Fable is back, and back in a big way. Microsoft's reboot of Lionhead's much-loved fantasy role-playing series has had its moment in the Xbox Developer Direct showcase, leaving fans with plenty to chew on. Ahead of the reveal, IGN's Ryan McCaffrey sat down for a chinwag with Playground founder and general manager Ralph Fulton to expand on what was shown and discussed during the livestream. So, put down those chickens and settle in for our big interview on the Fable reboot. And when you're done with that, check out everything announced at Xbox Developer Direct.
IGN: So, Ralph, I wanted to start here. Number one, that was super impressive. We'll get into it. As a Fable fan, that made me very happy. But I wanted to start here, which is the beginning. How did this come to be? How did Fable come back? How did it get to be you guys? Did you pitch Phil? Did leadership come to you? Give me the origin story on this project.
Ralph Fulton: Yeah, it's almost lost in the midst of time now. It was such a long time ago. Like I say in the piece, we've been working on this game for a really, really long time. But the origin story began, I would say, in the year after we shipped Forza Horizon 3. So, I'm sure you know off the top of your head, that was 2016, 2017 kind of period. And I imagine you'll also remember that by that game in the series, the team had really hit its stride, knew exactly what it was doing, understood the franchise, had really gelled and come together as a team and really knocked that game out of the park.
IGN: Yeah, I think that's the first one we gave a 10 out of 10 to, was the third one.
Ralph Fulton: And in every respect, that was the hockey stick moment, just inflection point for that series. And we were still an independent studio back then. We talked about what the future looked like. And honestly, the intent to build a second team came out of a desire we had to learn and grow as developers, almost to challenge ourselves to see if we could go and achieve that same thing we'd done with the Horizon team in a different genre. And there was a little bit of, "Can we do this?"
IGN: Yeah.
Ralph Fulton: And I think that's super healthy. I think that as a developer, you should always be trying to challenge yourself and expand your skill set. So, that's where the idea came from. And obviously because we'd been working with Xbox for really since our inception as Playground Games, we had great relationships with them. We knew a lot of people there. The obvious first conversation for us was with them where we said, "Hey, look, we're looking to build a second team. We want to work in a new genre." We felt like the transferable skills that we had from the Horizon games were an open world. We had learned a lot about building open worlds technically in terms of streaming, in terms of game design and game flow and all that good stuff. And in lots of ways that are maybe surprisingly car agnostic. There's a ton of things about Horizon games that are about the cars, but there's a ton of principles that we'd learned there, which we felt were transferable. And I don't remember who said the word Fable first, but as soon as I heard it, I was like, "That has to be it. That fits so perfectly." It's a series that we adored here and still do.
And the conversation went from there and it went pretty fast. I think everybody felt... certainly I know the folks we spoke to on the Xbox side felt really strongly that if a studio were to start working on Fable to pick that up, it had to be a British studio. And the fact that we had this great working relationship, the fact that we were making this game that was increasingly important and successful, and had this ambition to scale and to grow, it went pretty fast after that.
IGN: That's awesome. Can you talk about the multiplatform piece? You know what's best for your game and what you're up to versus what other studios are up to, but within that example, Horizon 6 is Xbox first and PlayStation later. This one's multiplatform straight out of the gate. Can you talk about why those discrepancies between each of your games?
Ralph Fulton: Yeah, and I think it goes to the strategy all up, which is that every project team is deciding these things, deciding what's right for their particular title. And even within Playground, we have two projects which have made slightly different decisions, although the endpoint is the same. And I think as a game developer, the most important thing to me is that the greatest number of people play my games as possible. That's what we're in this for. I think that's true of most developers. We want the largest number of people to experience our games and enjoy them.
And therefore the platform piece is really a natural extension of that. And certainly looking back on Horizon, the first Forza Horizon was an Xbox 360 exclusive. We were developing for one platform, but the way of the industry and the intervening period has been platform expansion. Even within the Horizon series like going to PC, going to Steam, that has been the general progression. And it's in service of how can we bring our games to the largest audience possible?
