After years of waiting, Xbox and Playground Games have finally shown off Fable gameplay. I’m not talking about the wonderfully curated trailers or pre-rendered footage, but an actual playthrough where developers take us through a town, interact with characters, and offer a comprehensive glimpse at what our own experience might be like. Except I doubt I will be walking at such a painfully slow pace during my playthrough.

The 30-minute gameplay demo takes place almost entirely within the picturesque town of Silverbrook, one of many similarly sized settings to be found in the full game. This place is obsessed with vegetables, so much so that they have become a part of its culture. You’re likely to find accents on clothes, decorations in houses, and even a giant beanstalk in the distance, all inspired by healthy foodstuffs. It’s a charming idea, and likely to lead up to meeting the giant Richard Ayoade found in earlier trailers.

But I don’t want to focus on that today. Instead, I want to talk about the potential Fable offers to become a capitalist piece of garbage who doesn’t care what anybody thinks so long as all the gold keeps on rolling in. I want to become a landlord.

I Cannot Wait To Mess With Fable’s NPCs

Playground Games has confirmed that Fable has over 1,000 entirely unique NPCs, all of which are fully-voiced and come with their own distinct routines and behaviours. Each of them will have an opinion of you as well, since your heroic or not-so-heroic deeds travel across Albion with astonishing speed. The demo has our hero saving a talking pig from being cooked for a major town event, flirting with a local merchant, and giving a beggar employment after purchasing the local pub. But each of these actions changes how you might be viewed by the populus.

The uniqueness is probably a slight overpromise, but it wouldn’t be Fable without a few of those.

Someone who isn’t a fan of shrewd dealings will turn their nose up at you, while those who stand against capitalism won’t be a fan of someone buying up all the property in town for an easy profit, even if you’re improving the lives of others in the process. I’m unsure how deep this system will go in the finished game, but there is certainly plenty of potential.

In the first three Fable games, you eventually reached a point where you had so much money you could just buy every single piece of property and watch the gold roll in. There wasn’t much nuance to be had, but here the purchasing of property or having a conversation is just the start.

I want to see how far these systems can be stretched, especially since this fantasy world is already letting me do crazy things that would never happen in reality, like owning property. I will use this power and become the very thing I despise most — a terrible landlord.

We know that once you’ve bought an establishment you’ll be able to set the prices of goods or pick a suitable tenant to live within a house, all of which will have to pay whatever you demand or move out. Will the beggar I previously offered work be forced back into destitution if I then choose to lower his wages and increase his rent at the same time? If Fable accommodates something like this, I’ll be very impressed.

How Far Will The Gameplay Systems Of Fable Go?

Can NPCs reach such a level of hatred that they will turn around and try to kill me, or will I need to threaten repercussions if they fail to pay my bills or don’t show up to work? I would love to see if someone who loves me dearly and another villager hates my guts cross paths and see if a natural interaction plays out I have no control over. I’ve been let down by trying to experiment with Fable before, but the depth we’ve seen so far makes me believe bizarre things like this might just be possible.

My plan is to eventually buy up every single piece of property in a small town and turn all the inhabitants against me with high rents, low wages, and refusing to deal with any issues they come to me with. See, I’m just like a real life rich person. Fable is always fun when you decide to go to the extremes of its morality system, since staying in the middle rarely earns you any substantial rewards. I can’t grow devil horns in this game, but I can do the next best thing — raise your rent.

Silverbrook is just the start, and I can already see myself committing to two playthroughs of Fable just to see how I can bend its world and the people who call it home to my whims. I’ll be an angel in one save and a devil in the other, morphing my behaviour to fit those I’m desperate to associate with. Being a terrible landlord is just one fantasy, and, with a little bit of luck, Playground Games will cater to countless others.

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Fable

RPG Adventure Action Systems Released February 23, 2027 ESRB Mature 17+ / Blood, Sexual Themes, Strong Language, Violence Developer(s) Playground Games Publisher(s) Xbox Game Studios Engine unreal engine 4, forza tech Franchise Fable
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DIGITAL
Genre(s) RPG, Adventure, Action Powered by Expand Collapse