Fable: How Playground Games is Building Albion for a New Generation | Official XBOX Podcast

Joe (0:00)

Games in this podcast range from E to M.

Hello and welcome to The Official XBOX Podcast, the only podcast coming to you from Inside XBOX, which currently is Inside 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 (0:21)

Not at all. Hi Joe, how are you?

Joe (0:22)

I'm very good. Increasingly tired, but that's where we're at.

Ralph Fulton (0:26)

Gamescom way.

Joe (0:27)

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 (0:38)

Two different demos of Fable. Yeah, we've gone big on Fable this week. That was always the intention. This is such a great show to come to here in Germany. It's biggest game show in the world. It's our best opportunity to get in front of real gamers, the real players and they are here in their droves, and we're taking advantage of that. We're running a round-the-clock, effectively, theater demo down on the XBOX booth, where some of my team are 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. 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 are 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 (1:59)

That's what I was going to say, is 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 (2:19)

I'm not sure about that. I've been blown away and I've sat in 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 just really deep feelings they have about the franchise. 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.

But yeah, they're just going crazy for it. There's whooping and there's cheering, and there has been some tears as well, which I find the most moving thing. Yeah.

Joe (3:04)

I heard someone had made Colin the Pig merch from the last time you showed the game as well.

Ralph Fulton (3:09)

Colin the Pig seems to be a breakout star of our showcase gameplay deep dive that we did. Yeah. He had, I have to say, an extremely well-made Colin the Pig t-shirt.

Joe (3:21)

That's amazing.

Ralph Fulton (3:21)

Yeah. Leveraging the key art for our expansion, which is coming later next year.

Really well done. I took a photo with him.

Joe (3:29)

That's great.

Then behind closed doors, you've been showing pressing 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 (3:47)

Yes. I think if we can go and show people a live demo of a quest, I think what that's really helpful for is to 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, 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, and really blown away by the reactions we've been getting there. I know you were in the room a couple of days ago getting your hands on.