural extension of that. And certainly looking back on Horizon, the first Forza Horizon was an Xbox 360 exclusive. We were developing for one platform, but the way of the industry and the intervening period has been platform expansion. Even within the Horizon series like going to PC, going to Steam, that has been the general progression. And it's in service of how can we bring our games to the largest audience possible?

IGN: From where I sit, it makes sense in terms of this is a reboot, you're trying to get this franchise back off the ground, and the best way to do that is to hit as many platforms on day one as possible. So, I definitely get it. This was covered a bit in the video, but can you elaborate on what you guys wanted to make sure to capture from the originals into this new one?

Ralph Fulton: That was the big question when we started this project and it dominated our thoughts and our conversations for quite a while, in the sense that we were asking what is the nature of Fable? What is the essence of Fable? What are the things, the elements without which a game is not Fable? And to be really clear there, I'm talking high level, I'm talking conceptually, I'm not talking about locations or particular features. I'm like, "What is the essence of that franchise that we love?" We talked around that a lot and we landed on a bunch of things. Choice and consequence is central to Fable. We actually wrap that up into the word "freedom" because it's about the freedom to choose, the freedom to make the choices and then have to live with the consequences of your choices. It's the freedom to go where you want, do what you want, be the hero you want to be. And that right there is at the heart of our game. We want you to be the hero you want to be. So, freedom is absolutely central to it.

We landed on two other tonal pillars, I think. And the first is fairytale. And we actually inherited this from Lionhead. We had this treasure trove of documents which had been in storage, that came originally from Lionhead. And one of them had this incredibly neat little bit of direction, which was Fable is fairytale, not fantasy, which I just think is brilliant, incredibly incisive and speaks to really tonally what Fable is. Because if you think about fairytale, when you think about fantasy, they're kind of like opposite ends of a spectrum and everyone knows what fantasy is. It's grand and sweeping and it's high stakes. And then fairytale's right at the other end of the spectrum and it's personal and it's intimate. It's about ordinary people and what happens when magic touches their lives. And then it has this moral component to it as well. And you can almost imagine the difference in color scheme. The color palette of fantasy is very different from the color palette of fairytale. And we just onboarded that as this really fantastic directional statement.

And then finally, it's about Britishness. And again, why was it important to Xbox that a British studio continued with Fable? Because Fable is this quintessentially British game, and not just because Albion is medieval Britain through a filter, if you like. And not just because the characters are British and have British accents. There's a sensibility to the games, there's a tone of voice, a way of thinking about things, a way of reacting to things. It's very British. And those things combined are for us the DNA of Fable. If you don't hit those things, if you're not true to those things, you're not making a Fable game. So, that was something that we decided right at the start.

IGN: Love it. So, I suspect I know the answer to this, but is there any narrative connection to the originals at all or is this truly a reboot?

Ralph Fulton: I'm going to avoid that question, Ryan. And I'll tell you why. We touch very lightly on story in the Dev Direct piece, but honestly, what we really wanted to do is come out and speak to the detail in the game and answer all those questions that people inevitably have about the game we haven't answered before. We're going to talk more about story later in the year, so I'm not going to say yes or no to that particular question just yet.

What I would say is with this being a reboot, it felt really imperative for us to clear the space, to tell a story that we want to tell within Albion, which is why this isn't a sequel, for example. This isn't necessarily connected to the original timeline or events or characters, but we do share lore and some of that originating lore of the Fable universe is really important to our story.

IGN: In hindsight, I think that at least as a player, the mistake I think Lionhead made was jumping the timeline around so much during the sequels. I think most people like the setting of 1 and 2 versus jumping further ahead in 3. Because man, it's gorgeous. Again, this medieval Britain inspired look is just like... don't take me to Steampunk 500 years later.

Ralph Fulton: You'll never hear me say a word against the original trilogy, but there is, I think we always felt a classic Albion, which is that really pastoral, idyllic, rural Albion. And we've absolutely tried to capture that. And hopefully you saw a bit of that in the Dev Direct piece.

IGN: Absolutely. This is a broader question, but I'll be curious how you decide to answer it. What does a Fable game need to do in 2026 that it didn't need to do in 2008?

