Fable gameplay footage debuted at today's Xbox Developer Direct, and despite a long 16-year wait between instalments the presentation felt very on brand. That's maybe a little surprising, given Lionhead Studios closed in 2016. The new game is in the hands of Forza Horizon studio Playground Games, which has very little in common with the old Lionhead except for—perhaps crucially—its Britishness.

In an interview published by Xbox, Fable game director Ralph Fulton discussed how the studio dealt with taking on a storied series from a once-venerated studio. "One of the things I said to the team was, ‘Look, we’re not Lionhead—we can’t try to make a Lionhead game.’ This has to be a Playground game because I’m a really firm believer that the personality and the character of a team is visible in the work they do and the games they make."

Fulton went on: "And I think you can see Lionhead in that original trilogy. It would be pointless, I think, for us to try and ape that. And that’s really at the heart of the reboot question, right? It felt imperative to me that this was a reboot because we’re starting again as Playground Games, and making Playground’s Fable."

One sacrosanct part of the Fable identity is its fairytale setting. It is not a fantasy series, Fulton insists, and that's an important distinction that informed Lionhead's world building right from the start.

"When we started working on this project, we got a treasure trove of documents from Lionhead that had been in storage," Fulton said. "Something that I thought was just brilliantly succinct was one of the documents, which said: ‘Fable is Fairytale, not Fantasy’—which is just super neat."

Another sacrosanct part of Fable's identity is that you're allowed to kick chickens. Today's gameplay teaser featured a booted hen, but there was more to this act of mindless violence than just a quaint little callback: it's a useful case study for the way Playground Games is approaching Fable's morality system.

"Our version of morality isn’t a sliding scale," Fulton says. "We’ve chosen to anchor this around the actions you do, and specifically the things you do in Albion that are witnessed by at least one other person. So, if the things you do are seen by one or more people, you’ll start to earn a reputation for that thing. Obviously, we always use the chicken kicking example, because kicking chickens is classic Fable.

"So if a person sees you kicking a chicken," he continues, "you will start to get a reputation as a ‘Chicken Chaser’—and if enough people see you do it, or you do it a lot, that reputation will become one of the things you’re known for in that settlement. And people will react to you based on what they think about that particular reputation."

That's pretty par for the course when it comes to RPG morality systems, but Fable has a fascinating twist. What if the NPC who witnessed you kicking the chicken actually thinks chickens deserve to be kicked? "Different people will view that reputation in different ways," Fulton says. "Kicking chickens isn’t objectively good or objectively evil in a way everybody will agree on—it comes down to the unique worldview of the NPC, what they think of you because of it."

It's worth reading the full interview on Xbox Wire for more details on morality, especially as it relates to bigamy. Fable is releasing in fall.

I like it when a game has a beginning, middle, and end⁠—I'm old fashioned like that⁠—so I tend to avoid a roguelike unless it looks really, truly special. Upcoming stealth-immersive-platform-brawler-prank sim DreadBound fits the bill.

From its first trailer, DreadBound looks to be taking a page from the likes of Dark Messiah of Might & Magic or 2025's best immersive sim, Skin Deep, by embracing the slapstick and improvisational side of the genre, rather than cerebral exploration.

In DreadBound's first trailer, I clocked instantly deploying spike traps, oil slicks to trip enemies (or set them on fire), Ravenholm-style circular saw projectiles that you can embed in walls and use as platforms to reach high places, and an homage to my favorite quick melee in all of gaming, the Dark Messiah kick.

Rather than the handcrafted levels typical of immersive sims, DreadBound will feature "a cursed city that changes every time you die." That gave this Roguelikephobic gamer some pause, but roguelike and immsim, when attempted in the past, have often proven to be a chocolate and peanut butter genre combo.

Amnesia: The Bunker boasts randomized codes and item placements after your first playthrough, which helps the horror sim keep its bite on repeat outings, while I've heard good things about Prey's roguelike Mooncrash DLC. More than anything, I like the potential for forced improvisation to override complacent gaming: Even all-time greats like Dishonored can let you get into a groove that keeps you from exploring all of its gameplay possibilities⁠—teleporting and nonlethal takedowns, in my case.

The full delivery of DreadBound's promise could result in a game where you're always off-balance, always having to adapt your playstyle⁠—a full ghost sneaky run here, a loud and proud trapmaster there⁠—based on what opportunities the randomized map affords you. That's what I'm hoping for, anyway. DreadBound currently has no definite release window, but you can wishlist it on Steam and there's a demo coming "soon."

Fable is about to bring us into an open-world version of Albion that's home to a living population of over 1000 NPCs, and I'm happy to confirm that you can romance almost all of them.

With the Xbox Developer Direct revealing that we can get to know the NPCs, go on dates, get married, and even have kids, I took the opportunity to ask Playground Games' general manager Ralph Fulton if we could feasibly woo and wed any one of NPCs we encounter in the world.

"With a very few exceptions, the answer is yes," Fulton says. "We went into this with some non-negotiables that we felt were just really important in this area of the game. So we said from the start, I want to be able to talk to any NPC. Now, obviously in the original games, you did that through gestures. We wanted to do that in fully voiced conversations in this game. So you kind of throw that challenge at the narrative team and the audio team, and they go away, and they kind of figure out how they're going to do that."

I have so many fond memories of trying to romance and eventually marry noble townsfolk in Bowerstone, or win the heart of a travelling NPC in an encampment in Fable 2. Of course, in those days, I'd have to flex my muscles at them, dance a jig, or give them a present. But it sounds like the Fable reboot is really stepping things up not only when it comes to NPCs, but in the love department, too. And of course, not every match will work out, because yes, you'll be able to divorce them… or they can divorce you.

"You can talk to them, you can romance them, you can marry them. You can divorce them or be divorced by them," Fulton says. "You can have children with them. You can hire them. You can fire them. They are [the NPCs] kind of a game within a game, but they are such a unique, fundamental part of Fable."

As Fulton explains, in Fable, there's an "abundance of things" that will give you different reputations with the many NPCs across settlements. With a kind of witnessing system at play that will see them judge the actions they've seen or known you've done in the world, every NPC will feel differently about what you do based on their own worldviews, personalities, and traits.

"We kind of saw a little bit of it in the footage from the piece [Xbox Developer Direct], when those little words are sort of popping up on screen," Fulton says, "that's somebody seeing you being generous, or dishonest or dishonorable, or a bigamist, or whatever. So there's an abundance of things for them to react to."

As you might have noticed there, Fulton mentions that yes, you can be a bigamist and marry more than one person. But you better believe the people you meet will have opinions about that if they find out. With so many NPCs to get to know, potentially marry, and more, I can't wait to find love in Albion – and maybe stir some drama while I'm at it.

"We've stuck with the ambition we had right at the start": How Fable's open world fantasy lets you meddle in the lives of over 1000 living NPCs.