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New Fable developer Playground Games has been careful not to slavishly emulate the work of series creator Lionhead Games, but the new shepherds of the IP did obviously want to examine and learn from the games that came before them. As part of this history lesson, the studio unearthed design files that were evidently stored away before or around the time Xbox shut down Lionhead a decade after acquiring the studio and mismanaging it into dust – a misstep that Xbox leadership has publicly owned up to in the past. Surely they wouldn't do that again.
In an Xbox Wire post, Fable general manager and game director Ralph Fulton tackles the question of "the essence" of a Fable game.
"We came up with a bunch of things – the first of which I would say we actually inherited from Lionhead," he says. "When we started working on this project, we got a treasure trove of documents from Lionhead that had been in storage.
"Something that I thought was just brilliantly succinct was one of the documents, which said: ‘Fable is Fairytale, not Fantasy’ – which is just super neat."
Digging up these documents might technically count as grave robbing given Lionhead's fate, but there is something poignant about a new generation of developers rediscovering the principles laid out by the folks who made the IP they've now inherited, and using them as a touchstone for their own ambitions. And Lionhead nailed it with those five words – that's Fable, right there.
We spoke to Fulton to learn more about how Fable's open-world fantasy lets you meddle in the lives of over 1,000 unique characters. He stressed that, "It would be inauthentic for us to try and just make Fable 4. We felt we needed to reboot the franchise and put our own stamp on it."
