Among the details revealed about Playground Games’ Fable during a recent deep dive was the fact that it is going to be a reboot of the franchise. While game director Ralph Fulton spoke about this, noting that the studio didn’t want to “be beholden to the timeline of the original games,” he has gone into more detail about this aspect. In an interview with GamesRadar, Fulton spoke about how Playground Games’ take on the open-world RPG series will set itself apart from Lionhead’s trilogy.
This, however, began with the studio questioning what makes a Fable game. Having previously spoken about the differences between a fantasy story and a fairy tale, and how Fable is closer to the latter than the former, Fulton has now elaborated on the very “essence” of a Fable game.
“Right back at the start, we spent a lot of time thinking about: what is Fable? What is a Fable game?,” he said. “And not really in terms of features or characters or locations or any of that stuff, really a much higher level. What is the essence of Fable? We talked about that a great deal and landed on a few guiding principles, you might say, that we felt without these things, the game can’t call itself Fable.”
“So we thought about them, and we really kind of enshrined them right at the top of the creative process as we then started to think about: what do we put in this game? But I think something that I’ve always said to the team, certainly back in the early days, was that this has to be Playground’s Fable.”
Playground Games also wanted to make its own mark on the Fable series, and the best way to do this, argued Fulton, would be to start from scratch rather than making a sequel. The original Fable trilogy, he noted, had many aspects that added up to make them identifiably Lionhead games.
“We’re not Lionhead. I think you can see Lionhead in that original trilogy,” he said. “I really believe that the personality of a team shows in the work they do and the games they make, you can see Lionhead in that original trilogy, and we’re not Lionhead. We’re a different studio, different people, different culture. It would be inauthentic for us to try and just make Fable 4. One of the big reasons that this isn’t a sequel is we felt that we needed to reboot the franchise, and we needed to put our stamp on it and make it a Playground Fable game going forward. So that’s kind of what we’ve done.”
To further help with this, Fulton also noted that Playground Games was given plenty of time during pre-production to help it envision what a Fable reboot would look like. He also noted that the last Fable game—Fable 3—having come out all the way back in 2010 means that there are plenty of newer gamers that might have never played the originals.
“It’s been a long time since the Fable trilogy concluded,” he said. “It’s been a long time since Fable has been around. So there’s lots of people there who will not have experienced Fable, and we need to make sure that they look at this as a game that they want to get involved in as well. So making a Playground game and really not making it a mandate that it has to be slavishly based on the originals, has led us to a place now where I look at a game that is inherently faithful to those original games. But I think it also has lots and lots that the gamers today and will really get on board with.”
Fable is being developed for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release this Fall.
