Autumn 2026 could be the definitive release window for Xbox and Playground Games’ Fable, which last week confirmed its journey to PS5 on top of Xbox Series X/S and PC. Years after its original announcement, it’s had its ups and downs, but the powers that be appear to have a solid grasp on what they want to achieve with it. Now, we also know it’d been a dream project for the developer for a while.
“The first conversations we had about doing something other than Forza Horizon and building a second team go right the way back to the year after we shipped Forza Horizon 3,” said Playground general manager Ralph Fulton during an interview for GamesRadar. It was in 2016 that Forza Horizon 3 was released and cemented the open-world driving series as a modern behemoth.
“It was the best Forza Horizon we’d made. The team really hit its stride – the game was really high-quality, it landed with a wide audience. We felt great about that,” Fulton added. Around that time, conversations started at the studio about building a second team which maybe could take on something different: “The conversation around building a second team and doing something else, doing something different, was really about wanting to challenge ourselves – to learn and grow as developers.” As we all know, the Forza Horizon series has become essential to the studio, especially after Xbox bought it, and its sixth entry could help offset any possible disappointment with the Fable reboot.
Still, we’re generally optimistic about the ambitious RPG, especially after the franchise was left for dead following Lionhead Studios’ closure in 2016. A lot of what’s made Forza Horizon special over the years seems to be on full display on Playground’s Albion. Fulton admits the veteran devs “felt our transferable skills were, in a genre sense, open-world game design, open-world technology, and open-world streaming,” which helped the studio narrow down what it could do outside of driving sandboxes.
Fulton went on to explain how the technology had to be modified and optimized to fit an open-world RPG and how passionate the entire team is about Fable and its legacy. But funnily enough, he doesn’t exactly remember who first brought the famous IP up as a real possibility: “I don’t remember who mentioned [Fable], but as soon as I heard the word I was sold.”
As underlined by the trailers released so far and the in-studio videos we’ve received over the past few years, Playground wants to make its own version of Fable instead of Fable 4 under a different, simpler name: “We’re not Lionhead, we’re a different studio with different people and a different culture. It would be inauthentic for us to try and just make Fable 4.”
From the focus on sitcom-inspired comedy to leaning more on a fairytale-like aesthetic, it’s safe to say this extremely British take on Fable has a voice of its own. The question now is whether it’ll live up to most players’ terribly high expectations after six years of teases and development hiccups.
