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Combat Intensity
September 12, 2026 at 11:06 PM
Initial version: combat intensity as the studio's difficulty term, the Story and Legend labels with their differing levels of attestation, what has not been published, and the demo-tuning caution
Combat intensity is the phrase Playground Games uses when it talks about difficulty in Fable (2027). William Kennedy, an Associate Game Director on the project, has written that the game "allows players to choose the combat intensity that's right for them", which confirms that how hard the fighting hits is a player-facing choice rather than a fixed curve. Whether those exact words are the label on the in-game menu has not been shown.
Difficulty is selectable, and the settings are separated enough to change how a single encounter plays. The first hands-on session with the game, at gamescom 2026, ran the same quest, Mud and Death, twice: two different difficulty levels, two different loadouts, and a noticeably different fight both times. Beyond that, three labels have real sourcing behind them, and they are not all equally solid.
Term | How it is attested |
|---|---|
Combat intensity | Playground Games' own term for the difficulty choice itself. Used in the studio's developer write-up of combat. |
Story | Named by Playground Games. Explaining its own June 2026 gameplay demo, the studio said its team had been playing on Story difficulty. |
Legend | Named by players who went hands-on at gamescom 2026. It has not yet appeared in a Playground Games document, so treat the exact spelling as provisional. |
Playground Games has not published a full list of settings, has not said whether difficulty can be changed part way through a playthrough, and has not said whether any setting touches rewards, loot or achievements rather than only the fighting. Longer lists of named settings and of individual combat sliders do circulate ahead of launch. None of them trace back to the studio, so this wiki does not record them, and neither should any guide that wants to still be right in February 2027.
One useful admission came out of the studio explaining its own demo settings. Playground Games disclosed that the blacksmith's gold payouts in the June 2026 gameplay demo had been tuned upward for the showcase and will be lower at launch. Demo footage is therefore not a safe source for economy figures, difficulty tuning, or any other number a studio might raise to make a stage demo read well. The same caution applies to how quickly enemies fell in any footage shown so far: nobody outside the studio knows which intensity was running.
Combat in Fable is built around one Hero against a group. Most enemy types can bring in more enemies, parries and counters run on real timing windows, and armoured Hollow Folk ignore ranged attacks entirely, which forces a change of approach rather than more of the same. Those are the systems any intensity setting is adjusting the pressure on. See Combat System Overview for the combat model, Will and Magic for the spell roster, and Enemies and Creatures for what is doing the hitting. New players deciding where to start will find the rest of the opening covered in the Beginners Guide.
