On this episode of the Official XBOX Podcast, we’re still in Cologne, Germany, and this time, we’re sitting down with Playground Games to discuss one of our most anticipated games: Fable. We’re getting more details on the gameplay the team shared at Gamescom while diving into the combat, story, and world that players got to experience at the convention.
TRANSCRIPT
SPEAKER 1: Games in this podcast range from E to M.
[ XBOX Sound ]
JOE SKREBELS: Hello, and welcome to the Official XBOX Podcast, the only podcast coming to you from inside XBOX, which is currently inside at Gamescom.
We are secreted away in a corner of the XBOX booth, and I’m very excited to say that we are going to talk Fable with Ralph Fulton from the Playground team.
Thank you for joining us.
RALPH FULTON: Not at all.
Hi Joe, how are you?
JOE SKREBELS: I’m very good, increasingly tired, but that’s where we’re at.
RALPH FULTON: It’s the Gamescom way.
JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, exactly.
We’re not recording this at the start of the week, I’ll say that much.
Thank you so much for coming.
You’ve had a busy week.
You’ve been showing Fable in two different places in two different ways.
RALPH FULTON: Two different demos of Fable.
Yeah, we’ve gone big on Fable this week.
That was kind of always the intention.
This is such a great show to come to here in Germany.
It’s the biggest game show in the world.
It’s our best opportunity to get in front of real gamers, real players.
They are here in droves, and we’re taking advantage of that.
We’re running a round-the-clock theater demo down on the XBOX booth where some of my team is showing a fragment of a quest down in the theater, explaining what’s happening, really hoping to give folks there an idea of how a quest is going to feel to play when they play the game in February when we launch.
That has been just the best experience, honestly, and it’s getting better as the week goes on, as we move through the media and influencers and content creators and get to real gamers who are now queuing for hours to see that theater experience and going nuts for what the team is showing there.
What an amazing morale boost, I think, for the team there, to be able to come out and show it to people who are just so passionate about Fable and so excited for this game and really not afraid to show it in that theater experience.
JOE SKREBELS: That’s what I was going to say.
After all this time working on it, you finally get to sit in a room with people actually seeing the game up close.
In terms of those reactions, are there things that you weren’t expecting going in?
Are there people honing in on stuff that you weren’t necessarily thinking of as the big stuff?
RALPH FULTON: I’m not sure about that.
I’ve been blown away, and I’ve sat in on a bunch of these theater sessions yesterday.
I’ve been blown away by the obvious emotion folks have, which, I think, goes, in part, to really deep feelings they have about the franchise.
There’s lots of nostalgia, lots of really fun, formative gaming experiences with the original trilogy, but also, just how emotional, how happy they are to see it back and to see it looking great.
That theater demo looks sensational.
I think we put it out after we showed it on the XBOX broadcast a couple of evenings ago.
Yeah, they’re just going crazy for it, and there’s whooping, and there’s cheering, and there have been some tears, as well, which I find the most moving thing.
JOE SKREBELS: I heard someone had made Colin the Pig merch from the last time you showed the game as well.
RALPH FULTON: Colin the Pig seems to be a breakout star of our showcase gameplay deep dive that we did, and yeah, he had, I have to say, an extremely well-made Colin the Pig T-shirt.
JOE SKREBELS: That’s amazing.
RALPH FULTON: Yeah, leveraging the key art for our expansion, which is coming later next year.
It was really well done.
I took a photo with him.
JOE SKREBELS: That’s great.
Behind closed doors, you’ve been showing the press and creators a combat-focused demo as well, which, through the magic of editing, you are probably seeing right now.
That’s really taking a different approach.
That’s getting down into the nitty-gritty of combat and letting people really mess with the game in that minute-to-minute way.
RALPH FULTON: Yes, yes, and I think if we can go and show people a live demo of a quest, I think, well, that’s really helpful for is they get the idea of, okay, this is what I’m going to be doing.
They can put themselves in the shoes of the person who’s on the sticks.
Combat’s different.
You cannot judge combat unless your hands are on the controller or your thumbs are on the sticks, and you’re feeling the game through that.
We felt it was imperative for us to come this week to Gamescom with a really deep combat build that we could put in the hands of media, press, content creators, and show them — not how it looks, because we’ve done that before, but how it feels.
