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It's been five years since a fairy, a sword, and a toad signaled the long-awaited return of Fable, now with Forza Horizon developer Playground Games at the helm. With the revival set to land in autumn 2026 for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X, the studio can't wait to welcome players back into Albion – almost a decade after it started looking beyond the open world racing games it was known for.
"The first conversations we had about doing something other than Forza Horizon and building a second team go right the way back to the year after we shipped Forza Horizon 3," says Ralph Fulton, Playground's general manager, recalling conversations had back in 2017. "Forza Horizon 3 had gone really well in pretty much every dimension. It was the best Forza Horizon we'd made. The team really hit its stride – the game was really high-quality, it landed with a wide audience. We felt great about that."
That success, a year before Playground was officially acquired by Xbox Game Studios, led to new ambitions within the studio. "The conversation around building a second team and doing something else, doing something different, was really about wanting to challenge ourselves – to learn and grow as developers," he adds. "Wanting to see if we could do it, if we could build a game in a different genre. And that game wasn't Fable at that point, but there was definitely intent [to do something new]."
A world of opportunity
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Playground may seem like a strange choice of developer to take on the first truly open-world version of Albion – a fairtyale fantasy landscape packed with a living population of 1000 NPCs, a more nuanced approach to mortality and reputation, and plenty of callbacks to the Fable games of old. But the truth is that Playground built its reputation on bringing richly detailed, sprawling open landscapes to life – albeit one that you could explore from behind the wheel of a car.
"We felt our transferable skills were, in a genre sense, open-world game design, open-world technology, and open-world streaming – all the nuts and bolts that the team had gotten really good at, and we as a studio felt that we were pretty proficient at," Fulton says. "[In 2017] we were still an independent studio, but we'd worked with Xbox since the first year of our existence. We had really good relationships, lots of friends there, and the conversation about a second project very quickly became about Fable."
"I don't remember who mentioned [Fable], but as soon as I heard the word I was sold," he says. "I could think of nothing else, because we just adore that series here – as people do all over the world. Suddenly, the promise of us building a team to make a new Fable game just felt like the perfect match."
Taking on a series as beloved as Fable wouldn't be an easy feat – especially when so much time has passed since the release of Lionhead's Fable 3 in 2010. But as Fulton explains, the international team Playground put together to build this reboot is unified in its desire to "make a great Fable game", because "they're fans, first and foremost."
The Xbox Developer Direct gameplay showcase on Jan 22 demonstrated just some of the ways Playground set out to capture the spirit of the original trilogy, while also striving to achieve its own ambitions for a new game instalment. "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. "But there are lots and lots of points of divergence as well."
"The world in Forza Horizon is experienced at up to 250 miles an hour. 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."
A new beginning
In Fulton's own words, it's "been a long road" since Playground Games first changed lanes to start shaping an open-world action-RPG with a high level of detail. For starters, the newly established teams (headquartered in Leamington Spa, UK) had to do "a lot of work on our technology" to properly optimize the proprietary ForzaTech engine for a new genre – to ensure the studio was "capable of building a character-first, story-first, narrative-first, highly cinematic" in the new Fable.
What's impressive is that Playground hasn't just set its sights on recapturing the spirit of Fable, but of giving it a new dimension. Hallmarks of the series are there, familiar haunts like the capital city of Bowerstone, chicken-kicking, British humor, and plenty of freedom of choice – alongside returning features like purchasable properties, jobs, marriage, and more. But Playground is putting its own stamp on the series, too – there's a reason this game is called 'Fable' and not 'Fable 4', after all.
"Right back at the start, we spent a lot of time thinking: What is a Fable game?," Fulton says. "And not really in terms of features or characters or locations or any of that stuff, but at a much higher level. What is the essence of Fable? We talked about that a great deal and landed on a few guiding principles, you might say, that we felt without these things the game can't call itself Fable. We enshrined them right at the top of the creative process."
Playground's Fable will let you shape your own fairytale as the hero of your choosing, with a reactive approach to reputation and morality, fueled by a living population of 1000 NPCs. You can expect faster, more fluid combat with combos, and a world that will be directly impacted by your decisions - even greatly altering the landscape of the open-world's lush rolling hills and sleepy hamlets. Playground may be presenting the sort of big ideas that helped define the Lionhead era of Fable, but this studio is keen to leave its own mark on the series.
"Something that I've always said to the team, certainly back in the early days of development, was that this has to be Playground's Fable," says Fulton. "We're not Lionhead. You can see Lionhead in that original trilogy – the personality of that team shows in the work they did and the games they made. But we're not Lionhead, we're a different studio with different people and a different culture. It would be inauthentic for us to try and just make Fable 4. One of the big reasons that this isn't a sequel is that we felt we needed to reboot the franchise, put our stamp on it, and make a Playground Fable game going forward – so that's what we've done."
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