IGN: From where I sit, it makes sense in terms of this is a reboot, you're trying to get this franchise back off the ground, and the best way to do that is to hit as many platforms on day one as possible. So, I definitely get it. This was covered a bit in the video, but can you elaborate on what you guys wanted to make sure to capture from the originals into this new one?
Ralph Fulton: That was the big question when we started this project and it dominated our thoughts and our conversations for quite a while, in the sense that we were asking what is the nature of Fable? What is the essence of Fable? What are the things, the elements without which a game is not Fable? And to be really clear there, I'm talking high level, I'm talking conceptually, I'm not talking about locations or particular features. I'm like, "What is the essence of that franchise that we love?" We talked around that a lot and we landed on a bunch of things. Choice and consequence is central to Fable. We actually wrap that up into the word "freedom" because it's about the freedom to choose, the freedom to make the choices and then have to live with the consequences of your choices. It's the freedom to go where you want, do what you want, be the hero you want to be. And that right there is at the heart of our game. We want you to be the hero you want to be. So, freedom is absolutely central to it.
We landed on two other tonal pillars, I think. And the first is fairytale. And we actually inherited this from Lionhead. We had this treasure trove of documents which had been in storage, that came originally from Lionhead. And one of them had this incredibly neat little bit of direction, which was Fable is fairytale, not fantasy, which I just think is brilliant, incredibly incisive and speaks to really tonally what Fable is. Because if you think about fairytale, when you think about fantasy, they're kind of like opposite ends of a spectrum and everyone knows what fantasy is. It's grand and sweeping and it's high stakes. And then fairytale's right at the other end of the spectrum and it's personal and it's intimate. It's about ordinary people and what happens when magic touches their lives. And then it has this moral component to it as well. And you can almost imagine the difference in color scheme. The color palette of fantasy is very different from the color palette of fairytale. And we just onboarded that as this really fantastic directional statement.
And then finally, it's about Britishness. And again, why was it important to Xbox that a British studio continued with Fable? Because Fable is this quintessentially British game, and not just because Albion is medieval Britain through a filter, if you like. And not just because the characters are British and have British accents. There's a sensibility to the games, there's a tone of voice, a way of thinking about things, a way of reacting to things. It's very British. And those things combined are for us the DNA of Fable. If you don't hit those things, if you're not true to those things, you're not making a Fable game. So, that was something that we decided right at the start.
IGN: Love it. So, I suspect I know the answer to this, but is there any narrative connection to the originals at all or is this truly a reboot?
Ralph Fulton: I'm going to avoid that question, Ryan. And I'll tell you why. We touch very lightly on story in the Dev Direct piece, but honestly, what we really wanted to do is come out and speak to the detail in the game and answer all those questions that people inevitably have about the game we haven't answered before. We're going to talk more about story later in the year, so I'm not going to say yes or no to that particular question just yet.
What I would say is with this being a reboot, it felt really imperative for us to clear the space, to tell a story that we want to tell within Albion, which is why this isn't a sequel, for example. This isn't necessarily connected to the original timeline or events or characters, but we do share lore and some of that originating lore of the Fable universe is really important to our story.
IGN: In hindsight, I think that at least as a player, the mistake I think Lionhead made was jumping the timeline around so much during the sequels. I think most people like the setting of 1 and 2 versus jumping further ahead in 3. Because man, it's gorgeous. Again, this medieval Britain inspired look is just like... don't take me to Steampunk 500 years later.
Ralph Fulton: You'll never hear me say a word against the original trilogy, but there is, I think we always felt a classic Albion, which is that really pastoral, idyllic, rural Albion. And we've absolutely tried to capture that. And hopefully you saw a bit of that in the Dev Direct piece.
IGN: Absolutely. This is a broader question, but I'll be curious how you decide to answer it. What does a Fable game need to do in 2026 that it didn't need to do in 2008?
Ralph Fulton: That's a super interesting question. I do think a bunch of things. I mean, we're, what? Two video game generations on from Fable 3 back in 2010. Technically, we're in a different world. Technology has moved on. I think game design has moved on. I think open world game design in particular has moved on. We talk about morality in the Dev Direct piece, and I think it's a great thing to point to, to show how we've taken something which was central to those original games and reimagined it. And I think in a way which is still faithful to the original games, but opens up huge gameplay opportunities, systemic opportunities almost in our game. So, we talk about how our morality system is more about shades of gray. It's more about the subjectivity of morality that honestly we see in the world today. There's no objective good, there's no objective evil. You couldn't get everyone in the world to agree that something is evil or something is good. That just doesn't happen. That diversity of opinion I think is really clear these days.
