Fable: Deep Dive Into New Gameplay With Playground Games | Official XBOX Podcast

About this video

On this episode of the Official XBOX Podcast, we’re sitting down with Ralph Fulton of the Fable team to dive deep into the recently released gameplay for the XBOX 25th Anniversary celebration! We’re learning more about the world of Albion, finding out where this place in the story, and gathering more details about the characters and enemies our Hero will be interacting with along the way.

TRANSCRIPT

Games in this podcast range from E to M.
JOE SKREBELS: Hello and welcome to the Official XBOX Podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside XBOX and specifically this week, inside XBOX’s 25th anniversary celebrations.
And weirdly, we got you a present, which is new Fable gameplay.
And I’m joined by none other than Ralph Fulton from Playground Games to talk through that gameplay in a little more detail.
Ralph, thank you so much for joining us.
RALPH FULTON: My pleasure.
How are you?
JOE SKREBELS: I’m good.
It feels like only yesterday we were talking about the last set of Fable gameplay.
So this is a lovely surprise.
RALPH FULTON: Yeah, we’re just sort of gliding into the final stages of our project here, fixing those final few pesky bugs.
But yeah, excited to show you more gameplay today.
JOE SKREBELS: That’s great.
And so last time, we got a sense of quests and a little bit more story and a big breakdown of combat, which people got to play.
What are you intending to show here?
What are we learning from this?
RALPH FULTON: Well, this is a cool little clip from the game, which I’m excited to show for a number of reasons.
So we’ve got more combat in this particular sequence.
We’ve got a new part of the world that we’ve not shown before at all.
We’re actually in the middle of Deepwood, the magical forest right in the middle of Albion.
It is typically a very beautiful part of our world.
The section that we’re going to show today is not so beautiful for reasons which are definitely relevant to the plot.
And what I guess I’m most excited about this little clip is it’s actually kind of a pivotal moment in our story.
Nothing’s too spoilery, because we really don’t want to be spoiling the progression of the story with the clips we put out.
But I think folks will get a kick out of some of the plot details that we drop in this one.
And I’m sure folks are going to be going nuts online trying to decipher some of the references within it.
JOE SKREBELS: But Ralph, before I get into the questions, I think we should run the clip in its entirety so everyone knows everything that we’re talking about for the rest of the episode.
HERO: The woman who attacked my village, she must have come this way.
ARDEN: Have you ever heard of Isabel?
She’s guild, or at least she was.
She came looking for me a while back, wanted my help with something.
I made her these boots and sent her packing back to Humphry.
>> Did you not mention her?
HERO: No.
ARDEN: Well, come on.
Let’s see what she was up to.
Look, the forest.
It really is sick.
HERO: Isabel, tell me about her.
ARDEN: I only met her the once.
She seemed kind.
Didn’t get the sense she’d be capable of something like this.
But she’s a Hero.
And arsing things up is what we do.
Question is, did she mean to do this or was it an accident?
After you, Briar Hill.
[ MUSIC ]
Uh, these look odd.
HERO: Arden, be careful.
ARDEN: These creatures.
Like your Hobbes from Briar Hill?
HERO: Yeah.
ARDEN: The river’s coming from that cave.
Whatever’s messing with the water’s in there.
This must be what all these old ruins were built around.
That light, it doesn’t seem natural.
HERO: None of this does.
ARDEN: The power here.
Never felt anything like it.
HERO: Me neither.
You can turn back, you know?
ARDEN: Could’ve turned back an hour ago.
That’ll do it.
No wonder everything’s gone sideways.
What now?
HERO OF BOWER: Hero, come closer.
HERO: Did you?
HERO OF BOWER: Hero.
Come closer, Hero.
ARDEN: All yours, mate.
HERO OF BOWER: Hero.
Hero.
JOE SKREBELS: We’ve seen sort of main quest gameplay a few times now, but this seems to be the first time that we’re really getting solid hints towards Isabel, played by Hayley Atwell, as we know.
We’re getting Arden, played by Susan Wokoma, who we’ve previously seen in trailers.
Is this really about setting the agenda with a few other characters that we know are coming?
RALPH FULTON: If I’m totally honest with you, we picked this little section because we wanted to show a bit of Deepwood.
And then when we got to like selecting a three-minute clip for the celebrations, this clip felt like it fell really neatly into two camps, as new environment and combat, but also just some gentle hints about story.
And like I say, I really don’t want us to be spoiling our story or giving away the farm with the clips we put out pre-launch.
But I think there’s a few hints in here that we drop that the folks will get a kick out of.
JOE SKREBELS: Nice.
And I guess to set this up in terms of where it takes place, like how far into the story are we at this point?
RLPH FULTON: I think it’s at the end of what we call in the game “Act 3,” which is to say it’s probably getting on for halfway through the game.
