It’s been a long time since players got a new adventure in the land of Albion, but now that Fable is on the way, things are looking up for the series’ fans. The game is certainly cryptic for now, though. After a couple years of rumors and leaks, the most concrete thing Fable players have to go off of is a short trailer from this year’s Xbox Games Showcase. It doesn’t reveal much about the game, but it’s at least confirmation that something is on the way. In a time when the fantasy RPG is alive and well, a new Fable game will be a welcome addition to the market.
That said, after this extended absence, Fable and Albion might have some adjusting to do to keep up with the competition. There’s plenty of other high profile games in the genre coming up— fans need to look no further than Avowed, Obsidian Entertainment’s RPG that turned heads at the Xbox Games Showcase as well. There’s a crucial difference between these games that might weaken Fable, though: Fable has a habit of leaping through the timeline between games, causing lore to change vastly. Avowed is mysterious, but it looks like it’ll be rooted in some very stable lore. Fable might be wise to take a page out of that book and change how it approaches its own setting.
For those who don’t know, Avowed will take place in Eora, the medieval fantasy world that Obsidian first brought to life in the Pillars of Eternity games. Thanks to that first appearance, Eora has a ton of lore to offer Avowed. Even though the Living Lands, the region where Avowed takes place, didn’t appear in those games, they’ve been fleshed out significantly and players have a good idea of what to expect going in. The area’s population is very diverse, boding well for character creation, and all kinds of fantastical beasts and landmarks in the area make it a promising choice for an adventure.
All of this remains consistent between the Pillars games, so it’s liable to be similar in Avowed. In contrast, Fable has handled Albion very differently over the years. For instance, there’s a gap of five hundred years between the first and second games in the main line. Naturally this means that Albion undergoes tremendous changes and becomes a very different society. The same things happen to a lesser extent when fifty years pass before Fable 3 takes place. Fable goes from a medieval adventure to a early modern or Renaissance society to the dawn of an industrial empire. Technology and society are constantly changing between the games, forcing lore to expand with it.
It’s certainly possible to view Fable‘s inclination toward constant change as a good thing. It allows players to explore various kinds of fantasy worlds within the same franchise and see a society develop in response to the player’s actions. However, from a lore perspective, it proves troublesome. Time skips create a lot of extra work for the writers, forcing them to reimagine Albion with every Fable game rather than focusing on the details of an established setting with each new entry and fleshing them out in new ways. So much change results in instability and can make the games hard to follow.
With that in mind, maybe Fable will look to Eora and decide to pin down Albion’s lore to a specific time. This new entry is a reboot, so it’s got the opportunity to make big, bold changes in Fable‘s traditions. Maybe Playground Games will decide to prioritize stable lore that doesn’t have to reintroduce itself to players every time since going back to basics is ideal for a reboot. Fable has the opportunity to make its lore more grounded and let players get comfortable as the developers look toward the possibility of a whole reboot trilogy, or even more.
Fable is in development for PC and Xbox Series X.
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