And therefore we've sort of taken that and probably in quite a gamey system-y way, we've taken that and built it into this reputation system that we talk about in the piece, which allows you to build reputations based on the things you do within Albion. And you could do big things once or little things lots of times. And if people see you doing that, it contributes to you building a reputation in that particular location. But then the key thing is how the people of Albion react to that? And they react to it based on the individual, almost unique worldview that they each have. And I think that's probably a more nuanced view of morality, but it's super interesting and it's also just packed with potential in gameplay terms.
IGN: On that note, the Dev Direct piece talked about 1,000 populated people in Albion and the word "handcrafted" was brought up. So, are those NPCs procedurally generated, or are those all the same people going to be in everybody's game?
Ralph Fulton: Yeah, so they are handcrafted. There's a lot of things about the way we have built the living population, which I think you could be forgiven for saying is just nuts. I think we maybe once thought we could procedurally generate them, but we abandoned that idea quite a long time ago because we wanted to craft every one of these NPCs from their name, to their appearance, to their personality traits, to that moral worldview that I talked about, to where they work and where they live and what their family unit is, because it's important to the player that they can get to know unique crafted NPCs. And like I said, there's 1,000 of them in the game. You can go and speak to every single one of them in fully voiced conversations. You could marry... it'll be a bit of work, but you could marry them all. You can have kids with them, you can hire them, you can fire them. They are just great fun.
And also they act as this sort of Greek chorus, if you like, reflecting your choices and your morality back at you. So, as you walk around, that's classic Fable, isn't it? People catcalling you in the street, telling you what they think of you. It's a brilliant thing in our game as well, but it's a great way of tracking how popular your decisions have been, your choices have been.
IGN: There's just a complete, not throwaway moment in the Dev Direct, but just a little quick second of gameplay when the team's talking about that where it's like you get labeled as a miserable twat or something. And I was just like, "That's Fable, that's as British as it gets there."
Ralph Fulton: Yeah. I'm glad you spotted that. It's there for half a second or something like that, but you caught it.
IGN: On this same track, the Dev Direct piece talked about the more fluid, good and evil system, morality. Will you physically change appearance like you classically did in the original three based on how you behave?
Ralph Fulton: That sort of character morphing feature, obviously a really central part of the original games. It's not in ours. And I'll tell you why. There's probably a couple of reasons. One, I guess it's about that high level principle I was talking about, that there is no objective good and evil. And the original games were predicated on there being an objective good and an objective evil, and you were somewhere along that scale, and that's what determined how your appearance changed.
IGN: Yeah.
Ralph Fulton: But for us, that doesn't really work. The way I've described our morality system working, you're never that thing, absolutely. You're different things to different people based on what they like or what they choose to value. So, that's one reason that it didn't work.
There's another reason, which is in our game, you build reputation based on the settlement, the town, the city that you're in, the part of the world that you're in. But when you go to a new place, a place you've never been to before, you walk in without any reputation and thus nobody knows what to think about you. And you can almost, through your behavior, through your choices, form completely different reputations, a completely different identity, if you like, in that place from the place that you were last time. And you can do that across all the locations in the game.
Now, you couldn't do that if you walked in with horns and a trident. Your reputation would precede you in that instance. And honestly, that ability to be completely in control of your identity and thus what people think of you felt more important to us than that legacy feature. So, it worked great in those games. It didn't seem to fit in ours, so we don't have it.
IGN: Okay, that's a good answer.
Ralph Fulton: Nice.
IGN: Based on what we've seen in the video, physically, how big is Albion? How big is your open world in this? Maybe relative to a Horizon game, I guess, would probably be just the best apples to apples comparison.
