In early 2018, Playground Games, the studio best known for the Forza Horizon series, opened a second office. Two years later, it was announced that its experts were working on a new Fable. This game will not be released until February 2027, which means that its development took about 9 years. That’s a huge amount of time for a AAA project, and Xbox has canceled a lot of long-term construction projects over the years, but that hasn’t affected the Fable game.
Playground Games CEO Ralph Fulton Tellthe idea of developing a new Fable came up as early as 2017, and despite the studio’s lack of experience in creating such a project, the studio was excited about it. He cited the Fable series’ importance to the “Xbox DNA” as the main reason the project stayed alive even as many other games were cancelled.
I firmly believe that Fable is an important game. What kept us going through the long development cycle was that many people at Xbox felt that Fable was an integral part of the platform’s DNA. I would go a step further and say that this is important to the entire video game world. It combines elements simply not found anywhere else.
Let’s remember that Fable’s release has been delayed several times in recent years. Initially, the project was supposed to be released in 2025, but it was pushed back to 2026 early last year. However, the RPG won’t be releasing in 2026, as the game has been pushed back to February 23, 2027.
Fable, produced by Playground Games, will be the first full-fledged new game in the series since the release of Fable III in 2010. Meanwhile, Fable Legends, a game developed by Lionhead themselves and announced in 2012, never made it to launch – it was canceled in 2016 and the studio was shut down.
