The upcoming Fable reboot is approaching the original trilogy's whacky life sim elements in an interesting way. Developer Playground Games has handcrafted 1,000 NPCs and dubbed them 'The Living Population' since each of them will apparently react to your heroic or evil landlording deeds differently, much to the horror of the studio's art department, who were then tasked with making 1,000 beds, give or take a few.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ about the ambitious fairytale game, studio general manager Ralph Fulton says the team "knew that we wanted every NPC to be persistent, which is to say, you could, if you were so minded, follow an NPC around all day, and they will autonomously do the things that they do every day."
"They'll get up, they'll go to work, they'll have some leisure time, they'll go back to their home, and they'll go to bed," he adds. As we saw in this week's Developer Direct, sometimes where they work or sleep will change depending on your choices. Maybe you bought every building in the land and evicted them or maybe you hired them for a specific role.
"And immediately, you know when you hear that, certainly as a developer, you start going, 'Oh, okay, so every NPC, and there's more than 1,000 of them in the game, needs a bed.' And you have that conversation with the environment art team, and they're like, 'they need what now?' Which is, it brings you to a very different way of building a game, because it needs to be functional as well as beautiful."
Fable launches sometime later this year on Xbox Series X|S, Game Pass, PC, and PS5.
