Forza Horizon developer Playground Games wanted to branch out from its racing series for almost a decade, and are finally doing so with Fable.
"The first conversations we had about doing something other than Forza Horizon and building a second team go right the way back to the year after we shipped Forza Horizon 3," says Ralph Fulton, Playground's general manager, in an exclusive interview with GamesRadar+. And while Forza Horizon 3 "had gone really well in pretty much every dimension," as the "team really hit its stride," new ambitions grew out of its release.
"The conversation around building a second team and doing something else, doing something different, was really about wanting to challenge ourselves – to learn and grow as developers," he explains. "Wanting to see if we could do it, if we could build a game in a different genre." However, at that time, the game wasn't Fable, but the team wanted something new.
Playground Games "felt our transferable skills were, in a genre sense, open-world game design, open-world technology, and open-world streaming – all the nuts and bolts that the team had gotten really good at, and we as a studio felt that we were pretty proficient at." And due to this skillset, "the conversation about a second project very quickly became about Fable."
Fulton adds, "I don't remember who mentioned [Fable], but as soon as I heard the word I was sold," he says. "I could think of nothing else, because we just adore that series here – as people do all over the world. Suddenly, the promise of us building a team to make a new Fable game just felt like the perfect match." Now, over five years after the game was first announced, Fable had its first proper showcase at the Xbox Developer Direct last week, with a release date set for "late 2026."
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