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Ralph Fulton, studio head at Playground Games, the developer behind the Forza Horizon series and the upcoming Fable reboot, discusses how the studio has been able to pivot seamlessly from racing games to a choices-matter RPG with 1,000 hand-crafted NPCs.
If it seems strange that the studio best known for lovingly recreating cars from the real world and putting them into life-endangering courses is working on a reboot of a series best known for people having the chicken kicker reputation overtake their notoriety as the town's savior, then you're not alone.
Fulton understands Playground Games' pivot might seem out of left field, and in our Fable interview, he explains how the two series have more in common than you may think. "There are lots of commonalities, maybe a surprising number of commonalities, between making an open-world racing game and making an open-world action-RPG," says Fulton, while also noting, "there are lots and lots of points of divergence as well."
A major part of these commonalities is how the player character moves around the world. Fable's protagonist might not be glued inside a car like Forza Horizon's, but they do take a speedier form of traveling around the world than walking. Despite this, they still have major differences.
"The world in Forza Horizon is experienced at up to 250 miles an hour," Fulton explains. "So that world is huge, and it looks great when you park, but it needs to look great when you're moving at speed as well. And in Fable, we move at the speed of a horse. So that means we're moving much more slowly. It means we have the opportunity, and I think requirement, to build much more detail into our world. So Albion is 100% the most richly detailed world we've ever built."
The Fable reboot is due to release in the autumn of this year.
