Fable is about to bring us into an open-world version of Albion that's home to a living population of over 1000 NPCs, and I'm happy to confirm that you can romance almost all of them.
With the Xbox Developer Direct revealing that we can get to know the NPCs, go on dates, get married, and even have kids, I took the opportunity to ask Playground Games' general manager Ralph Fulton if we could feasibly woo and wed any one of NPCs we encounter in the world.
"With a very few exceptions, the answer is yes," Fulton says. "We went into this with some non-negotiables that we felt were just really important in this area of the game. So we said from the start, I want to be able to talk to any NPC. Now, obviously in the original games, you did that through gestures. We wanted to do that in fully voiced conversations in this game. So you kind of throw that challenge at the narrative team and the audio team, and they go away, and they kind of figure out how they're going to do that."
I have so many fond memories of trying to romance and eventually marry noble townsfolk in Bowerstone, or win the heart of a travelling NPC in an encampment in Fable 2. Of course, in those days, I'd have to flex my muscles at them, dance a jig, or give them a present. But it sounds like the Fable reboot is really stepping things up not only when it comes to NPCs, but in the love department, too. And of course, not every match will work out, because yes, you'll be able to divorce them… or they can divorce you.
"You can talk to them, you can romance them, you can marry them. You can divorce them or be divorced by them," Fulton says. "You can have children with them. You can hire them. You can fire them. They are [the NPCs] kind of a game within a game, but they are such a unique, fundamental part of Fable."
As Fulton explains, in Fable, there's an "abundance of things" that will give you different reputations with the many NPCs across settlements. With a kind of witnessing system at play that will see them judge the actions they've seen or known you've done in the world, every NPC will feel differently about what you do based on their own worldviews, personalities, and traits.
"We kind of saw a little bit of it in the footage from the piece [Xbox Developer Direct], when those little words are sort of popping up on screen," Fulton says, "that's somebody seeing you being generous, or dishonest or dishonorable, or a bigamist, or whatever. So there's an abundance of things for them to react to."
As you might have noticed there, Fulton mentions that yes, you can be a bigamist and marry more than one person. But you better believe the people you meet will have opinions about that if they find out. With so many NPCs to get to know, potentially marry, and more, I can't wait to find love in Albion – and maybe stir some drama while I'm at it.
"We've stuck with the ambition we had right at the start": How Fable's open world fantasy lets you meddle in the lives of over 1000 living NPCs.
