Playground Games provided many details on what to expect for its upcoming Fable reboot in yesterday’s Xbox deep-dive at Developer Direct. The developers didn’t beat around the bush when the question arose regarding whether they planned to follow in the path laid out by LionHead with the original trilogy. The short answer is that Playground knows that it’s not Lionhead and does not intend to attempt to make a Lionhead game.
“Look, we’re not Lionhead—we can’t try to make a Lionhead game.’ This has to be Playground game because I’m a really firm believer that the personality and the character of a team is visible in the work they do and the games they make.”
– Ralph Fulton, Founder amd General Manager Playground Games
Fans of the original games should not immediately become disenchanted with this statement because it quickly becomes apparent that Playground Games isn’t throwing everything to the wind and scrapping all that made the franchise so endearing to many. In fact, the developers have emphasized sticking to the British-styled humor and sensibilities employed in the original games. They’ve also acknowledged acquiring notes and documents for the original games, which show a focus that Fable was always intended to be a fairytale game, rather than a fantasy RPG.
“When we started working on this project, we got a treasure trove of documents from Lionhead that had been in storage. Something that I thought was just brilliantly succinct was one of the documents, which said: ‘Fable is Fairytale, not Fantasy’—which is just super neat.”
– Ralph Fulton, Founder amd General Manager Playground Games
The developers have added that players will be able to fully customize their characters, and just like the first game, characters will begin as a child who then ages as they progress through the story. Players will be able to fully explore an open world where, once again, they will develop a reputation based on their actions. From how you treat folks to critters and decisions regarding conflicts, many things can affect how the over 1,000 NPCs and the world interact with players.
“So if a person sees you kicking a chicken, you will start to get a reputation as a ‘Chicken Chaser’—and if enough people see you do it, or you do it a lot, that reputation will become one of the things you’re known for in that settlement. And people will react to you based on what they think about that particular reputation.”
– Ralph Fulton, Founder amd General Manager Playground Games
“The same applies for being generous, or being a bigamist, or being a thief, and so on. There are a significant number of these reputations that you can get—you have a word cloud of reputations in every settlement, and they can be different from place to place. It means you can create completely different identities in all the different settlements by being a different person and behaving in different ways.”
– Ralph Fulton, Founder amd General Manager Playground Games
Fable is set to launch for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PlayStation 5 in Autumn 2026. More details from the Xbox Developer Direct can be found here.