Ralph Fulton: So, I'm used to fielding that question from my time on the other game. And the comparison is useful actually because it probably won't surprise you to know that in terms of just square miles, it's smaller than an Horizon world. Horizon worlds are designed to be experienced at 250 miles per hour. So, you cover the distance far faster in those games than you do in ours. In our game, you move at the speed of a horse at most.
So, what we found is, although we took lots of world building experience and technology into this game from the Horizon titles, obviously we share a code base, we had to reevaluate the things that were important in building Albion. So, it's still massive. It'll still take you a long time to get through. There's tons to explore, but what we had to do with this game was build in far, far more detail into it than we necessarily have to in a Horizon game.
So, you move slower, but you see much more, you experience much more. I think maybe you're more immersed. Case in point, every building in the game you can go inside. So, every building needs an interior because you could rob it if you wanted, or you could buy it and live there with your family or with one of your families. So, I guess the focus just got pulled right in and we ended up building out much more rich detail at ground level, if you know what I mean.
IGN: Well, that was the correct answer as far as I'm concerned! I would much rather have a smaller, more dense world than a larger one where it's just geometry.
Ralph Fulton: I'll tell you a fun story, Ryan, about right at the start of this project. One of the first things we did was we got our Fable character running around in Surfers Paradise from Forza Horizon 3, and it took an eternity to get anywhere. And I think that if we hadn't realized already, that was the moment it dawned on us like, "Okay, we're going to have to play with some of our metrics here."
IGN: ForzaTech clearly was not originally built for this, obviously. So, how involved of a process was it to adapt the engine to what Fable specifically needs?
Ralph Fulton: Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the decision to use ForzaTech was based on a bunch of reasons. It's what we're used to working with here. We understand how to ship games on ForzaTech, and that's a big deal. And we know we can build expansive, beautiful, immersive open worlds using it. And crucially, we know we can stream them, because the Forza Horizon games have absolutely... They need to have absolutely world-class streaming technology.
What the engine didn't do was quest structure, cinematics... I mean, character-led gameplay full stop. So, yeah, we have invested an enormous amount in the engine to make it capable of making this game. But hopefully you can still see in the footage you just saw, there is a really unique look to games built with ForzaTech. There's a quality of light, there's a quality of render, which we adore, and I think makes all that effort, all that investment worthwhile.
IGN: You mentioned the horse, and we see a little bit of horse in the presentation. You knew you were going to get this question, so here it is: no dog. Talk about the dog decision because clearly there had to be one.
Ralph Fulton: Yeah. I did know I was going to get this question. And do you know what? There are some folks on the team that were relishing me getting this question because I cut it a while back. You know what? For development reasons, right? I don't need to go into any more detail than that, except to say there are a substantial number of people on the team who have yet to forgive me for that decision.
IGN: So, that's item number one for the sequel then is what you're telling me? It better be!
Ralph Fulton: I hear you on that. Hey, for those people that still bear a grudge, this is my penance.
IGN: Well, on that note, which classic Fable's your personal favorite? I'm sure different people on the team have different answers, but what's your answer?
Ralph Fulton: I love them all. Fable 2 has a really special place in my heart. For me, it's kind of a point of inspiration because I think the thing I remember most vividly from playing it is just the sense of place of being in Albion. I can remember walking up to Bower Lake like it was yesterday. The drive to try and recreate that same feeling in our world has been really strong.
IGN: 2 is my favorite as well, so I'm glad that you said 2, which makes the dog thing all the more shocking. So, if I were on the team, I would be one of those people that would be holding the grudge against you.
Ralph Fulton: I know you would!
IGN: You've mentioned and the video mentioned a clear reverence for and respect for what Lionhead built. Has Peter Molyneux seen this game yet?
Ralph Fulton: To my knowledge, he has not. He has not. But you're right. We as a team, I think, wear the responsibility of carrying on the franchise really heavily. I think it's something we're all conscious of. Everybody who's on this team, and this isn't PR, we've built a team from scratch for this project. And the thing that unites every single person is that they came here to make Fable. They didn't come here to work for Playground Games necessarily. They came here to make Fable. Everyone is first and foremost a fan. And I think everybody is really eager with anticipation to see the reaction we get from everyone, from fans all over the world when we finally show some stuff at Dev Direct.
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
Connexion
