Xbox has confirmed that the the highly-anticipated Fable game will launch in autumn 2026 on Xbox consoles, PC and PS5.
The news came as part of a deep dive into the game from developer Playground Games during Xbox’s latest Developer_Direct presentation on Thursday.
First, the studio says the RPG is focused around a key question: “What does it mean to you to be a hero?” Your character’s journey begins in the sleepy town of Briar Hill. You play as Albion’s first hero in a generation, and your abilities spring up after a mysterious stranger turns everyone, including your grandmother, into stone.
We also get a look at gameplay, which includes extensive character customization and real-time combat blending melee and ranged weapons with magical abilities. Playground also promised both returning enemies like Hobbess, Hollow and trolls, as well as many new foes.
Adding to the RPG elements is the ability to marry someone, have kids and manage your own home, with these choices having “ripple effects” on the people of Albion. In total, there are over 1,000 interactive NPCs in Albion who each have their own backstories and lives.
The developer says it also wants to have a more subjective and “grey” morality system this time around. Different actions will contribute to your reputation in various ways, and NPCs will react to you accordingly. Some choices can even change Albion as a whole. For instance, Playground says if you choose to kill a particular giant NPC early on, his corpse will remain on the landscape, affecting the housing market in the process.
Overall, the developer says the game has been designed to be approachable to both series newcomers and fans alike. That’s certainly good to hear since it’s been a long time coming for the new Fable. The game was first unveiled in 2020 in the lead-up to the Xbox Series X/S launch with a short CG trailer. However, it wasn’t until 2023 that we saw the first in-game trailer. The game was later set to launch in 2025, although it was eventually delayed to 2026.
Anticipation has been particularly high since it’s the first new mainline Fable since 2010’s Fable III, not counting spin-offs and 2014’s Anniversary remaster of the original game.
The other games featured during the Developer_Direct were fellow Playground title Forza Horizon 6 (releasing May 19), Pokémon maker Game Freak’s new action-RPG Beast of Reincarnation (coming this summer) and, as a surprise, a new multiplayer brawler called Kiln from Psychonauts developer Double Fine (dropping this spring).
Image credit: Xbox
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