Playground Games has largely avoided discussing its upcoming reboot of Fable in any concrete terms. Not only has Playground gone without revealing any gameplay, but it has avoided nailing down details on Fable's relationship with the original Fable trilogy. At the moment, it's unclear what elements it'll reuse and what it will reinvent; not even the classic setting of Albion is certain. However, Playground and Microsoft reusing the Fable IP suggests that the reboot will still have things in common with the old games. The new Fable may bring back a ton of character concepts, story threads, and themes that carried Lionhead Studios' trilogy.
One Fable theme that really stands out is family. All three of the original Fable games feature a variety of important characters that are related to the player in some way, rather than making players be a standalone adventurer without a past like some RPGs prefer to do. This angle seems like an easy one to implement in the Fable reboot, although if it does so, Playground Games should flip the idea on its head in one way or another. Rather than rehashing the Fable trilogy's notions of family-driven quests, Fable 4 should explore different types of familial relationships.
Repurposing Fable's Approach to Family
There's no denying that blood relations are an important part of the Fable franchise. In the first Fable game, the player's sister Theresa gets an origin story before becoming one of Fable's most important characters. Fable 2 also includes a significant sister in Rose, while Fable 3 pits players against their brother. Additionally, all three of the Fable protagonists are meant to be related by blood, meaning the entire franchise is tied together by one influential family. Aside from these narrative functions, the player's ability to marry and raise a family has always been a major part of the Fable brand as well.
The new Fable game may seemingly be abandoning the industrial Albion of Fable 3, but it can still latch onto Fable's fondness of family-driven narratives in its own way. Telling such a story would be a great way to ground the Fable reboot in the original trilogy's traditions, even if the game experiments with major changes in other departments. However, in order to keep its family elements fresh, the Fable reboot should try different angles on the theme. After so much focus on sibling relationships and raising children, the Fable trilogy has left a lot of different types of family relationships untouched.
Possible Family Elements in Fable 4
Rather than exploring the Fable protagonist's relationship with a sibling, it might be interesting it Fable 4 gave players a mission related to a parent of come kind. Whether the parent is an inspiring figure who has gone missing or a tragic adversary, a Fable game exploring the love between a parent and a child could be very compelling. Alternatively, the next Fable game could build a found family narrative for itself, rather than focusing on the player's biological family. As players travel across the Fable world, players might forge strong bonds with like-minded individuals, eventually transcending friendship and becoming a family.
The Fable franchise needs to establish some kind of relationship with the original games, outside of borrowing the name. Change is inevitable, since Fable is in different hands now, but fans are still expecting something similar to what the original games delivered. A new take on a family relationship would be a great way to acknowledge the impact of the Fable trilogy. Storytelling has always been a strength of the Fable franchise, so Playground Games is under serious pressure to tell a story that's worthy of the franchise's reputation. A combination of traditional Fable structures with new ideas from Playground could be one road to success.
Fable is in development for PC and Xbox Series X/S.