JOE SKREBELS: And so as we mentioned, Arden’s here.
Can you tell us more about her and how she’s figured into the story before this point?
RALPH FULTON: Absolutely.
So we met Arden maybe a couple of hours back in the story as you would play it.
She is one of the few Heroes in our story, Heroes with a capital “H” in that Fable sense.
Obviously, you are a Hero.
That’s a big deal in the story.
It’s kind of pivotal for you.
Isabel, played by Hayley Atwell, is obviously a Hero, as is Humphry the Golden, played by Matt King.
Arden is an interesting one in that she describes herself as a retired Hero.
So she has the powers, she has the abilities, but she has kind of rejected Hero-dom, if you like.
She has a perspective, and I guess all our Heroes do in this game on what it means to be a Hero.
That’s a central question in the whole game.
What does it mean to be Hero?
And Humphry and Isabel have different perspectives.
Arden is that nobody should be a Hero.
This power is too much for any one individual.
And she learned that a long time ago, that backstory is in the game and I’ll leave folks to discover it.
But certainly she doesn’t think she or anyone else should have the powers that she does.
And she is very much a reluctant companion on this part of the journey.
JOE SKREBELS: She’s outwardly skeptical about Heroes in this clip.
So not trying to spoil things, but is part of this story about learning where that line is about using powers for good or whether you even should?
RALPH FULTON: Yeah, I think so.
She certainly has a very different perspective.
Having met Humphry and Isabel in previous trailers, you can’t help but feel that she’s got a point about Heroes and her negativity towards them, right?
Like they’re probably not the best examples of Heroes that you could find.
But hers is another interesting perspective.
And obviously she’s going on a journey through this game as well.
And she will be forced to kind of reckon with, you know, how she feels about the abilities she has and also her history.
JOE SKREBELS: I’d love to talk about Susan Wokoma playing her as well.
Because I know her primarily from Taskmaster.
I’m a massive Taskmaster fan.
As it turns out, you’ve accidentally got two Taskmaster contestants in with Richard Ayoade as well, having recently been on the show.
RALPH FULTON: I think if you go recruiting for like British comedy legends, then you’re going to hit the Taskmaster more often than not, right?
Like it’s difficult to avoid that.
That wasn’t her intention.
She was brilliant and in a bunch of things.
You might know her from the Enola Holmes films on Netflix.
She’s really funny in a really dry kind of way.
She’s a great actor as well.
She was an absolute blast to work with.
I know we say that about all the actors we’ve worked with, but certainly very true of Susan.
She was just a joy to work with.
And I think she brings a very different characteristic to the Heroes in our game through the character of Arden.
JOE SKREBELS: Shifting onto the combat, one of the newest things we spot here is these creatures that seem to have been cursed.
They’re glowing red.
Is that just a part of the storytelling?
Are they kind of upgraded versions of existing creatures?
RALPH FULTON: Yeah, a little bit of both.
And you will be introduced to creatures like that.
They have this kind of red, evil almost sort of emanating off them quite early in the story and just shortly after your village is cursed.
If you want to think about that, maybe put those two things together, you might not be too far from the truth.
But certainly they seem to occur in parts of the world which have been struck with this “curse,” let’s call it.
And certainly you’re right, they’re kind of upgraded, they’re more powerful, they’re more durable as well, but they’re certainly, they speak to the story and what’s happened and what will happen.
JOE SKREBELS: That’s cool.
And in terms of the combat itself, we see a bunch of spells.
I think we’ve seen all of these spells previously, but these certainly seem to be upgraded versions of those spells.
We talked about that last time we were on together, this idea that one spell can kind of be charged and create bigger and better effects.
RALPH FULTON: Yes.
JOE SKREBELS: Is this sort of an advanced level Hero at this point in the game?
RALPH FULTON: So it’s a good question.
I had a glance at the skill tree that the person capturing the footage had used.
And what they’ve done actually is go big on a couple of spells.
So you saw the Dash spell in there.
That’s upgraded to the max.
So it has all the additional abilities, which really makes it a super multi-purpose tool on the battlefield, particularly when you’re fighting a whole bunch of enemies as the Hero is in this clip.
JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, we’ve talked about that previously, this one-versus-many idea that you’re really trying to get across.
So is this a kind of player choice, or is this how the game tends to sort of funnel you in combat, to be as effective as possible against multiple enemies?
RALPH FULTON: So yes.
I mean, as we’ve discussed before, we set out because we wanted to create one-versus-many combat scenarios.
There are boss fights and one-versus-one fights throughout our game, which are super fun.
But the general case is like you against a ton of enemies.
Because you’re a Hero, right?
And to make that fight even sort of vaguely even, you need a lot of enemies to be taking on.
