Playground Games began planning shift to RPGs after Forza Horizon 3

We have known about the Fable reboot being developed by Playground Games since 2018, when Eurogamer leaked early details of the project. As it turns out, Playground actually began its journey towards becoming a multi-project and multi-genre studio a couple of years earlier, following the success of Forza Horizon 3.

With Forza Horizon 3, Playground Games cemented itself as a premier open-world studio and set the franchise up for so much future success that Horizon has overtaken Forza Motorsport as Xbox's flagship racing series. Now with Fable, Playground Games is about to release an entirely new type of game, moving away from its racing roots and into RPG territory.

In an interview with GamesRadar, Playground Games GM, Ralph Fulton, confirmed that the company began considering building out a second team in 2016:

“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.”

Fable wasn't cemented as the company's new project just yet. However, Fulton explains that team leaders looked towards transferable skills like open-world game design, open-world technology and open-world streaming. From there, they modified their tools to aid them in creating an open-world RPG. As we've known for a while, by 2018, Playground Games became the new home for the Fable IP, following Microsoft's closure of Lionhead several years earlier.

The Fable reboot is finally launching later this year, with plans to release on PC, PS5 and Xbox on day-one. For reference, the last mainline Fable game to release was none other than Fable 3 all the way back in 2010. A new trailer released last week gave us a good look at what to expect and for the most part, it appears that many staples of the previous Fable games will remain in the reboot and some have been expanded. For instance, romanceable NPCs will return, but players will have around 1000 NPCs to choose from. The trade-off is that the player's appearance won't change based on whether they align themselves with good or evil.

KitGuru Says: Playground has a busy year ahead with Forza Horizon 6 launching in May, followed by Fable this Autumn. Are you looking forward to the new Fable game?

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