Ralph Fulton, Playground Games general manager and game director on the new Fable, is drawing a distinct line between what his reboot of the classic RPG series is and isn't.
For one, it's not a Lionhead game. The OG Fable developer shut down in 2016, and Playground isn't trying to simply dupe the recipe for that studio's special sauce.
In an interview with Xbox Wire, Fulton revealed that Playground received a "treasure trove of documents from Lionhead that had been in storage" to serve as a navigating star as the new developers worked on rebooting the franchise. However, Fulton also made clear, "we can't try to make a Lionhead game." The British game developer is known these days as the Forza Horizon studio, but obviously that's about to change.
"One of the things I said to the team was, 'Look, we're not Lionhead – we can't try to make a Lionhead game,'" said Fulton. "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."
Another key distinction Fulton learned from the aforementioned documents is that Lionhead didn't consider Fable a fantasy game, despite magical creatures and abilities having always been a core component of the series' world and systems.
"I guess our interpretation of what that means is that fairytale and fantasy probably exist on opposite ends of a spectrum," Fulton said. "I think we all know what fantasy is – it's The Witcher, it's Skyrim, it's Lord of the Rings, it's Game of Thrones. And I think tonally it's quite grand, it's sweeping, it's geopolitical, it's serious. You know, you can almost picture the color palette of fantasy."
One of the standouts from the Fable segment of today's Xbox Developer Direct was the focus on NPCs, of which there are more than 1000, almost all of which you can interact with in a myriad of different ways, from marrying them to divorcing them and even employing them. Fulton recently sat down with GamesRadar+ and explained how Fable's ambitiously designed NPCs are at the core of the game's open world fantasy – erm, fairytale.
"We felt we needed to reboot the franchise and put our own stamp on it. This had to be Playground's Fable," Fulton told us.
