Fable gameplay footage debuted at today’s Xbox Developer Direct, and despite a long 16-year wait between instalments the presentation felt very on brand. That’s maybe a little surprising, given Lionhead Studios closed in 2016. The new game is in the hands of Forza Horizon studio Playground Games, which has very little in common with the old Lionhead except for—perhaps crucially—its Britishness.
In an interview published by Xbox, Fable game director Ralph Fulton discussed how the studio dealt with taking on a storied series from a once-venerated studio. “One of the things I said to the team was, ‘Look, we’re not Lionhead—we can’t try to make a Lionhead game.’ This has to be a Playground game because I’m a really firm believer that the personality and the character of a team is visible in the work they do and the games they make.”
Fulton went on: “And I think you can see Lionhead in that original trilogy. It would be pointless, I think, for us to try and ape that. And that’s really at the heart of the reboot question, right? It felt imperative to me that this was a reboot because we’re starting again as Playground Games, and making Playground’s Fable.”
One sacrosanct part of the Fable identity is its fairytale setting. It is not a fantasy series, Fulton insists, and that’s an important distinction that informed Lionhead’s world building right from the start.
“When we started working on this project, we got a treasure trove of documents from Lionhead that had been in storage,” Fulton said. “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.”
Another sacrosanct part of Fable’s identity is that you’re allowed to kick chickens. Today’s gameplay teaser featured a booted hen, but there was more to this act of mindless violence than just a quaint little callback: it’s a useful case study for the way Playground Games is approaching Fable’s morality system.
“Our version of morality isn’t a sliding scale,” Fulton says. “We’ve chosen to anchor this around the actions you do, and specifically the things you do in Albion that are witnessed by at least one other person. So, if the things you do are seen by one or more people, you’ll start to earn a reputation for that thing. Obviously, we always use the chicken kicking example, because kicking chickens is classic Fable.
“So if a person sees you kicking a chicken,” he continues, “you will start to get a reputation as a ‘Chicken Chaser’—and if enough people see you do it, or you do it a lot, that reputation will become one of the things you’re known for in that settlement. And people will react to you based on what they think about that particular reputation.”
That’s pretty par for the course when it comes to RPG morality systems, but Fable has a fascinating twist. What if the NPC who witnessed you kicking the chicken actually thinks chickens deserve to be kicked? “Different people will view that reputation in different ways,” Fulton says. “Kicking chickens isn’t objectively good or objectively evil in a way everybody will agree on—it comes down to the unique worldview of the NPC, what they think of you because of it.”
It’s worth reading the full interview on Xbox Wire for more details on morality, especially as it relates to bigamy. Fable is releasing in fall.
