While Playground Games founder Ralph Fulton had previously spoken about how upcoming open-world action RPG Fable will feature 1,000 handcrafted NPCs in its world, he has now gone into more detail about what this meant for the game’s development. In an interview with GamesRadar, Fulton noted that the environment artists had to do quite a bit of work to help with the NPCs.
Considering the fact that Fable’s NPCs will follow full-fledged life-like schedules, like going to work during the day or going back home for the night, this also meant that artists had to make homes for all of them.
“They’ll get up, they’ll go to work, they’ll have some leisure time, they’ll go back to their home, and they’ll go to bed,” he said about the NPCs.
“And immediately, you know when you hear that, certainly as a developer, you start going, ‘Oh, okay, so every NPC, and there’s more than 1,000 of them in the game, needs a bed.’ And you have that conversation with the environment art team, and they’re like, ‘they need what now?’ Which is, it brings you to a very different way of building a game, because it needs to be functional as well as beautiful.”
This also indicates that NPCs will have more than just copy-pasted identical housing. Rather, the fact the environment art team was shocked at the number means that we might see more of the personalities of these NPCs start shining through thanks to things like how they decorate their homes and bedrooms, and what their preferred style of furniture might be.
This would fall in line with the fact that the NPCs will also be handcrafted rather than being procedurally generated. Fulton had previously spoken about trying the latter, but he said that “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.”
“And like I said, there are 1,000 of them in the game. 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.”
Fulton has also previously hinted at how big Fable‘s world will be. Bringing up a comparison with Forza Horizon, he noted that Fable‘s worlds will be smaller, since “Horizon worlds are designed to be experienced at 250 miles per hour. So, you cover the distance far faster in those games than you do in ours. In our game, you move at the speed of a horse at most.”
Fable is being developed for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release later this year.