Out of everything under Microsoft’s now-massive, multi-publisher umbrella, there is no game I’m more excited for than Fable. I adored the original trilogy (especially Fable 2), and, um, we’ll just pretend that the Kinect version, Fable: The Journey, never happened. But anyway, Fable is not only unlike anything else in Xbox’s thick portfolio, it’s being crafted by arguably the best studio they own: Playground Games, who have done nothing but make one 10 out of 10 after another. Playground also possesses one key trait when it comes to building a Fable game: it’s British.
This year’s Xbox Developer Direct offered the best evidence yet that Playground has all of the ingredients in place to craft a worthy Fable revival, and after the Xbox Showcase – which finally gave the game a firm release date of February 23, 2027 – I got to see it running myself on an Xbox Series X. While I didn’t see combat, which is honestly the one true concern I have for this game, seeing as how Playground has never built something with combat in it before and the combat animations from what we’ve seen so far seem to lack weight when a weapon impacts an enemy, I did see the key non-combat side of Fable: the life-simulation elements.
Playground says it’s the game within the game: a life sim, social sim, and economic sim – all of which combine to allow you to build “an extraordinary life” in Albion. My hands-off demo began atop a golden meadow outside the town of Silverbrook – as evidenced by the beanstalk stretching into the sky just over the next hill, it’s the same town where Dave lives, the townsperson from previous trailers who becomes a giant, and whom you’ll have the chance to cure or slay.
But I didn’t meet Dave in this trip to Silverbrook. Instead, the point was to show off the relationships you can make and break as well as the reputation – good or bad – you can earn with each person and within each town. There are no horns or halo to sprout over your head that reflect your deeds. Instead, you might become known as a menace in one region and a benevolent saint in another.
The first thing our demo driver happened upon was a boy arguing with a butcher over the fate of a pig named Colin. It seems Colin has recently learned the ability to speak English, just the same as anyone else in Silverbrook, and because of this, the boy wants to spare him from the sausage-y fate he was raised for. The pair turn to us to decide whether Colin lives to quote Shakespeare another day or ends up becoming bacon by morning. For this demo, Colin was spared, but the butcher won’t let him walk for nothing. And so we offered him 2,000 gold in return for Colin’s life, a sum the man happily agrees to. This gets the boy to instantly like us, of course, and also earns us town-spanning reputation as a kind person.
Walking further into town, we came upon Jack the Beggar, a down-on-his-luck fellow currently lacking both home and employment. In an attempt to win his favor, we gifted him 100 gold. And then another 100 gold. As you’d expect, this got us on his good side in short order, and further adds to our growing town-wide reputation for kindness.
Yet we still weren’t done with Jack. We headed into a nearby store called Odds & Sods (I did say that Playground has sufficient British bona fides!) to buy him a gift in order to further ingratiate ourselves to him, but we got sidetracked by the shopkeeper, Megan. After a sweet word or two from our hero, she made it clear that she’d be willing to go on a date with him, but our player character didn’t meet her lofty standards in his current state. She told us she’d only date an entrepreneur and homeowner who dressed in fancy clothes. At the moment, we checked exactly zero of those three boxes.
Fortunately, we had plenty of gold coins to our name, and so we waltzed over to the nearby pub, the Silver Trough. And we bought it. As a bonus, it turns out everyone loves Susan the Bartender who works there, and because of her, the pub generates an extra 10% of income each month. But there was a position open at the pub, so in an effort to maximize its potential revenue, we walked outside, back down the street, and offered Jack the Beggar a job – which only made him like us more! If we’d not been so nice to him, he might’ve not wanted to work for us.
With our hero now officially an entrepreneur, that left two more prerequisites to fulfill before Megan would agree to a date. And so next we headed elsewhere in town to The Spinning Wheel, a tailor shop run by Rhiannon. Because she sees you as a rich entrepreneur, she does not like our hero, and as a result, she’s put an absurd 80% markup on any clothes we’d like to buy. But fortunately our pockets are still deep, and we paid the tariff-happy tailor – no doubt through gritted teeth. Perhaps someday we might be able to buy The Spinning Wheel and unceremoniously fire Rhiannon. Playground says there are 120 different shops with unique items, and yes, you can buy them all, so perhaps we’ll be back someday.
We now looked fancy – ridiculous, for sure, but fancy – and needed only to purchase a home. By this point we’d spent so much money that we didn’t have enough left to buy a house. And so we picked up a shift at the local blacksmith in order to earn some gold while the pub generated income passively. Playground says the blacksmithing minigame was simplified and shortened for the purposes of this demo, so it only took a few well-placed smacks of a hammer on a hot piece of freshly forged fork in order to give us enough cash to buy a house.
We randomly chose one that looked nice, but there was just one problem: it already had tenants. We could simply evict them and leave them to live on the street – which would surely depress the positive reputation we’d been building in Silverbrook – so instead we paid them to move out, clearing the way for the place to be all ours.
Then it was back to Odds & Sods, in order to ask Megan out on a date. She graciously agreed, at which point we offered her a gift of a bouquet of wild flowers and then jumped straight to our date. It went well, so we quickly asked if she’d like to be in a relationship. She said yes! From here we could move in together, get married, and/or start a family together. But one thing is certain: Megan is smitten with our hero.
To show off more of Fable’s life-sim systems in effect, we returned to The Silver Trough and fired Susan, the Bartender everyone in town loves – the same one who’d been giving a bonus to the pub’s income. She now thinks I’m heartless, a reputation trait now on our personal ledger. And to further send our hero’s reputation down the toilet and to conclude the demo, our gamepad-wielding Playground developer started shooting citizens in the knees with his bow and arrow. That sent the law after us, started some fights, labeled us a killer (uh, guilty I suppose!) and, well…that was the end of the demo. At least, once I’d finished turning Silverbrook into Crimsonbrook with the blood of all of the townsfolk we slayed. That left but one choice: to flee!
I’m pretty sold on Fable’s “game within a game,” which was an important part of what made the original trilogy unique and special and is, thus, important for this Fable to get right. I should add that, seeing Fable running live on a Series X, it looks absolutely gorgeous. It’s wild to think that it’s running on ForzaTech, an engine that has powered over a dozen racing games over the years. I absolutely can’t wait to play it, and it remains the first-party Xbox game I’m looking forward to above all others.
Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s executive editor of previews and host of both IGN’s weekly Xbox show, Podcast Unlocked, as well as our semi-retired interview show, IGN Unfiltered. He’s a North Jersey guy, so it’s “Taylor ham,” not “pork roll.” Debate it with him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan.