Gaming: Fable Reboot Devs Aren't Trying To Make A Lionhead Game, But One...

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.

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Source: PC Gamer