Ralph Fulton: That's a super interesting question. I do think a bunch of things. I mean, we're, what? Two video game generations on from Fable 3 back in 2010. Technically, we're in a different world. Technology has moved on. I think game design has moved on. I think open world game design in particular has moved on. We talk about morality in the Dev Direct piece, and I think it's a great thing to point to, to show how we've taken something which was central to those original games and reimagined it. And I think in a way which is still faithful to the original games, but opens up huge gameplay opportunities, systemic opportunities almost in our game. So, we talk about how our morality system is more about shades of gray. It's more about the subjectivity of morality that honestly we see in the world today. There's no objective good, there's no objective evil. You couldn't get everyone in the world to agree that something is evil or something is good. That just doesn't happen. That diversity of opinion I think is really clear these days.

And therefore we've sort of taken that and probably in quite a gamey system-y way, we've taken that and built it into this reputation system that we talk about in the piece, which allows you to build reputations based on the things you do within Albion. And you could do big things once or little things lots of times. And if people see you doing that, it contributes to you building a reputation in that particular location. But then the key thing is how the people of Albion react to that? And they react to it based on the individual, almost unique worldview that they each have. And I think that's probably a more nuanced view of morality, but it's super interesting and it's also just packed with potential in gameplay terms.

IGN: On that note, the Dev Direct piece talked about 1,000 populated people in Albion and the word "handcrafted" was brought up. So, are those NPCs procedurally generated, or are those all the same people going to be in everybody's game?

Ralph Fulton: Yeah, so they are handcrafted. There's a lot of things about the way we have built the living population, which I think you could be forgiven for saying is just nuts. I think we maybe once thought we could procedurally generate them, but we abandoned that idea quite a long time ago because we wanted to craft every one of these NPCs from their name, to their appearance, to their personality traits, to that moral worldview that I talked about, to where they work and where they live and what their family unit is, because it's important to the player that they can get to know unique crafted NPCs. And like I said, there's 1,000 of them in the game. You can go and speak to every single one of them in fully voiced conversations. You could marry... it'll be a bit of work, but you could marry them all. You can have kids with them, you can hire them, you can fire them. They are just great fun.

And also they act as this sort of Greek chorus, if you like, reflecting your choices and your morality back at you. So, as you walk around, that's classic Fable, isn't it? People catcalling you in the street, telling you what they think of you. It's a brilliant thing in our game as well, but it's a great way of tracking how popular your decisions have been, your choices have been.

IGN: There's just a complete, not throwaway moment in the Dev Direct, but just a little quick second of gameplay when the team's talking about that where it's like you get labeled as a miserable twat or something. And I was just like, "That's Fable, that's as British as it gets there."

Ralph Fulton: Yeah. I'm glad you spotted that. It's there for half a second or something like that, but you caught it.

IGN: On this same track, the Dev Direct piece talked about the more fluid, good and evil system, morality. Will you physically change appearance like you classically did in the original three based on how you behave?

Ralph Fulton: That sort of character morphing feature, obviously a really central part of the original games. It's not in ours. And I'll tell you why. There's probably a couple of reasons. One, I guess it's about that high level principle I was talking about, that there is no objective good and evil. And the original games were predicated on there being an objective good and an objective evil, and you were somewhere along that scale, and that's what determined how your appearance changed.

IGN: Yeah.

Ralph Fulton: But for us, that doesn't really work. The way I've described our morality system working, you're never that thing, absolutely. You're different things to different people based on what they like or what they choose to value. So, that's one reason that it didn't work.

There's another reason, which is in our game, you build reputation based on the settlement, the town, the city that you're in, the part of the world that you're in. But when you go to a new place, a place you've never been to before, you walk in without any reputation and thus nobody knows what to think about you. And you can almost, through your behavior, through your choices, form completely different reputations, a completely different identity, if you like, in that place from the place that you were last time. And you can do that across all the locations in the game.

Now, you couldn't do that if you walked in with horns and a trident. Your reputation would precede you in that instance. And honestly, that ability to be completely in control of your identity and thus what people think of you felt more important to us than that legacy feature. So, it worked great in those games. It didn't seem to fit in ours, so we don't have it.

IGN: Okay, that's a good answer.

Ralph Fulton: Nice.

IGN: Based on what we've seen in the video, physically, how big is Albion? How big is your open world in this? Maybe relative to a Horizon game, I guess, would probably be just the best apples to apples comparison.

