"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

Playground Games' Fable revival is the most ambitious RPG of 2026. As revealed in the Xbox Developer Direct, not only will Albion be truly open-world for the first time in the series' history, but it will be brought to life with over 1000 NPCs whose lives will be shaped by the choices you make.

From property management to marriage, the return of so many familiar features already make me want to become a chicken-kicking hero. But one thing Fable isn't is a sequel. Sitting down to speak with general manager Ralph Fulton, he explains that the upcoming action-RPG presented the opportunity for a fresh start. "We're not Lionhead," he says. "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. This had to be Playground's Fable."

Albion's impressive Living Population feature distinguishes Playground's Fable from past games, where every NPC is a fully-realized individual who has their own worldviews, personalities, and feelings about your actions. "We went into this with some non-negotiables. We said from the start that we wanted to be able to talk to any NPC," says Fulton, "and we knew we wanted every NPC to be persistent [...] I think it's a real elevation of the traditional open-world NPC, they are all as real as they can be."

The living population

Playground is no stranger to building vast open worlds, with a history of creating beautiful locations in the Forza Horizon series. But as Fulton reveals, the team are pushing the boundaries in Fable's setting, not just through its living population, but in the way we'll be able to explore every nook and cranny of Albion.

"You can go into any building, any house that you encounter," Fulton tells me. "You can buy that house, you can live in it. That was one of those kinds of requirements that we took from the original games, something that people will really want to do. That kind of forms the approach we've taken to world building, to environment building, and this process."

Lively NPCs were one of the non-negotiables taken from the original trilogy, with Fulton explaining that everyone at Playground recognized that the inhabitants of Albion breathe so much life into Fable. To recapture that, the studio knew there could be no shortcuts.

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"In the original games, you [talked to the NPCs] through gestures. We wanted to do that in fully voiced conversations in this game," Fulton says. "So you throw that challenge at the narrative team and the audio team, and they go away, and they figure out how they're going to do that. We knew that we wanted every NPC to be persistent. If you were so minded, you could follow an NPC around all day, and they will autonomously do the things that they do every day."

Giving every NPC a daily routine is no small feat when there are over 1000 of them to take into consideration, but it was crucial for the level of detail and believability the team wanted to bring to the RPG – keeping Albion perpetually in motion around the player's heroics.

"They'll get up, they'll go to work, they'll have some leisure time, they'll go back to their home, and they'll go to bed," Fulton says. "When you hear that, certainly as a developer, you start going, 'Oh, okay, so every NPC, and there's more than 1000 of them in the game, needs a bed.' And you have that conversation with the environment art team, and they're like, 'they need what now?' It brings you to a very different way of building a game, because it needs to be functional as well as beautiful."

As someone who adores the life sim elements of Fable 2 and Fable 3, the ways we can get to know the population looks set to exceed any hopes I had for the reboot. Every NPC will have their own unique personalities and traits, likes and dislikes – and as Fulton confirms, your interactions with them go well beyond romance.

"You can talk to them, you can romance them, you can marry them. You can divorce them or be divorced by them. You can have children with them. You can hire them. You can fire them," Fulton says. "[NPCs] are kind of a game within a game, but they are such a unique, fundamental part of Fable. And I think one of the things that sets Fable apart from other open world medieval fantasy RPGs is that it was uncuttable. We knew we had to deliver against this. I love that we've stuck with the ambition that we had right at the start of that."

Some of my fondest memories of Fable involve trying to woo NPCs by flexing at them, or performing a jig. Of course, my ultimate goal was always marriage, so to hear that the reboot is paying homage to this feature and elevating it? I couldn't ask for more. The number of NPCs is undoubtedly ambitious, as are the sprawling locations the open world promises. It's been a real learning experience for the team, and I'm already itching to see how the world and its population come together to hopefully deliver an Albion that feels alive.

"The idea is that you can, in a very gamey sense, get to know [characters]. You will learn the names of people in the settlement, if you spend enough time there, you'll kind of learn the things they like, their personality traits. You learn where they work. You can affect that as well. So there's tons of stuff that we've had to learn and do for the first time, but the experience of doing it has been wonderful."

The Playground team are fans "first and foremost" of the original games, and the reboot is as much a new beginning as it is faithful to the spirit of the series' past. The way the studio has recaptured this 'game within a game' concept is impressive, signaling that immersion into this fairytale is a key priority for Playground. Equally impressive is the way the team has layered all of this throughout old Albion haunts like the capital city of Bowerstone, to the rolling hills of an open world populated by familiar foes like Hobbes and Balverines, as is how jobs and property management return with a new Playground spin.

With Xbox preparing for its biggest year of the console generation so far, GR+ is exploring the publisher's most anticipated first-party games (and some key Game Pass releases) as part of our Big in 2026 Spotlight series. Join us every day this week for exclusive interviews, new previews, and fresh insights into all of the upcoming Xbox games you need to have on your radar.