Let me start by saying that I’m borderline blown away by what I’ve seen from the Fable reboot to this point. Recent Fable developer Playground Games already had my trust – it is a studio that has produced nothing but one open-world masterpiece after one other – but after learning rather a lot more about what the team has in store for its resurrection of one in all Xbox’s biggest franchises, I’m much more bullish about where they’re going with it. Playground has turned the ForzaTech engine right 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 on the recent Xbox Developer Direct, I also spoke with game director Ralph Fulton in regards to the selections the studio has made with this revival, so there’s lots to debate. But first, in the event you’ll permit me, a fast Fable history lesson…
How We Got Here
Right out of the gate within the early 2000’s, Fable was all the time unbelievable, even when its early days on the unique Xbox got a bit of extra scrutiny because its director on the time, legendary strategy game developer Peter Molyneux, made crazy guarantees about players planting acorns that might grow into full-sized trees over the course of the campaign. But while that lofty systemic boast never got here to be, the sport that Lionhead delivered was nevertheless a wealthy, 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 an entire other life outside of the bigger-picture quest throughout the world of Albion.
Lionhead arguably perfected the formula within 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 maneuver the timeline forward by 500 years, thereby changing your entire feel and appear of Albion. After which Microsoft royally screwed the franchise up by attempting to turn it right into a 4v1 multiplayer game that cost the studio its entire existence (that’s a story for one more 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 trying to expand and construct a second team after Forza Horizon 3, “I do not remember who said the word Fable first, but as soon as I heard it, I used to be like, ‘That needs to be it. That matches so perfectly.’ It is a series that we adored here and still do.
“And the conversation went from there and it went pretty fast. I feel everybody felt… definitely I do know the parents we spoke to on the Xbox side felt really strongly that if a studio were to begin working on Fable to choose that up, it needed to be a British studio. And the incontrovertible fact that we had this great working relationship, the incontrovertible fact that we were making this game [Forza Horizon] that was increasingly essential and successful, and had this ambition to scale and to grow, it went pretty fast after that.”
A Little bit of the Old, a Little bit of the Recent
The studio’s adoration for the series shines through within the gameplay it’s shown to this point. There are Hobbes and Balverines to slay, swords to wield, and spells to forged, sure. And the humor and British charm look to be there – look no further than a chicken spell wearing off, reverting the goal back to their original form but still flapping their arms and clucking. Or the chicken armor. You even start the sport as a baby.
But where Playground is winning serious points with Fable fans like me to this point is in its commitment to the sport throughout the game: the town-management facets baked into Fable’s urban areas. You’ll find a way to purchase property – literally all of it, in the event you can give you enough gold, apparently – and grow to be a beloved landlord or a loathed slumlord. Not to say a form boss or a horrible boss, must you purchase any businesses. It’s also possible to date and marry all of them, have kids with them, and will it come to it, get divorced. There are also jobs to partake in, like blacksmithing.
Where the brand new Fable breaks from the old one is within the morality. Now not will it’s so black or white, Fulton told me. You won’t manifest that halo or sprout those horns. As a substitute, individual people in each city or town will form their very own opinion of you based on the way you treat them, meaning you can be a “wealthy twat” (in Fable’s own words) in a single town while getting hailed as a saint in one other one. Higher still, one in all my least favorite facets of contemporary role-playing games, procedurally generated content and all the generic, time-filling tedium it brings with it, is nowhere to be present in Fable. As a substitute, Fulton told me that each NPC is a singular, handmade, and fully voiced character. That’s so refreshing nowadays that it gets me extra excited to consult with as lots of them as I possibly can once I get a construct 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 large? It seems that the entire setup for the brand new Fable isn’t a Jack and the Beanstalk story. As a substitute, Dave is an “egotistical gardener in a rural village” who finds a magic growth formula. You’ll then have to choose learn how to take care of him: will you spare him – hopefully this implies discover a method to return him to normal size and befriend him – or slay him, which is able to see his giga-corpse splayed over a hill just outside of town for the remainder of your campaign, negatively impacting surrounding home prices in the method?
And so if Dave’s foray into gigantism is merely a quest, perhaps which means this Fable isn’t as much of a departure from the originals, lore-wise, as that video had led me to consider. The truth is, I point-blank asked Fulton whether or not it is a true reboot or if this Fable is not directly connected to Lionhead’s originals, and he had quite a telling answer for a supposed non-answer. He told me, “I’ll avoid that query, Ryan. And I’ll let you know why. We touch very evenly on story within the Dev Direct piece, but truthfully, what we actually desired to do is come out and speak to the detail in the sport and answer all those questions that individuals inevitably have in regards to the game we have not answered before. We’ll talk more about story later within the yr, so I’m not going to say yes or no to that individual query just yet.
“What I might say is with this being a reboot, it felt really imperative for us to clear the space, to inform a story that we wish to inform inside Albion, which is why this is not a sequel, for instance. This is not necessarily connected to the unique timeline or events or characters, but we do share lore and a few of that originating lore of the Fable universe is admittedly essential to our story.” Make of that what you’ll…
My Big Concern
So Fable seems to have the look, the humor, the moral selections, the quintessentially British charm. Playground, to place it simply, seems to grasp the task here. And the studio, as I discussed earlier, absolutely gets the good thing about the doubt from me on account of its impeccable track record since its inception. What, then, am I apprehensive about? There may be one thing, and it’s a key a part of Fable: combat.
To be clear, I’m not in any way judging Fable’s combat based on what we’ve seen to this point. How could I? I haven’t played it for myself yet! Nevertheless, for as talented as Playground is, it’s never made a game with combat before. It’s not that every one of the delightful town-management and NPC relationship stuff suddenly means nothing if the combat doesn’t deliver, but Fable can have a giant problem if battling Balverines isn’t a blast.
Oh, and I suppose I’ll be honest and share one actual disappointment with what I’ve seen of Fable to this point: the incontrovertible fact that horses appear to be your only four-legged companions. After the large reveal was decidedly dog-free, I asked Fulton in regards to the decision to ditch the dog, and he admitted, “There are some folks on the team that were relishing me getting this query because I cut it some time back. what? For development reasons, right? I need not go into any more detail than that, except to say there are a considerable number of individuals on the team who’ve yet to forgive me for that call.” Now, I do know full well that game development is amazingly difficult and that Fulton probably has a really defensible reason for not moving forward with Fable 2’s signature feature – it stung a bit of 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 brand new features list for the sequel, should we get that far.
Things Are Looking Up
On the entire, though, I’m truly, genuinely excited and optimistic in regards to the latest Fable. I’ve long felt that – particularly in Playground’s hands – Fable has the very best ceiling (by way of game quality and at last delivering Xbox – and PlayStation, because it seems – a PlayStation Studios-like Game of the Yr award-contending single-player game) of anything currently in Microsoft’s massive first-party games portfolio.
And though we don’t yet have a particular release date to count right down to, Playground is promising that we’ll be playing it this Fall – which mainly means “before November” because it’d be patently silly to try to relaunch this franchise after the higher a part of a decade in development right up against the incoming game industry meteor often known as Grand Theft Auto 6. Here’s hoping that the brand new Fable lives as much as its sky-high potential.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of each IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, in addition to 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.