One of the key aspects that has always been praised about the Fable franchise has been its undeniably-British sense of humor. In an interview with Xbox Wire, director of Playground Games’ reboot of Fable, Ralph Fulton, has spoken about some of the British comedies that have influenced the comedy of the upcoming game. Citing classic British comedy shows like The IT Crowd and Peep Show as major inspirations, Fulton also cited The Office as among the influences as well.
“We were inspired by the incredibly rich variety of British comedies that have been around over the last 20 years like ‘Peep Show,’ ‘The IT Crowd’ and so many others,” he said. “We started with ‘The Office’, which again started out as quintessentially British, but also travels really, really well. Not just that IP, but a lot of the techniques and the devices that it’s popularized, you know. It’s that really grounded, awkward style of humour which really appeals to us. And the actors who have been in a lot of these shows – and indeed some of whom are in our game – they’re known all over the world.”
When it comes to the UK version of The Office specifically, Fulton noted that its type of comedy hasn’t really been seen much in gaming before. Its mockumentary style with plenty of awkwardness culminating into punchlines, for instance, was used for some of the studio’s previous trailers. He noted that these narrative devices were used in the game as well.
“The other cool thing about The Office is something we’ve kind of nicked. You’ve maybe seen in our trailers that we have a sort of mockumentary interview style. I think a lot of people assume we just did that for those trailers, but it’s actually a device we use throughout the game,” he said.
“I’ve never seen it in games before, but it allows you a way to really neatly tell a joke or drop a little bit of character detail in a way that would feel really clunky in a dialogue, but suddenly feels entirely natural when you do it to ‘camera’.”
Fulton has revealed plenty of other details about Fable as well, including the fact that the open-world action RPG will feature more than a thousand NPCs that were handcrafted, each with their own morals, jobs and opinions of the protagonist.
While procedural generation was once considered for Fable‘s various NPCs, Fulton said that the studio “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.”
Fulton also went into detail about the game’s morality system, and how it won’t feature a strict good/bad binary like the previous entries in the Fable franchise did. Rather, the “morality system” in the upcoming Fable will revolve more around each NPC forming opinions about the protagonist based on their own beliefs and the protagonist’s actions.
For more details about Fable, check out why Playground Games decided to reboot the series instead of making Fable 4. Fable is coming to PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S this Fall.
