Fable (2026)

What is Fable

Fable is an open-world action RPG developed by Playground Games with support from Eidos-Montreal (roughly 100 developers contributing since 2022) and published by Xbox Game Studios. It is a full reboot of the franchise, not a sequel or remake. You do not need to have played earlier Fable games.

The game takes place in Albion, a fictional land loosely inspired by the English countryside. You play as the first Hero in a generation. The tone sits somewhere between a Monty Python sketch and a Grimm fairy tale. Playground Games has been clear about this distinction: the game is a fairytale, not a fantasy. Ralph Fulton, the studio's founder and general manager, put it like this: "Fairytales are intimate, they're small stories about regular people; they're not grand and sweeping, they're very personal and whimsical."

The original Fable games were made by Lionhead Studios (founded by Peter Molyneux). Lionhead closed in 2016 and the franchise went dormant. Playground Games, the studio behind Forza Horizon, started building a second team for this project around 2017. See the Development History for the full timeline.

Release

Fable launches Autumn 2026. It was originally targeting 2025 but was delayed on February 25, 2025. Craig Duncan, Head of Xbox Game Studios, announced on the Official Xbox Podcast: "We are actually going to give Fable more time. It's going to ship in 2026 now."

Platforms:

• Xbox Series X|S

• PlayStation 5 (a first for the franchise, confirmed at Developer Direct)

• Windows PC via Steam and the Microsoft Store

• Xbox Cloud Gaming

Available day one on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Xbox Play Anywhere is confirmed, meaning a single digital purchase covers both Xbox and PC with cross-save support.

What you do

The game mixes combat, life simulation, and exploration. The combat system (called "style weaving") lets you blend melee attacks, ranged weapons, and magic without delays between them. Outside of combat, you can buy and rent out property, take jobs like blacksmithing, romance and marry villagers, have kids, and build a reputation across the land.

Albion is fully open from the start. Once you leave your starting village, you can go anywhere. There are no loading screens in the open world. Every building can be entered. Bowerstone is the capital city. Bloodstone is a lawless port town. The Heroes' Guild is where you train under a retired hero named Humphry.

The story has no time pressure. Your village is petrified at the start, but the game waits while you explore. You can spend a week buying property in Bowerstone before investigating what happened to your grandmother.

NPCs

The game has over 1,000 handcrafted NPCs. Playground Games considered procedural generation but decided to hand-craft every one. Each NPC has a unique name, job, personality, daily routine, home, family connections, and moral worldview. Every one is individually voice acted. NPCs remember what you do and gossip about you. They react to your reputation based on what they personally witnessed. Some give mockumentary-style interview segments about the player, like a fantasy version of The Office.

Tone

Fable has always been a comedy franchise and this entry keeps that going. The humor is dry British wit. Richard Ayoade voices a gardener named Dave who accidentally becomes a giant. Matt King from Peep Show plays the Guildmaster Humphry. Playground Games uses authentic regional British accents: Brummie, Scouse, Midlands dialects. They have said they are not toning down the Britishness for international audiences.

Chickens are everywhere. You can kick them. Doing so in front of NPCs earns you the "Chicken Chaser" reputation in that settlement. A Will spell turns enemies into chickens. One of the bosses is a fire-breathing chicken called the Cockatrice.

Multiplayer

Fable is single-player only. No co-op, no online multiplayer. Playground Games confirmed this directly. Fable 2 and 3 had co-op modes, but this entry does not.

Technical