How you manage lots of adversaries in a combat scenario, on the battlefield, if you like, is still very much up to the player.
There’s a bunch of different ways you can do it.
You can go for power.
You can go for crowd control and area of effect.
You can go for this kind of mobility spell that we have in Dash, which allows you to get round the battlefield and close distances really quickly.
And you can combine them.
As folks have been saying since we started giving them hands-on with the game, you can combine them super seamlessly, really fluidly, tons of fun having that.
And honestly, there’s a lot of fun to be had in just figuring out how different spells complement each other and level each other up, I guess, in the gameplay sense.
JOE SKREBELS: Nice.
And to talk about the character that we don’t see in this footage, we are hearing the name about Isabel, we’re learning a little bit more about what’s going on there.
Is this sort of the first time that we’re really getting a sense of Isabel as the villain as opposed to a villain at this point in the story?
RALPH FULTON: So interesting that you pick up on that.
It is actually literally the first time in the game that the name Isabel is mentioned at all.
Now, we obviously have the benefit of having watched our previous showcase trailer all about her, where she very much gives us her account of what being a Hero is like and what she’s all about.
But in the game, the Hero has none of that context, not having watched our showcase trailers.
So this is the first time we’ve heard Isabel, and this is the first really big clue.
And you’ve been looking for clues for the whole first half of the game of what happened to your village and you’ve been hunting things down and getting help from Humphry and from your brother Connor.
But this is the first time you’ve heard her name, and this is going to put you on a path which will track her right across Albion and ultimately right to the end of the game.
JOE SKREBELS: So is there a sense that like the first half of the game is sort of a detective story and the second-half of the game is a manhunt, Hero hunt even?
RALPH FULTON: There’s a little bit of that.
A detective story is probably begging it up too much.
But I’ll tell you what this does relate to, and it’s the pains we’ve been at to make sure that our story doesn’t rush you through our game.
You can not only go and explore the world and spend time and waste time, we actually encourage you to do that, right?
But if there is that ticking bomb, if there is this impending doom, it would seem foolish to spend time going on a date with a villager or earning some gold as a blacksmith or whatever you want to do.
So we were really conscious that we didn’t want to rush players through that or make them feel foolish for spending their time how they want.
So for the first half of the game, the stakes are high, because your village, your grandmother, have been turned to stone.
But you’re not running out of time.
It’s not a race against time to save them.
I guess the conceit of being turned to stone is that you can be turned back at any point.
I don’t know the science of that, I would have to check.
But certainly you’re not up against it all the way, because that gives you the permission to go and explore the world and the game systems and the social system and every settlement that you encounter.
And I would say, it doesn’t get really real in terms of there’s nothing I can do but go and save the world until probably Act 5, Act 6, at which point you would be remiss if you were to be spending your time dating in a pub.
Because at that point, definitely go and save the world.
But we have tried to make sure that the player gets to choose the pace they play the game at and that they don’t feel like they’re doing it wrong if they go and just explore.
JOE SKREBELS: That’s awesome.
And towards the end of the footage, obviously we get a big tease towards something.
There’s more of that red light.
It all becomes very ominous very quickly.
Can you give us any clues as to what they’re stumbling on here?
Is this a kind of visual reminder of that inciting incident at the start of the game?
Does that connect up for the player?
RALPH FULTON: It’s not that, and I could give you more clues, but I’m not going to.
It’s funny, I watched the footage back just before we jumped on this call, and it did dawn on me that I think there are probably enough breadcrumbs in the footage that some of our more keen-eyed lore followers out there might be able to start piecing things together from things we’ve said and put out over the last couple of months.
I’m not going to do any more to join the dots for you right now, because like I say, I don’t want to spoil it.
But there is a cool reveal just as the screen goes black, which is going to take you somewhere you’ve never been before and explain a lot more of what’s happening in Albion and what you’re going to need to save the world.
JOE SKREBELS: Well, there we go.
We were talking about detective stories, now we’ve given one to the viewers.
They can go and do their own detective work on that one.
So while you go off and do that detective work, we are going to wrap up here.
Ralph, thank you so much for joining us again.
We’ll try to leave you alone before launch for a little bit, I think.
RALPH FULTON: Don’t feel you have to.
I’ll see you next time, Joe.
JOE SKREBELS: Okay, excellent.
We don’t have very much time to wait.
Fable is out on February 23, 2027.
We are incredibly excited for it.
I will also give a little tease of my own, which is that if you look out this weekend on the actual anniversary of XBOX, there might be a little bit more Fable information from Ralph that you can look out for.
I won’t say any more, but XBOX Wire might have some details for you.
And until then, we will say goodbye.
Thank you so much.
This has been the Official XBOX Podcast.
We’ll see you next time.
[ MUSIC ]