The new Fable, this time rebooted by Forza Horizon maker Playground Games, is surprisingly faithful to Lionhead Studios' original classics despite coming more than a decade after the last mainline game, right down to the fact that you can become a property hoarder and buy every single building in the open world of Albion. But the studio's general manager says the feature was basically one of the "requirements" the devs held on to from the first trilogy.
Being able to buy any building of course leads to fun RPG possibilities, like letting players roleplay as a penny-pinching landlord or, as the game calls it, a "Rich Tw*t." Though it also means every single building also needs to be enterable. Playground Games' Ralph Fulton told GamesRadar+ in a recent interview the team had "the requirement in our game that you can go into any building, any house that you encounter."
"So that detail needs to persist outside the house and inside the house as well," Fulton continued. "You can buy that house, you can live in it. That was, again, like one of those kinds of requirements that we took from the original games, that's something that people will really want to do. So again, that kind of forms the approach we've taken to world building, to environment building, and this process."
Playground Games is staying faithful to Lionhead's OG vision in a bunch of other ways too. There's loads of chickens to chase and kick, obviously, plus you can romance, marry, build a family with, and then divorce nearly all of its 1,000 NPCs - it helps that the studio had a "treasure trove" of design documents leftover from the classic Xbox games.