Ralph Fulton: So, I'm used to fielding that question from my time on the other game. And the comparison is useful actually because it probably won't surprise you to know that in terms of just square miles, it's smaller than an Horizon world. Horizon worlds are designed to be experienced at 250 miles per hour. So, you cover the distance far faster in those games than you do in ours. In our game, you move at the speed of a horse at most.

So, what we found is, although we took lots of world building experience and technology into this game from the Horizon titles, obviously we share a code base, we had to reevaluate the things that were important in building Albion. So, it's still massive. It'll still take you a long time to get through. There's tons to explore, but what we had to do with this game was build in far, far more detail into it than we necessarily have to in a Horizon game.

So, you move slower, but you see much more, you experience much more. I think maybe you're more immersed. Case in point, every building in the game you can go inside. So, every building needs an interior because you could rob it if you wanted, or you could buy it and live there with your family or with one of your families. So, I guess the focus just got pulled right in and we ended up building out much more rich detail at ground level, if you know what I mean.

IGN: Well, that was the correct answer as far as I'm concerned! I would much rather have a smaller, more dense world than a larger one where it's just geometry.

Ralph Fulton: I'll tell you a fun story, Ryan, about right at the start of this project. One of the first things we did was we got our Fable character running around in Surfers Paradise from Forza Horizon 3, and it took an eternity to get anywhere. And I think that if we hadn't realized already, that was the moment it dawned on us like, "Okay, we're going to have to play with some of our metrics here."

IGN: ForzaTech clearly was not originally built for this, obviously. So, how involved of a process was it to adapt the engine to what Fable specifically needs?

Ralph Fulton: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the decision to use ForzaTech was based on a bunch of reasons. It's what we're used to working with here. We understand how to ship games on ForzaTech, and that's a big deal. And we know we can build expansive, beautiful, immersive open worlds using it. And crucially, we know we can stream them, because the Forza Horizon games have absolutely... They need to have absolutely world-class streaming technology.

What the engine didn't do was quest structure, cinematics... I mean, character-led gameplay full stop. So, yeah, we have invested an enormous amount in the engine to make it capable of making this game. But hopefully you can still see in the footage you just saw, there is a really unique look to games built with ForzaTech. There's a quality of light, there's a quality of render, which we adore, and I think makes all that effort, all that investment worthwhile.

IGN: You mentioned the horse, and we see a little bit of horse in the presentation. You knew you were going to get this question, so here it is: no dog. Talk about the dog decision because clearly there had to be one.

Ralph Fulton: Yeah. I did know I was going to get this question. And do you know what? There are some folks on the team that were relishing me getting this question because I cut it a while back. You know what? For development reasons, right? I don't need to go into any more detail than that, except to say there are a substantial number of people on the team who have yet to forgive me for that decision.

IGN: So, that's item number one for the sequel then is what you're telling me? It better be!

Ralph Fulton: I hear you on that. Hey, for those people that still bear a grudge, this is my penance.

IGN: Well, on that note, which classic Fable's your personal favorite? I'm sure different people on the team have different answers, but what's your answer?

Ralph Fulton: I love them all. Fable 2 has a really special place in my heart. For me, it's kind of a point of inspiration because I think the thing I remember most vividly from playing it is just the sense of place of being in Albion. I can remember walking up to Bower Lake like it was yesterday. The drive to try and recreate that same feeling in our world has been really strong.

IGN: 2 is my favorite as well, so I'm glad that you said 2, which makes the dog thing all the more shocking. So, if I were on the team, I would be one of those people that would be holding the grudge against you.

Ralph Fulton: I know you would!

IGN: You've mentioned and the video mentioned a clear reverence for and respect for what Lionhead built. Has Peter Molyneux seen this game yet?

Ralph Fulton: To my knowledge, he has not. He has not. But you're right. We as a team, I think, wear the responsibility of carrying on the franchise really heavily. I think it's something we're all conscious of. Everybody who's on this team, and this isn't PR, we've built a team from scratch for this project. And the thing that unites every single person is that they came here to make Fable. They didn't come here to work for Playground Games necessarily. They came here to make Fable. Everyone is first and foremost a fan. And I think everybody is really eager with anticipation to see the reaction we get from everyone, from fans all over the world when we finally show some stuff at Dev Direct.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.