Everything we know about Fable

Yes, as a Microsoft title it will be available on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass from day one. It will likely also become available on competitor services, like PlayStation Plus Premium, within a year after release.

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Playground Games, famously known for Forza Horizon. Although that is a racing series, it makes sense that Playground takes on this huge responsibility, as they have a lot of experience with open-world games. Even though the team has only just released Forza Horizon 6, we don't have to worry about their focus: Fable is being developed by a completely separate team, although they are sharing technology and the engine.

Skip the next part if you don’t want anything spoiled!

The game is fully 3D of course, and you play the game in third person. According to an extensive preview by Game Informer, Fable should bring us a bit more than the usual fetch quests, like building houses, running businesses, taking on a job you would expect in a medieval-like fantasy setting (think of blacksmithing), or just exploring the open world. The world is seamless and you can where-ever you want from early in the game.

You can also meet a lot of NPCs, as Playground promises over a 1,000(!) characters who will each respond in their own way to your actions. As highlighted in a recent GamesRadar interview, they each have their own voice acting and do daily activities like real people would. You can hire NPCs, but also stumble into a relationship, marry, get kids, and file for divorce (probably in that order). Keep in mind that how you treat people can alter small things, but also have a deep influence on how the story evolves.

You can again do evil or good deeds, which have an impact on the returning morality system. This time around this won’t affect your appearance though. We did see the player getting a '+ Chicken Chaser' message after kicking a chicken, so that might point to a perk system.

You can enter every building in the game, and even become a landlord. You can kick people out, but you will get a bad reputation if you do so (and a few insults while you are at it).

Your actions have consequences and the well-known butterfly effect will be in place here. An example of a bigger implication is the giant in the game (we will talk about him later on in this dossier). You can let him live or kill him, and the fatal option will end up leaving his gigantic corpse in the game world, where it will remain forever. It will be a nice landmark, and will also have an influence on nearby property prices. Nice touch.

We are confident that the Fable reboot is in good hands with the people of Playground Games, as they did a fantastic job with Forza Horizon. Although it is created by two different teams, they make use of the excellent ForzaTech engine. Judging by the in-engine trailers we saw, that will do the job excellently.

As was the case with the previous installments, the setting looks much like a fairytale, with lots of cozy villages, green meadows, colorful flowers, lively forests, enchanting castles, dark taverns, and… giant pumpkins. We also saw great-looking enemies, like a balverine, a colossal toad, hobbes, and a giant cockatrice. If you want to take on smaller enemies, we have also spotted wasps, or you can always kick around a chicken.

The characters also look very nice, and to prove how realistic they are, Playground has actually put British comedian Richard Ayoade in both the trailer and the game. It is a nice touch, but it also shows the great job the developer is doing with mimicry and lip-syncing.

We don’t know much about character creation yet, but we do know that it exceeds the choices we had in previous entries. That wasn’t that hard though, as previously your choice was limited to female and male. In the reboot, you should be able to really create your unique character, with their own clothing, physique, skin tone, haircut, ink, and scars.

Character Creation in Fable