We’re really blown away by the reactions we’ve been getting.
I know you were in the room — JOE SKREBELS: Yeah.
RALPH FULTON: — a couple of days ago getting your hands on.
We’re really blown away by the enthusiasm and the praise that’s been coming out of that group, who are just falling in love with the feel of our combat.
It’s very fluid; it’s very smooth; it’s responsive, and loving to see the reactions, loving to see people of different skill abilities — and we’ve seen the range from the folks that we’ve shown the game to this week — finding their way through the combat system and becoming accustomed to it, then some of the more advanced players really starting to explore the intermediate and advanced skills you can pull off within our combat system.
JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, well, that’s what surprised me is how many intricacies are behind that stuff.
The demo was, you play it twice.
I played on two different difficulty levels with two different loadouts, but what I wasn’t realizing until I went in was how much I could start messing with those things — spells having multiple different forms based on how long you charge them up.
It’s just those little nitty-gritty elements where you can’t really get your head around it until you’ve got your fingers on the buttons and you realize that there are so many options at any one moment.
RALPH FULTON: Exactly, exactly, and I think once you’ve come to grips with the rudiments of the combat system, which is by no means super-complicated, but it’s using the whole of the pad, so there’s a lot to take on, high cognitive load immediately.
Once you get comfortable and once you find your bearings, there are so many things that you can explore, and the “what if” instinct really comes into play.
I think our designers have done a great job of paying that off.
What if I combine this with this?
What if I Lightning Spell some folks that I’ve lifted up into the air?
Is that going to do something?
Absolutely, that’s going to do something.
JOE SKREBELS: I think the thing that struck me, as well, is I went into this remembering Fable as a game that has typically had those one-versus-many encounters.
RALPH FULTON: Yes.
JOE SKREBELS: I didn’t realize how many I was going to get into.
You start off and you’re, like, okay, there’s some skeletons and some wraiths, Hollow Folk, sorry.
RALPH FULTON: Yeah.
JOE SKREBELS: Hollow Folk and wraiths, and you’re outside the mine that you start in.
Okay, I’ve dealt with that crowd, and as you go through this mine, those crowds just keep getting bigger and bigger until you hit a boss that, literally, spawns them as you go, and it’s just endless waves.
Is that more about this quest, or is that indicative of where you’re thinking in terms of those combat encounters for the game?
RALPH FULTON: No, absolutely, one-to-many has very much been our mantra in setting up combat encounters.
That’s not to say that you won’t go one-on-one with some larger creatures in the world, or indeed, let’s say, other heroes.
Those are really big set-piece jewels, if you like, but the majority of our combat is about one-to-many, facing off against, often, large numbers of enemies.
Often, as you point out, a combination of different enemy types, often who have the same synergies that you were talking about with your own spells and weapons and move-set, for example.
So yeah, the mines that you were playing in Mud and Death, which is the quest we’re showing behind closed doors, can get super hectic.
JOE SKREBELS: I think that strategy came through on my second playthrough where I understood that element of, okay, that wraith’s over there; it’s powering up.
Fire a couple of crossbow bolts into that and deal with that problem and then carry on.
It’s almost learning the texture of those fights.
RALPH FULTON: Yes.
JOE SKREBELS: Then you get to that point where you start meeting armored Hollow Folk whom you can’t hit their weak spots with — or those particular weak spots with arrows like you could with everyone else, so you really start quite quickly ticking over those combat encounters and learning how to prioritize, which feels very natural.
RALPH FULTON: Yes, absolutely, and it’s a light level of strategy that goes into every combat encounter, but I think because you have so many tools at your disposal, we give you lots and lots of ways in which to deal with the encounter as you see it, and what’s great, and I’ve been seeing this firsthand watching folks in the BCD, folks formulate their own plans, their own strategies.
There is no one way to move through this, and I think that, ultimately, always ladders back up to that central vision we have for this game.
What kind of hero do you want to be, and putting the agency on the player?
JOE SKREBELS: To go back to the quest gameplay a little bit, I think part of the nostalgia for people is going to be seeing Bowerstone.
That’s such a moment for, I mean, it looks incredible whether you’ve played the old games or not, but I think if you know Bowerstone from the past, being reintroduced to it this way seems quite special.
I imagine that’s a big part of the reaction for you guys.
