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Playground Games' Fable will balance the original series' ideas with brand new ones, according to an Xbox executive.
Speaking to The Guardian, head of Xbox Game Studios Matt Booty explained that Playground is very much looking to Fable's past, while thinking about what fresh mechanics it could add:
“With any kind of franchise like that, where you’ve had existing versions, there’s always that balance between what you’re going to bring forward, what still stands up, and what you want to add that’s new,” he said. “It’s like the challenge of making a new Star Wars movie – there’s stuff that everyone wants you to bring along, but then you’ve got a responsibility to that, to new places and I trust Playground has a good vision for that.”
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As for why Playground was chosen to take on the project, Booty pointed to the studio's past work on Forza Horizon's open worlds, and its passion for Fable as a whole:
“I just look at what Playground has done with the Horizon series – that attention to detail, the ability to represent these naturalistic landscapes. They also have a real passion for the IP and a unique point of view on what’s core to Fable. Everything I’ve seen as the game progresses tells me this is going to be a very high-quality release.”
It may go some way toward assuaging fears that the new Fable will be an MMO rather than a single-player RPG, which became a widespread rumour after the announcement of the game (and a conspicuous lack of gameplay footage). While other anonymous sources have refuted those rumours, this is as close as we've heard to Microsoft explaining what the new Fable could be, other than a "new beginning" for the series.
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Booty's comments, at least to me, point more towards a version of Fable that takes in modern approaches to open world games, rather than one that wildly changes the series' format. On a personal level, I'd be very interested to see the game draw on Playground's own history in the genre - a single-player Fable where you can stumble across AI versions of your friends' heroes fighting in the wider world, like some weird mix of Forza's Drivatars and Dragon's Dogma's Pawns, would be pretty cool in my eyes.
After years of rumours, Fable was finally announced for Xbox Series X last week - but there's no word on when we'll actually see more of the game.
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Joe Skrebels is IGN's Executive Editor of News. Follow him on Twitter. Have a tip for us? Want to discuss a possible story? Please send an email to newstips@ign.com.