Playground Games’ upcoming reboot of Fable has certainly looked quite impressive since its showcase last month. Creator of the series, Peter Molyneux, has shared this sentiment. In an interview with IGN, he expressed his thoughts about the series carrying on behind his work on it during his tenure at Lionhead Studios, and even mentioned that he felt himself tearing up as he watched the trailer.
“When I was watching the Fable trailer, I just felt myself tearing up”, said Molyneux. “I know that I could probably be slaughtered for saying that, but I am someone who cries frequently, and I felt incredibly emotional, and the reason I felt emotional was: F*** me. This thing that we created, it’s going to live, it’s going to carry on. This world, which we loved creating so much, and other people loved, has a life.”
Molyneux said that the fact that the Fable franchise will continue beyond his own involvement was great. His own decisions to go back to developing God games—a classic sub-genre of strategy games that were more prevalent in the 1990s—were made for similar reasons, he noted, before also praising Playground Games for its decision to reboot the series rather than make a sequel and be burdened with the original trilogy’s lore.
“And for me, the saddest thing would be to see it diminish, which is one of the reasons I’m really going back to God games,” he said. “So that was the overall emotion. I thought it was really smart of them to retell Fable 1 rather than have the burden of continuing the Fable story. I loved seeing some of those references. I thought it was super smart to have the kid’s family turn to stone. I thought that was really smart. And so those were all the plus points.”
That’s not to say that Molyneux didn’t have any criticisms of the showcase, however. Further in the interview, he mentioned that the trailer felt “antiseptic”, by which he meant that the world of the upcoming Fable reboot felt cleaner than he would have liked. He would have preferred Playground Games’ take on the world of Albion to be more chaotic.
“I mean, if I was critical, which I think you want me to be, there was a slight antiseptic feel about it,” he explained. “But I mean, they’ve got months and months to build in that character and almost that dirtiness that you want in the world. I never thought Fable as being clean and all the angles being sharp and defined. It’s more chaotic. It’s more what Old England probably used to be, which was not straight lines, the place, it’s more crinkling, and all the buckle belts on people are ridiculously large, and the boots and the hands ridiculously large because that is part of the character. So there’s a little bit more of that character, which I would probably foolishly and ridiculously ask for.”
Fable is being developed for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Since its appearance at Xbox Developer_Direct, Playground Games has gone on to reveal quite a few details about it. Among other things, the studio has spoken about its morality system, its variety of NPCs, and how the studio was influenced by classic British comedies. For more, check out our thoughts on why it might be worth the wait after all.