Playground Games – the studio behind the upcoming open-world RPG Fable – has been quite vocal about the lengths it went to in order to create its thousands of in-game NPCs. In a new interview with GamesRadar, director Ralph Fulton has revealed more details about how, despite the studio having a tool that could automatically generate all the NPCs it needed for Fable, the team decided to hand-craft them anyway.
He explained that, while the randomized NPC creator tool would have helped save quite a bit of time and energy, he noted that the NPCs created this way didn’t quite make much sense. To avoid having nonsensical characters roaming around the game’s world, the team instead decided to handcraft the NPCs.
“We individually picked everything about every NPC to make it into an NPC that you could read, that made sense top to bottom. We originally had a tool that would randomize it, and just ‘roll’ an NPC, and that would have been a massive labor-saving device. That would have saved us so much time, but what we found was, they just didn’t make as much sense.”
Back in January, Fulton had spoken about how handcrafting all of these NPCs also led Playground Games to figuring out a “very different way of building a game”. He discussed how the various characters throughout the game have their own lives to live, and the challenge this presented to the development team.
“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.”
At the time, he had noted that the team abandoned the idea of procedurally generating NPCs “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.”
The team has also gone on the record to note that it didn’t use any generative AI to create voice work for the over 1,000 NPCs that populate Fable’s Albion. “We’ve got a really fantastic cast of actors who have come in and recorded tons and tons of dialogue, which is what you’ve heard today voicing our NPCs,” said Playground Games. “All of our NPCs are fully voiced. We cast around 100 actors to voice our Living Population alone.”
Fable is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release on February 23rd, 2027. Fulton had spoken about avoiding the “chaotic” release window at the end of 2026 that is populated by heavy-hitters like Control Resonant, Gears of War: E-Day, and Grand Theft Auto 6.
