Let me start by saying that I’m borderline blown away by what I’ve seen from the Fable reboot so far. New Fable developer Playground Games already had my trust – this is a studio that has produced nothing but one open-world masterpiece after another – but after learning a lot more about what the team has in store for its resurrection of one of Xbox’s biggest franchises, I’m even more bullish about where they’re going with it. Playground has turned the ForzaTech engine into a medieval British postcard, combat is multilayered, a thousand NPC townsfolk are waiting to be romanced, co-parented with, divorced from, and landlord over, and there are chickens abound just waiting to be kicked.
Alongside Fable’s big coming-out party at the recent Xbox Developer Direct, I also spoke with game director Ralph Fulton about the choices the studio has made with this revival, so there’s lots to discuss. But first, if you’ll permit me, a quick Fable history lesson…
How We Got Here
Right out of the gate in the early 2000’s, Fable was always fantastic, even if its early days on the original Xbox got a little extra scrutiny because its director at the time, legendary strategy game developer Peter Molyneux, made crazy promises about players planting acorns that would grow into full-sized trees over the course of the campaign. But while that lofty systemic boast never came to be, the game that Lionhead delivered was nevertheless a rich, textured, uniquely British fairy tale that players could meaningfully affect change in, whether their good deeds manifested a literal halo over their heads, their sheer evil caused actual horns to sprout from their skull, or they got married to a townsperson and lived a whole other life outside of the bigger-picture quest within the world of Albion.
Lionhead arguably perfected the formula in the Xbox 360 sequel, adding a dog who’d be by your side throughout the story, and Fable 3 tweaked it further still while making the questionable-in-hindsight decision to move the timeline forward by 500 years, thereby changing the entire look and feel of Albion. And then Microsoft royally screwed the franchise up by trying to turn it into a 4v1 multiplayer game that cost the studio its entire existence (that’s a story for another day), and since then the franchise has been dormant for over a decade.
Enter Playground, who produced smash hit after smash hit in Microsoft’s Forza Horizon driving series. Fulton told me that Playground was looking to expand and build a second team after Forza Horizon 3, "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 [Forza Horizon] that was increasingly important and successful, and had this ambition to scale and to grow, it went pretty fast after that."
A Bit of the Old, a Bit of the New
The studio’s adoration for the series shines through in the gameplay it’s shown so far. There are Hobbes and Balverines to slay, swords to wield, and spells to cast, sure. And the humor and British charm look to be there – look no further than a chicken spell wearing off, reverting the target back to their original form but still flapping their arms and clucking. Or the chicken armor. You even start the game as a child.
Where Playground is winning serious points with Fable fans like me so far is in its commitment to the game within the game: the town-management aspects.But where Playground is winning serious points with Fable fans like me so far is in its commitment to the game within the game: the town-management aspects baked into Fable’s urban areas. You’ll be able to buy property – literally all of it, if you can come up with enough gold, apparently – and become a beloved landlord or a loathed slumlord. Not to mention a kind boss or a horrible boss, should you purchase any businesses. You can also date and marry all of them, have kids with them, and should it come to it, get divorced. There are also jobs to partake in, like blacksmithing.
Where the new Fable breaks from the old one is in the morality. No longer will it be so black or white, Fulton told me. You won’t manifest that halo or sprout those horns. Instead, individual people in each city or town will form their own opinion of you based on how you treat them, meaning you could be a “rich twat” (in Fable’s own words) in one town while getting hailed as a saint in another one. Better still, one of my least favorite aspects of modern role-playing games, procedurally generated content and all of the generic, time-filling tedium it brings with it, is nowhere to be found in Fable. Instead, Fulton told me that every NPC is a unique, handmade, and fully voiced character. That is so refreshing these days that it gets me extra excited to talk to as many of them as I possibly can once I get a build of Fable in my hands.
Clever Fairy Tale Misdirection
That goal to make each hero’s story unique extends to the larger world of Albion too. Remember the 2023 teaser trailer that introduced us to Dave, a giant? It turns out that the whole setup for the new Fable isn’t a Jack and the Beanstalk story. Instead, Dave is an “egotistical gardener in a rural village” who finds a magic growth formula. You’ll then have to decide how to deal with him: will you spare him – hopefully this means find a way to return him to normal size and befriend him – or slay him, which will see his giga-corpse splayed over a hill just outside of town for the rest of your campaign, negatively impacting surrounding home prices in the process?
And so if Dave’s foray into gigantism is merely a quest, perhaps that means this Fable isn’t as much of a departure from the originals, lore-wise, as that video had led me to believe. In fact, I point-blank asked Fulton whether or not this is a true reboot or if this Fable is in some way connected to Lionhead’s originals, and he had quite a telling answer for a supposed non-answer. He told me, “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.” Make of that what you will…
My Big Concern
So Fable seems to have the look, the humor, the moral choices, the quintessentially British charm. Playground, to put it simply, seems to understand the assignment here. And the studio, as I mentioned earlier, absolutely gets the benefit of the doubt from me on account of its impeccable track record since its inception. What, then, am I worried about? There is one thing, and it’s a key part of Fable: combat.
To be clear, I’m not in any way judging Fable’s combat based on what we’ve seen so far. How could I? I haven’t played it for myself yet! However, for as talented as Playground is, it’s never made a game with combat before. It’s not that all of the delightful town-management and NPC relationship stuff suddenly means nothing if the combat doesn’t deliver, but Fable will have a big problem if battling Balverines isn’t a blast.
I'm disappointed by the fact that horses seem to be your only four-legged companions.Oh, and I suppose I’ll be honest and share one actual disappointment with what I’ve seen of Fable so far: the fact that horses seem to be your only four-legged companions. After the big reveal was decidedly dog-free, I asked Fulton about the decision to ditch the dog, and he admitted, "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." Now, I know full well that game development is extremely difficult and that Fulton probably has a very defensible reason for not moving forward with Fable 2’s signature feature – it stung a little extra when he told me that Fable 2 was his favorite of Lionhead’s original trilogy – but as a player I’m still allowed to be bummed out by it. Here’s hoping it’s first on the new features list for the sequel, should we get that far.
Things Are Looking Up
On the whole, though, I am truly, genuinely excited and optimistic about the new Fable. I’ve long felt that – particularly in Playground’s hands – Fable has the highest ceiling (in terms of game quality and finally delivering Xbox – and PlayStation, as it turns out – a PlayStation Studios-like Game of the Year award-contending single-player game) of anything currently in Microsoft’s massive first-party games portfolio.
And though we don’t yet have a specific release date to count down to, Playground is promising that we’ll be playing it this Fall – which basically means “before November” since it’d be patently stupid to try and relaunch this franchise after the better part of a decade in development right up against the incoming game industry meteor known as Grand Theft Auto 6. Here’s hoping that the new Fable lives up to its sky-high potential.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN's executive editor of previews and host of both IGN's weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He's a North Jersey guy, so it's "Taylor ham," not "pork roll." Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.
Connexion
