The team at Playground Games has shared new details about creating a living population in the upcoming reboot of the Fable role-playing series. Initially, the developers planned to use special tools to automatically generate characters to save time, but this idea had to be abandoned.
As game director Ralph Fulton explains, procedural construction results in hilarious and illogical contradictions in imagery, such as a vegetarian butcher or a hairdresser with a ridiculous hairstyle. Therefore, the studio decided to manually develop a thousand unique NPCs, giving them logical roles, professions and personal characteristics.
This approach makes it possible to build believable communities, where residents can react differently to players’ actions – from admiration to open contempt. This will make social interactions, including marriages and divorces, more in-depth and interesting.
