A young man walks into Bowerstone Market. He’s known around these parts for various reasons: he’s got way too much cash tied up in property, the best dog around town, and a wicked affinity for swords and sorcery – and blunderbusses. He’s also got great big horns sticking out of his head and spends most of his day farting on people. “Oi, you,” he says, pointing to an innocent, elderly man sitting down by the canal. “Cough up your rent, bud *farts*.”
It’s safe to say that everyone's favourite Little Sparrow unfortunately grew up to be a colossal dick.
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Fable boasts a different kind of fantasy to most other games. It’s deeply invested in the traditional, tragicomic humour of inimitable icons like Dickens and Pratchett – the former of whom is quite literally referred to as The Inimitable – and I’ve always been sceptical about whether or not any studio that isn’t pre-2010 Lionhead could do this world justice. It’s not just about farting, or being a capitalist git, or wrecking warehouses for Albion’s version of Fagin mixed with Bill Sikes. It’s about how Fable consistently adheres to its own presupposed and unwavering logic systems, and about how all of its humour is original, coherent, and highly successful as a result of that.
When I heard we were getting a new Fable game, I was ecstatic. I didn’t care about the multiplayer or live-service rumours, mostly because I think indulging in those areas in the right way could be great given Fable 2’s online aspects – I still believe a Fable MMO-lite title could be excellent for that exact reason. I wasn’t bothered about whether or not this was a reboot, Fable 4, or a whole new project – all I wanted was to go back to Albion. Bring me back to Reaver, please, and Witchwood, and the Crucible. All that matters is… hang on. Lionhead is working on the new Fable, right? *Padme face* Lionhead is working on the new Fable, right?
Playground is an excellent developer that has put out a number of beloved games over the years. Forza continues to be ridiculously impressive, and, for what it’s worth, I doubt there are many studios out there capable of creating an Albion half as gorgeous as Playground could. The thing about Fable is that it has such a distinct identity. Plenty of studios have adopted the rights to established games in the past – just a few months ago I wrote about how Larian smashed it with Baldur’s Gate 3, the newest entry in a series that was originally handled by old-school BioWare. Playground could make the best Fable game of all time for all we know, but it’s only natural to be sceptical.
The reason for this is simple: Fable can’t work if it starts borrowing too much from other fantasy worlds, or attempting to riff off the successes of titles like Skyrim and The Witcher 3. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great games – the latter is my favourite one ever – but Fable has never really been comparable to anything else. I’ve seen a million different pieces on “Games you’ll like if you loved Fable,” but I’ve yet to play anything that’s even remotely similar to it. Fable 2 in particular is a game that is somehow every other game at once – I played it via Game Pass a couple of months back and it holds up pretty well, too. Not many people talk about Fable anymore on account of it being 11 years since the last entry launched to a lukewarm reception, but I firmly believe it’s one of the best and most important series in the business.
This is why I was so excited to learn that Fable 4 is going to retain the Britishims and humour of the original trilogy. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will stick the landing, mind, or that it’s 100 percent going to nail every aspect of Albion. What it means is that Playground clearly recognizes Lionhead did something special when it created Fable. The devs working on this new adventure are aware that Fable isn’t a series that needs to be influenced by other games – on the contrary, other fantasy RPGs have often been largely and brazenly derivative of it. These are some of the most ambitious and unapologetically outlandish large-scale video games of all time. They’ve got all the charm and wit of an indie game, and yet they always felt as if they were developed by a team sent back in time from the future. The only thing a new Fable game needs is to honour all of the Fable games that came before it – once that’s the case, it’s inevitably going to be a pure banger.
It’s an ostensibly minor detail, that Playground wants to make sure it respects that classic Fable mode of speech and storytelling, but it’s actually a big deal. These could just be fighting words right now, or marketing jargon designed to get Fable fanboys like me on board. I’m not sure, though – Playground is held in extremely high esteem and the fact it’s been trusted with Fable at all only furthers that. It’s not just “The Forza team is making an RPG now” – it’s that Playground has expanded beyond just Forza, which is still being made at the same time, just by a different department. Essentially, Playground has earned this.
There’s no way of telling whether Fable 4 is going to be good or not just yet – I mean, we don’t even know when it’s coming out, so making unfounded assumptions right now is kind of useless. What I will say is that knowing Playground recognizes the necessity to make this a Fable game as opposed to an open-world RPG that has been specifically engineered based on what else is popular in 2021 – or 2022, or 2023, depending on the current production pipeline planned for it – is refreshing. As of right now, it’s honestly all I need to hear.
Well, that and some sort of announcement about Stephen Fry making a comeback to play Reaver again. I mean, come on – what’s a Fable game without the guy who narrated Mythos voicing the Hero of Skill, eh?
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