On Thursday evening, we finally got the chance to take a closer look at Fable and check out lots of gameplay, and it was also revealed that it will be released in the autumn (and that it will also be coming to PlayStation 5).
One thing that was mentioned during the presentation was that Albion is populated by approximately 1,000 people, who were described in the video as "handcrafted." This caused quite a stir, as it is a staggering number of people to manually create, especially if they are all to have their own personality, clothing style, and so on, particularly when you can cut corners with AI.
IGN wanted to know more about this and asked Playground Games boss Ralph Fulton about it, and he replied that there is actually no cheating involved, which he seems very proud of:
"Yeah, so they are handcrafted. There's a lot of things about the way we have built the living population, which I think you could be forgiven for saying is just nuts. I think we maybe once thought we could procedurally generate them, but we abandoned that idea quite a long time ago because we wanted to craft every one of these NPCs from their name, to their appearance, to their personality traits, to that moral worldview that I talked about, to where they work and where they live and what their family unit is, because it's important to the player that they can get to know unique crafted NPCs. And like I said, there are 1,000 of them in the game. You can go and speak to every single one of them in fully voiced conversations. You could marry... it'll be a bit of work, but you could marry them all. You can have kids with them, you can hire them, you can fire them. They are just great fun."
In the same interview, Fulton also commented on what they wanted to preserve from the original series, one of the things he mentioned being the British factor (something also briefly mentioned in yesterdays presentation), which really permeates the game series and which he believes could not have been created anywhere else:
"It's about Britishness. And again, why was it important to Xbox that a British studio continued with Fable? Because Fable is this quintessentially British game, and not just because Albion is medieval Britain through a filter, if you like. And not just because the characters are British and have British accents. There's a sensibility to the games, there's a tone of voice, a way of thinking about things, a way of reacting to things. It's very British. And those things combined are for us the DNA of Fable. If you don't hit those things, if you're not true to those things, you're not making a Fable game. So, that was something that we decided right at the start."
The interesting interview offers more details about Fable, including the revelation that the series' creator, Peter Molyneux, has not seen the game yet. We assume we'll find out more during the week of June at Summer Game Fest (and not-E3), where we hope to learn more about the story.
What do you think about the fact that every NPC in Fable was created manually, and could the game have been developed in a country other than the UK?
<bild>The franchise creator Peter Molyneux hasn't gotten the opportunity to try Fable himself yet.</bild>