With plenty of studios discussing the use of generative AI in the development of their games, Fable developer Playground Games has joined the fray to confirm that no generative AI was used to voice its NPCs. This is certainly an impressive feat considering the fact that the RPG will feature more than a thousand fully-voiced NPCs. As caught by GameSpot, the studio discussed this during a group Q&A at Summer Game Fest, and went on to praise its cast of actors.
“We’ve got a really fantastic cast of actors who have come in and recorded tons and tons of dialogue, which is what you’ve heard today voicing our NPCs,” said Playground Games. “All of our NPCs are fully voiced. We cast around 100 actors to voice our Living Population alone.”
The use of generative AI for voice acting became a major talking point for many players and developers alike when ARC Raiders developer Embark Studios spoke about using it for the extraction shooter. The company had confirmed this just a few days after ARC Raiders was released, with studio CCO and co-founder Stefan Strandberg revealing that the title used “a combination of recordings of real actors and [text-to-speech].”
Studio head Patrick Söderlund and parent company Nexon’s CEO, Junghun Lee, even went on to talk about how they wanted generative AI to be used in game development so that the development teams could be “free” to be more creative.
As for Fable, Playground Games revealed through a 30-minute gameplay overview that the open-world RPG will be an “endless, interconnected live sim”. This is largely possible because the studio worked hard to handcraft more than a thousand NPCs. The process of these NPCs being created also meant that the studio had to figure out a “very different way of building a game”.
“They’ll get up, they’ll go to work, they’ll have some leisure time, they’ll go back to their home, and they’ll go to bed,” explained studio founder Ralph Fulton.
“And immediately, you know when you hear that, certainly as a developer, you start going, ‘Oh, okay, so every NPC, and there’s more than 1,000 of them in the game, needs a bed.’ And you have that conversation with the environment art team, and they’re like, ‘they need what now?’ Which is, it brings you to a very different way of building a game, because it needs to be functional as well as beautiful.”
This also means that Fable players can expect there to be plenty of shops throughout the world of Albion. The studio has confirmed that, in its entirety, Fable’s world will feature more than 120 different shops, each with its own unique stocks. In the same gameplay showcase, the studio also revealed details about the Blacksmithing system, which will give players new ways to make gold.
Fable is being developed for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S, and is slated for release on February 23rd, 2027. Xbox CCO Matt Booty has confirmed that Playground Games worked with Blizzard to create some of the RPG’s cinematics.
