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After being delayed into next year to give others in the Xbox portfolio wriggle room in the months that won’t be dominated by Grand Theft Auto, the wait for Playground’s Fable is proving to be an arduous one—but the hope exists that the studio, based in England, should be equipped to run with the ball Lionhead left on the field and deliver a Fable of their own with the wry British wit intact.
Regardless of framing, whether it’s a funny vignette starring Richard Ayoade as Jack and the Beanstalk’s giant or a deeper dive into Albion and what the town and its people offer, Fable has always shown well. In a behind-closed-doors presentation, we got to check out a good, whimsical half an hour of Fable’s adventurous open-world, and oh, the game this is shaping up to be.
Fable is being described as a hero’s journey, full of all of the ‘save the world’ stuff we’ve come to expect. As seen in the most recent trailer, Hayley Atwell has been confirmed as the story’s big bad, although it looks like Jack of Blades is also back, and the stakes are higher than ever. That’s, of course, what happens in the grander adventure that is Fable. What we got to see, over the course of a half hour, is how you’re able to build a life within this Albion and how, if you choose to, you could play there forever.
As has always been the case for Fable, rich, systemic social systems are once again etched into the game’s bedrock and come together to form the foundation of how you, the hero, are perceived within the game’s world. Fable is a life sim in that you can date, take a partner if you choose, and take actions in the world to change people’s view of you. Unlike past games, whose morality systems have operated on a strict black and white scale, where it’s either good or evil, Playground’s Fable takes a more nuanced approach that reminds me of a quote I know: “You can’t be all things to all people.”
In Fable, each of the game’s thousand-plus NPCs has their own life, schedules, and principled views of things, and it’s unrealistic to expect all people to hold the same view of you, even if you think what you’re doing is objectively good. An example we’re shown sees the hero buying up both businesses and real estate to ingratiate himself with the locals and curry favour with a certain lady in town, whose ideal man has an entrepreneurial spirit and nice duds. As a result of all of this, he was able to offer a downtrodden beggar, whom he’d met earlier, a steady job.
The other side of the coin is that the tailor from The Spinning Wheel, from whom you need to purchase a dressier outfit, has a more humble disposition and passes off your behaviour as elitism, marking up your purchase eighty percent just to serve you right. Your traits populate a bit of a reputation cloud that’s ever changing based on your actions and choices, and the world’s characters react to them based on their subjective views; it’s a staggeringly deep system and feels like a substantial step up on the morality engines we’ve seen before.
Life sim aside, Fable can also be an economic management sim. You’re able to generate wealth through daily toil and engaging in the town’s trade, and, as I mentioned earlier, buy businesses in which you can manage things like who is staffed, what their wages are, and it’s up to you to decide what’s fair in this small piece of Albion. Silverbrook, a small farming town in Oakshire, one of the game’s six regions, is just one town; if you follow adventure elsewhere, your reputation will once again be a blank slate, which makes my mind race as to how I might be able to exploit the game’s systems in the pursuit of generational wealth.
It’s possible to buy up all of the houses in a town, jack up the rent, and watch that passive income roll in; being hated would be a small price to pay for this kind of bankroll. Of course, if you take things too far, people will miss payments and end up on the streets. The team noted that Silverbrook was once a smaller town but had its area expanded to cater for the possibility of every NPC in the town sleeping rough. That itself is a fascinating prospect.
Playground’s Fable has long felt like a match that’s too good to be true, and it has taken seeing it in action to appreciate that while their Albion is different, it’s uniquely theirs—the game’s funny, delightfully British. It’s got spark for fantasy that I’ve not felt for a while. Social systems aside, the game is also full of choices—thousands of them with branching options—whose consequences will be felt and impact the world and the story being told.
One such choice we saw pertained to Colin the Pig. The town’s butcher is contending that Colin be slaughtered for the town’s big feast, as he’s been buttering him up for that purpose, while a young boy contends that Colin is special and doesn’t deserve the chopping block. It seems like a standard problem, right up until Colin speaks. Talks get heated, and wanting to be a kind hero, it was determined that Colin should live; however, the butcher would demand to be compensated for all the faff, to use his word.
It’s a promising sign that we were shown nearly thirty minutes of the game’s social elements—things like working a job, getting married, running a pub, and befriending a talking pig—without a lick of combat until the last moments, where we saw the consequences of burning this extraordinary life to cinders, and I was still engrossed. There’s an interconnectivity within this world that looks groundbreaking, and I cannot wait to bend it to my will.