Fresh off its deep dive at the Xbox Developer_Direct, Playground Games’ Fable has warranted a ton of hype. After all, what other triple-A game lets you slay a giant and leave its corpse rotting in the countryside, garner multiple different reputations across its various cities, or interact with 1,000 handcrafted NPCs? It’s almost worth the lack of character morphing from the original trilogy.
However, this is still an open-world action RPG, where you can go anywhere and be anything. So, how big is Albion? If you’re basing it on experience with Forza Horizon, best to rein in those expectations.
“So, I’m used to fielding that question from my time on the other game,” said game director Ralph Fulton to IGN. “And the comparison is useful, actually, because it probably won’t surprise you to know that in terms of just square miles, it’s smaller than a Horizon world. Horizon worlds are designed to be experienced at 250 miles per hour. So, you cover the distance far faster in those games than you do in ours. In our game, you move at the speed of a horse at most.”
So while the development team is leveraging the “world-building experience and technology” from its other open-world franchise (including the code base), the overall pace of exploration in Albion warranted a rethink. However, Fulton assures that the world is “still massive.”
“It’ll still take you a long time to get through. There’s tons to explore, but what we had to do with this game was build in far, far more detail into it than we necessarily have to in a Horizon game. So, you move slower, but you see much more, you experience much more. I think maybe you’re more immersed.” For example, you can enter every building in the game, and not just for sightseeing.
“Every building needs an interior because you could rob it if you wanted, or you could buy it and live there with your family or with one of your families,” he said. “So, I guess the focus just got pulled right in, and we ended up building out much more rich detail at ground level, if you know what I mean.”
And if you’re still convinced that the world should be as big as Forza Horizon, Fulton has a funny story. “One of the first things we did was we got our Fable character running around in Surfers Paradise from Forza Horizon 3, and it took an eternity to get anywhere. And I think that if we hadn’t realized already, that was the moment it dawned on us like, ‘Okay, we’re going to have to play with some of our metrics here.’”
Based on everything we’ve seen thus far, it’s certainly paying dividends (and that’s without the concept art highlighting the sheer variety of locations). In a way, it also lends further weight to practices like buying every single property and establishment to become a landlord. You aren’t just taking care of (or evicting) tenants that emerge from the ether, but fostering living spaces.
With Fable launching this Autumn for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC alongside a day-one release on Game Pass, it feels like we’re only scratching the surface of what it has to offer. And hey, if you’re still craving a Horizon-style world, then there’s Forza Horizon 6 to look forward to on May 19th.
