A lot has been said about The Initiative’s Perfect Dark, from reports of problems to Xbox Game Studios head Matt Booty praising the involvement of Crystal Dynamics. However, there’s yet another Xbox-exclusive title still a ways off – Playground Games’ Fable. It was announced in July 2020 with no gameplay or release date confirmed.
Development is going well, but Playground doesn’t want to show anything until it’s ready, even if figures like Booty want to. At PAX West 2022, the latter said (transcription via IGN), “Part of my job is giving air cover to the team. They don’t want to show stuff early before it’s ready to go, but if there’s one game where that’s kind of flipped around, where every time I see something I say, ‘We should show this’, it’s Fable. Because there’s a lot of cool stuff.”
Overall, “the team has made it very clear that I am not going to be able to show anything until it’s ready.” Nevertheless, Booty said the developer is using the same “craft and dedication that they brought to Forza Horizon.” While acknowledging a racing game developer working on Fable as “a bit of a head-scratcher,” Playground Games has “proven that they get it.”
Fable is in development for Xbox Series X/S and PC. Recently, writer Anna Megill, who joined Playground as a lead writer last year, was made the narrative lead. In addition to being the narrative lead for Remedy’s Control, she also worked on Arkane Studios’ Dishonored: Death of the Outsider and Massive’s The Division 2. Stay tuned for more details in the coming months.
