Forza Horizon developer Playground Games wanted to branch out from its racing series for almost a decade, and are finally doing so with Fable. "The conversation around building a second team and doing something else, doing something different, was really about wanting to challenge ourselves – to learn and grow as developers," he explains. "Wanting to see if we could do it, if we could build a game in a different genre." However, at that time, the game wasn't Fable, but the team wanted something new. Why Playground Games' ambitious open-world Fable reboot is a fresh start for the series: "This has to be Playground's Fable" Fable isn't a sequel, Playground Games lead says, because "we needed to reboot the franchise" and "put our stamp on it" Fable 4 is officially just Fable, and after a 16-year wait it finally launches this fall across Xbox, PC, and PS5 Playground Games "felt our transferable skills were, in a genre sense, open-world game design, open-world technology, and open-world streaming – all the nuts and bolts that the team had gotten really good at, and we as a studio felt that we were pretty proficient at." And due to this skillset, "the conversation about a second project very quickly became about Fable." Fulton adds, "I don't remember who mentioned [Fable], but as soon as I heard the word I was sold," he says. "I could think of nothing else, because we just adore that series here – as people do all over the world. Suddenly, the promise of us building a team to make a new Fable game just felt like the perfect match." Now, over five years after the game was first announced, Fable had its first proper showcase at the Xbox Developer Direct last week, with a release date set for "late 2026." Fable is also a part of our Big in 2026 hub, where you can read our coverage of 50 of the year's biggest games, including the likes of Halo: Campaign Evolved and Resident Evil Requiem.