RALPH FULTON: I think you’re absolutely right because people remember Bowerstone, probably, more than any other location in the original games.
Bowerstone changed within those games, sort of, iteration to iteration.
It’s changed again in hours, but there’s still Fairfax Castle.
There’s still the old clock tower.
There are things that people remember and are seeing again, and there’s just that powerful nostalgia rush I think is hitting a bunch of our longtime fans.
Bowerstone, for us, was an enormous endeavor from a level design and environment art perspective.
Cities are always the hardest to pull off.
This one, in particular, is incredibly dense.
It’s incredibly vertical, as well, and it is packed full of NPCs and houses and businesses.
Of course, in our game, you can go inside every single building, every single house, whether you own it and you’re going home, or maybe you’re breaking into it to rob it, or it’s a shop — just an incredible footprint that I still can’t believe.
I think part of the reaction we’re getting in the theaters is about how good this city looks, what a great job our environment team and our lighting team have done making this iconic city come to life here at Gamescom.
JOE SKREBELS: Just the idea of having to, in some way, I don’t know if, realistically, this is the term, but understandably create different spaces inside of all these places that would usually be a backdrop must just be a wild challenge.
Do you have interior decorators on the dev team, essentially?
RALPH FULTON: I definitely think they have honed those abilities.
I have been blown away because I think, maybe mentally, this is maybe also because I’m old school, right?
I’m used to how games have been made over the years.
I think I had mentally written off the interiors that were going to be kind of the same, kind of generic, because how else are you going to do that?
I’ve just been constantly blown away by the environment team who go in and painstakingly set dress every single interior, so it tells a story about the people that live there and about their status.
Yeah, I’m always just blown away by how amazing the interiors look because I come from a generation of games where you’d have to load into an interior, right?
You remember that, as well.
The fact that we just seamlessly move and look at this beautiful, fully realized interior, I love it.
I love it, and particularly if I’m robbing it, which is a thing I do quite a lot in the game, an extra, you know, fizzle.
JOE SKREBELS: I think the — it almost plays into that, how you craft your own journey through that game, as well, because if you can buy every single house, there’s almost an element of real estate, visiting open houses and going in.
“Is this the one I want?” If I’ve only got so much gold, maybe we’ll come back and buy them all later on, but for my first house, I’m going to visit a lot of those and find the one that I like best.
RALPH FULTON: No, absolutely, but I guess, for your first house, you’re also going to be looking for one you can afford, right?
Just as there is a wide range of people and districts within Bowerstone, then there’s a wide range of homes as well.
Now, if you go right up to the top of Warminster in Bowerstone, which is where the palace is, it’s the — we call it informally “The Nobles District.” I think we’ve shown it in a couple of videos previously, so folks might be able to refer back to it.
It’s beautiful.
Oh, you would love to live there, Joe, but extremely pricey with big townhouses.
So yeah, you kind of aspire to live there, but the likelihood is you’re going to be buying a house down in Copperbottom as your first house.
JOE SKREBELS: Fair enough.
I’ll work up to it.
We’ll get there.
We’ll get there.
In terms of that quest that we see in and of itself, obviously, it’s fairly self-contained.
We see Humphrey.
We see what the journey we need to make is, but could we talk about what’s around that?
How far into the game are we at this point, and what have we done to get here?
Then, I guess, where do we go next from that point?
RALPH FULTON: That’s a great question.
You have a run-through of what we call the initial experience, which is maybe the first 90 minutes or so of the game, in which you’re a child.
Your heroic powers have emerged, and suddenly, you’re the hero of Briar Hill, like the first hero in Albion in a generation.
Then bad stuff happens.
We see our village is turned to stone.
Grandma is turned to stone by this mysterious hero, Isabel, whom we met at June Showcase.
With nothing left there and a real mission, you leave Briar Hill for the first time in your life and venture out into the open world of Albion.
I guess, and it’s been so interesting to see people playing this for the first time, as they have internally over the last couple of months.
There are some players who take that mission extremely seriously, right?
You’ve just seen your beloved grandma turned to stone.
They’re like, well, she said to go to Heroes Guild if I was ever in trouble.
That’s where I’m going to go, and I’m going to save my village.
There are other people who go that’s fine.
I’ll get to that, but equally, I’m going to go and explore, because the game now lets me do that.
