Playground Games has been working on 'Fable' reboot for four years

One of Microsoft’s original flagship franchises for the Xbox was the RPG Fable that allowed users to determine their character’s moral compass, making decisions that generally fell on a binary scale — do something cruel and chart a path towards evil, or be a benevolent warrior. While there wasn’t nuance beyond good or bad, it was one of the first games that leaned into this sort of decision-making, having cascading effects on the outcome of the gameplay.

Since 2010’s Fable III there hasn’t been another entry into the series but recently Tom Gaulton, an engineer at Playground Games, tweeted out his excitement about working on the forthcoming Fable.

While there was no inclusion of any details related to the latest Fable game, we now know that Playground Games has been working on it for at least four years. Aside from an announcement trailer that was released last July, there hasn’t been much word on the game. What will it be called? Fable IV? Or something else entirely? Towards the end of trailer, the word Fable flashes across the screen suggesting the latest iteration of the franchise may drop numerals altogether.

Changing of the guard— The original developer behind the Fable games, Lionhead Studios, was shuttered in 2016 and the game it was working on, Fable Legends, was canceled. According to Gaulton’s tweet Playground Games has been working on Fable IV (let’s just call it that for now) for four years, so it’s safe to say that development began just one year after Lionhead’s closure.

Playground Games wasn’t on the fandom’s radar until 2018 when the studio began hiring for an RPG. Rumors began circulating that the studio behind the massively popular Forza Horizon games, was going to helm the development of a new Fable title. This was then confirmed with the aforementioned trailer. Phil Spencer, the executive VP of gaming at Xbox, has backed the studio telling fans they should feel confident about the new developer:

“The only thing I can really say about Fable is, seeing the pedigree of the team and Playground, and where they set the bar for themselves in building a game. I think that showed with the Forza Horizon 5 preview that they had—I think people should just take confidence in that [studio director] Gavin [Raeburn] and the team there have that same level of focus on doing something amazing with an IP that we know is really important to a lot of Xbox fans, so we can’t wait to get to show more, but the team is just amazing.”

Since we still don’t have a release date we can only exercise patience in the mean time.