Buried like some kind of cursed treasure at the bottom of this week’s episode of the official Xbox Podcast was news about Playground Games’ long-awaited Fable. I call it “treasure” because it included a rare glimpse at gameplay, but “cursed” because it came with that dreaded caveat that accompanies so many development updates: a delay. Once planned to launch this year, Fable is now set for a 2026 release.
Delays, of course, are generally not harbingers of doom, despite the agonising wait they inflict. In Fable’s case, hopefully this is the sign of a richly detailed world that just needs more time to bloom. But that extra year of waiting can be put to good use: there’s no better time to play the Fable games. Specifically, I’d urge you to try Fable 2, the series’ highpoint, and (re)discover just what a strange and unique RPG Lionhead Studios’ 2008 classic is.
By today’s role-playing game standards, Fable 2 is really quite unusual. But even compared to its 2008 contemporaries, which includes the likes of Fallout 3 (released just days later) and BioWare’s early 3D games, it is practically singular in its vision. While Fable 2 features a fairly traditional campaign structure, with a linear main story and an esoteric collection of optional side quests, its RPG systems are a far cry from the crunchy stat blocks of Oblivion and Neverwinter Nights. It completely smooths out those aspects to create something incredibly approachable, even for those who find a D&D character sheet indistinguishable from hieroglyphics.
Just six main skills govern the likes of your health pool, strength, and speed. There’s only a single damage stat to consider when it comes to weapons, and nothing of the sort when it comes to armour or buff-providing accessories. Combat, despite being prevalent throughout most quests, is incredibly surface swashbuckling, spiced up only through the use of some genuinely creative spellcasting (including the wonderful Chaos, which forces enemies to dance and scrub the floors.) You’re even imperious to death – losing all your hitpoints is punished with nothing more than a minor XP penalty.
In short, Fable 2 is the RPG for people who have never played RPGs before. Back in 2008, when Oblivion’s open world Cyrodiil may have felt overwhelmingly huge and imposingly freeform for role-playing newbies, Fable 2’s Albion offered a more manageable chain of small, easy-to-navigate maps. You can freely go back and forth between these areas and, with the aid of your faithful canine companion who barks at the merest sign of adventure, you can tread beyond the beaten path to discover secrets like buried treasure, sunken caves, and the puzzle-posing Demon Doors. All this lends the world a sense of scale and opportunity grander than its actual footprint. But Albion’s geography is restrictive, largely forcing you down linear pathways from one landmark to another. This isn’t a world to get lost in, at least not in the traditional sense of the word.
Albion as a physical entity pales in comparison to the incredible worlds of BioWare’s Infinity Engine games and Bethesda’s wonderfully weird Morrowind. But to judge it on both modern and contemporary expectations of RPGs is to do it a disservice. Fable 2’s priorities lie not in climbing far-off mountains or spelunking through dungeons with a myriad of routes, but in a world that is bustling with life. Look at Fable 2 through the lens of a very different game – Maxis’ similarly singular The Sims – and you’ll find a truly remarkable simulation of society.
Albion operates like some kind of strange organic clockwork organism. Every morning, as the sun peeks over the horizon, its people wake and start their daily routines. Town criers bellow updates over the noisy crowds: “Shops are now opening!” and, when the stars begin to twinkle once more, “The time is: very late!” Much like your families in The Sims, every citizen of Albion has an interior life, driven by not just their societal roles, but also their likes and dislikes. Through the use of an ever-expanding library of gestures, you can delight, insult, impress, or even seduce every (non-hostile) person you encounter. A well-executed fart may have the patrons of a pub howling into their beers, while pointing and laughing at small children may send them fleeing for their parents. Through these emotes you can push and pull the people of Albion, charming them with your heroism and eccentricities, or pushing them away with your evil deeds and rudeness. We often talk about reactive NPCs and video game cities that feel alive, but there’s simply nothing out there that achieves those goals in quite the same way as Fable 2.
While your character is a Hero with a capital H, destined to go on grand adventures, bully bandits, and find glittering treasure, Fable 2 is a more interesting game when you fully assimilate yourself into its society. Pretty much every building in Albion is available for purchase, both houses and shops, and you can buy them with the money earned by toiling away at gainful employment (the woodcutting and blacksmithing minigames quickly become monotonous-yet-soothing distractions.) With the keys to a house in hand, you can either become a landlord, renting the property out for fair or extortionate prices, or make the building your home and furnish it to your tastes. Then there’s the next step: wooing the most attractive NPC in town by repeatedly spamming their favourite emote until they fall into your bed and, after a comedic bit of slap and tickle, you end up with a baby. The individual components of all this, as with The Sims, feels incredibly artificial. Yet the overall result produces a genuine, remarkable sense of life.
Few, if any, RPGs have followed in Fable’s footsteps in this department. Even the towering achievements of Baldur’s Gate 3 don’t include organic romances and the ability to game the property market. But Albion’s authentic sense of life does exist in a more unexpected successor: Red Dead Redemption 2. Rockstar’s digital recreation of the old West is incredibly responsive, filled with incidental characters that believably react to your presence and behaviour. Every single NPC can be spoken to using a system that feels like a slicker, more cinematic version of Fable 2’s gestures, and your demeanor can delight or annoy. While most interactions are simple pleasantries, the lives you touch in more meaningful ways – such as sucking the venom out of a lethal snake bite – may remember you and repay you with kindness many weeks later. If Playground’s new Fable is to stay true to its origins, then its modern touchstone should be Rockstar’s unparalleled living world rather than the tabletop-inspired RPGs that are currently in vogue.
There are other mandatory things Playground will need to foster, too. Fable’s incredibly British sense of humour needs to be maintained, and so we’d best be seeing some dry, witty satire of the class system with a healthy dose of bum jokes on the side. Plus we’ll need a cast of beloved thespians that rival the teaching staff of Hogwarts (something Playground already seems to have under control, with Richard Ayoade and Matt King appearing in trailers.) But perhaps the most important, beyond that bustling world, is Lionhead’s trademark approach to good and evil.
Peter Molyneux, the founder of Lionhead Studios and lead designer of the Fable series, has a fascination with good and evil. Providing players a choice between the two was the basis of the studio’s first project, the god game Black & White, and continued to be a focus throughout the rest of Molyneux’s career, including his upcoming Masters of Albion (which is unrelated to Fable, despite its confusing name.) But Lionhead’s approach to player choice is a far cry from the nuanced, tough decisions featured in The Witcher and the best works of BioWare. In Fable 2, your options are either absolutely angelic or despicably demonic, with no grey space in between. It works in comedic extremes; an early sidequest asks you to either clear the pests out of a trader’s warehouse or destroy all his stock. Later, a ghost who killed himself after being abandoned at the altar asks that you torment his still-living former lover, and your only paths are to make her life a living hell or make her your wife.
The past decade and change of RPG development has placed priority on ultimate player expression, unlocked through choices that explore a spectrum of human behaviour. Moral quandaries, we’ve decided, should be much more complicated than the choice between saving children or burning them alive. Fable, though, thrives on the binary. It relishes the chance for you to play the most heroic hero the land ever saw, or become the most heinous villain in history. This was established in the trilogy’s first game, which saw your character literally grow devil horns if you persistently chose evil options, but really came into its own in Fable 2. The way the sequel’s quests branch to offer good or evil pathways feels richer and more creative, while that reactive world allows both your moment-to-moment and week-to-week activities to shape your reputation and purity alignment. Moral-focused outcomes in RPGs can often feel underwhelming because they place increased resources on the centre rather than the extremes, and so being truly evil ultimately feels like saving the world with a scowl. Fable 2, on the other hand, is happy for you to go full Sith (with the lightning powers to match) and it largely works because it only has two paths to juggle.
It’s not yet clear if Playground Games will get this side of Fable right. While this week’s development update came with 50 seconds of pre-alpha gameplay footage, there was little in there that truly painted the picture of an authentic Fable game. Well, aside from the mandatory chicken kick, of course. But under a minute of contextless footage was never going to tell the whole story, was it?
What we can see in those fleeting seconds is a much more detailed world than Fable has ever enjoyed. The main character’s horse points to an open world with far fewer restrictions than the 360-era games, and an incredibly rendered forest suggests that we genuinely will be able to get lost in this new Albion. But it’s the brief shot of a city, which looks dense and knotty and full of life, that gives me hope that Playground Games have stuck true to the Sims-like simulation of society that makes Fable 2 so unique. I can’t wait to point and laugh at its children, dance on its pubs’ tables, and have a whirlwind romance with a randomer I meet behind the green grocers.
But all of that is a year away. And in that time you can revisit (or experience for the first time) the wonderful world of Fable 2. You’ll easily see why it’s so beloved, and why it’s so important that Playground Games retains all of its oddities. Because what we don’t need from this project is a Fable reimagined as a Witcher clone, or as a Baldur’s Gate-alike, or Dragon Age style RPG. We just need Fable to be Fable, farts and all.
Matt Purslow is IGN’s Senior Features Editor.