I think, you know, no judgment.
Both of those approaches are — we support them both.
It’s absolutely, again, about player agency, but if you do beeline for Briar Stone when you arrive, that’s not much before the start of the quest that we’re showing.
You go to the Heroes Guild.
It’s all locked up.
There’s an eviction notice on the door, so you set about trying to gain access to that.
Ultimately, you’re reunited with your brother, who is able to get you a key.
That’s really where we pick up the gameplay of the theater demo.
Unlocking the door, going inside the Heroes Guild for the first time as a hero myself, that’s a big moment for me.
Then I meet Humphrey the Golden, who is the greatest living hero, Albion’s greatest living hero, and he’s not what you see, or what you, perhaps, hope and expect, yeah.
JOE SKREBELS: In terms of that, there’s that little choice in there where you either get him a drink or throw a drink directly over him.
Is that just setting the table for you’re going to be presented with these moments of branching decisions?
How much will that one little decision affect the story going forward?
Does it change Humphrey’s opinion of you, or is this more just a taste of that?
RALPH FULTON: We have all sizes of choice and of consequence, I think, in the game.
What’s been really fun is to explore what choice means within the context of our game, and also, what it means to players because players bring completely different and often contradictory expectations of choices.
Now, that particular choice doesn’t really change anything.
You know, it’s about roleplay, really.
This guy who is not what you were, perhaps, hoping for has asked you for a beer, you know, when rather than paying attention to you and giving you respect.
We felt it was important to give you the opportunity to not take that and to put your foot down a little bit.
It’s a roleplay opportunity, and if you do throw the beer over him, our little reputation UI pops up.
He thinks you’re an arsehole.
It’s not going to change your relationship in the long term, but it’s giving you an opportunity, really, just to express yourself, which I think is one of the reasons we have a bunch of small decisions to make within the game.
JOE SKREBELS: I love that.
That’s the thing is that decision, ultimately, doesn’t affect a lot, but just the fact that it tells you that this character thinks you’re an arsehole, that is meaningful, as you say, to that roleplay moment where you’re, like, oh, maybe I want to get him back on my side now.
RALPH FULTON: Yes, absolutely.
JOE SKREBELS: I mean, it’s Super Hands.
RALPH FULTON: Super Hands did not like this.
JOE SKREBELS: Yeah, well, I feel like we should probably let you get back because you are continuing to show these demos to people.
You’ve got more press, more creators, more audiences coming in to see all of this.
How are you feeling about the rest of the week?
Also, what are people going to see next?
Where should they check for more Fable, if these two demos aren’t enough?
RALPH FULTON: Yes, we’re not finished with the week yet.
In fact, it being Gamescom, our quest demo is running in the theater on the XBOX booth right through Sunday evening.
That team is just working all the hours to continue showing as many people as they possibly can that demo.
I know that they are going to get increasingly tired, but I know they are super energized by the response that they are getting from real fans out there who are queuing for crazy amounts of time just to see that demo.
We are really appreciative of that.
We have another, I think, half a day of our behind-closed-doors combat demo.
Again, we’re really looking forward to seeing how media and content creators respond to that.
The response so far has been incredibly positive, really galvanizing, really happy with how people are receiving it when they have their hands on the controller.
I’m looking forward to more of that.
I think that finishes today.
Going forward, if you want to keep up to date with Fable, and you want to see everything that’s happening in the world, check out our website at fablethegame.
Join our Discord, which is growing and really thriving at the moment, and check out our social channels, as well, where we will continue to update you on things that come out of Gamescom.
I’m sure there’s going to be a long tail of stuff that we’ll continue showing and talking about over the coming weeks, and anything new that we’re dropping over the coming weeks and months.
JOE SKREBELS: Well, thank you so much for your time.
Thank you for watching.
If you want more on Fable, more on XBOX, more on Gamescom, you can keep checking out the official XBOX podcast.
We also have XBOX Wire, the website.
I’m definitely not promoting this just because I’m a part of that, and there’s so much more to come.
For now, thank you very much, and we’re very much looking forward to Fable.
RALPH FULTON: Thank you, Joe.
JOE SKREBELS: Thank you.
[ XBOX Sound ]
The post Fable: How Playground Games is Building Albion for a New Generation | Official XBOX Podcast appeared first on XBOX Wire.