Playground Games’ Ralph Fulton spoke about the origins of Fable’s return and ensuring the game kept the core spirit of the original series, which debuted a quarter of a century ago.
Fable has returned for the first time since 2018 and is set to release its first mainline game in the franchise in over a decade since Fable 3 in 2010. With Playground Games currently at the helm of the franchise, Fulton can now reflect on how the success of Forza Horizon 3 and the desire to grow as Developers sowed the seeds for Fable’s return.
Speaking with IGN, Fulton expanded on what he thinks led to this opportunity for the team of developers.
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.
Playground Wanted to Make Sure Fable Maintained Its Core Elements, Including Its Britishness
When rebooting such a beloved franchise from the ground up, the team at Playground wanted to ensure certain core elements remained intact. Ralph Fulton says the three pillars of Fable games they landed on were “Freedom,” “Fairytale,” and “Britishness.” For developers, these three pillars formed the core of Fable’s DNA.
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 a fairytale, not fantasy, which I just think is brilliant, incredibly incisive and speaks to really tonally what Fable is…
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.
For the first time ever, Fable has the freedom to release on PlayStation, and the game will be coming to PlayStation 5 on the same day it’s released on Xbox platforms. Learn more about that here.
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I though the founders left and formed a new studio Lighthouse