Fable, the upcoming open-world fantasy RPG from Playground Games, has 1,000 fully voiced NPCs, and, if you do the right things, you can marry every single one of them.
The long-awaited fairytale follow-up to Lionhead’s original Xbox trilogy was showcased at the January 2026 Xbox Developer Direct, and finally gave us a good look at its gameplay. But, there’s more to learn yet, as IGN spoke to the founder of Playground Games, the studio crafting the Fable reboot.
When speaking about the characters that inhabit the world of this new version of Fable, Playground chief Ralph Fulton told us: “They are handcrafted, and there are a lot of things about the way we have built the living population, which I think you could be forgiven for saying is just nuts. I think we maybe once thought we could procedurally generate them, but we abandoned that idea quite a long time ago because we wanted to craft every one of these NPCs from their name, to their appearance, to their personality traits, to that moral worldview that I talked about, to where they work and where they live and what their family unit is because it’s important to the player that they can get to know unique crafted NPCs.”
“There’s 1,000 of them in the game”, Fulton continued. “You can go and speak to every single one of them in fully voiced conversations. You could marry, it’ll be a bit of work, but you could marry them all. You can have kids with them, you can hire them, you can fire them, they are just great fun. And also they act as this sort of Greek chorus, if you like, reflecting your choices and your morality back at you. So, as you walk around, that’s classic Fable, isn’t it? People catcalling you in the street, telling you what they think of you. It’s a brilliant thing in our game as well, but it’s a great way of tracking how popular your decisions have been, your choices have been.”
It doesn’t sound like it will be easy to just pop the question to anyone you see wandering around Albion, then, with the way you’ve chosen to role-play as your hero dictating who may react positively to an offer of engagement. What if you’re playing as a goody two-shoes knight of the realm, but then a local necromancer catches your eye and captures your heart shortly after? Will you be tempted to delve into the dark arts in the name of love? Search deep within yourself; only you have the answer.
Fable is a series that lived and died by its morality system, so it’s great to see an emphasis on this sort of character building returning to the reboot. But, Playground doesn’t simply want to revive the same type of obvious ‘good vs evil’ decisions seen in the Lionhead games, instead opting for a more fluid approach to how you work your way through its story’s many choices, and, in turn, how its world reacts to your decisions.
“We talk about how our morality system is more about shades of gray,” Fulton revealed. “It’s more about the subjectivity of morality that, honestly, we see in the world today. There’s no objective good, there’s no objective evil. You couldn’t get everyone in the world to agree that something is evil or that something is good. That just doesn’t happen. That diversity of opinion, I think, is really clear these days. And therefore we’ve sort of taken that and probably in quite a gamey system-y way, we’ve taken that and built it into this reputation system that we talk about in the piece, which allows you to build reputations based on the things you do within Albion.”
“You could do big things once or little things lots of times”, Fulton explained. “And if people see you doing that, it contributes to you building a reputation in that particular location. But then the key thing is how the people of Albion react to that, and they react to it based on the individual, almost unique worldview that they each have. And I think that’s probably a more nuanced view of morality, but it’s super interesting, and it’s also just packed with potential in gameplay terms.”
For more, check out IGN’s interview with Playground studio head and Fable director Ralph Fulton in full. And be sure to check out everything announced at the Xbox Developer Direct. Fable is due out fall 2026 and will arrive simultaneously on Xbox Series X and S, PS5, and PC.
Author: Wesley Yin-Poole
Source: IGN Gaming
Reviewed By: Editorial Team
