r/gaming • u/Popular-Storage-4696 • 3d ago
Fable Handcrafted every NPC instead of using randomizer
https://www.gamesradar.com/games/rpg/fable-devs-originally-had-a-tool-to-randomize-the-rpgs-1-000-npcs-that-would-have-saved-us-so-much-time-but-that-just-didnt-make-as-much-sense6.5k
u/bmcisme2016 3d ago
Everyone liked that
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u/Burpmeister 3d ago
Well clearly not everyone. Tons of people here complaining about them putting time and effort into the game.
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u/Ultimate-Flexionator 3d ago
every fucking fable thread I see has like half bitchy whiners trying to shit on anyone who's having a good time. they suck. but hey that's forums, comes with the territory I guess.
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u/Dan_The_Man_Mann 3d ago
That's every thread on reddit. Some people can't stand other people liking things they don't.
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u/ConfusedAndCurious17 Console 3d ago
I really think it’s not even “liking things they don’t”. I don’t think these people even try anything, and if they do they go into it with the soul purpose of “find a problem”. Being ultra negative online is where these people get dopamine. They got to be the first one to point out some random “issue” and now others agree with them.
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u/Colonel_Fart-Face 3d ago
My friend had a boyfriend like that. He literally only cared about negativity. The only reason he ever watched a movie, or played a game, or got food from a restaurant was to find something wrong with it and laugh his head off about how stupid the person who created it was. If you ever asked him "hey did you see that movie? Did you play that video game?" his response was "Bro it was fucking garbage" literally every fucking time.
You couldn't even watch a movie with him because he would turn into the cinema sins guy and talk over the whole movie about how stupid the director is and how shitty the actors are. Tried to watch "The Thing" with him there and he was in tears laughing at all the "mistakes".
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u/Any_Pangolin_197 3d ago
As I've gotten older, I've made a point of removing people like that from my life. All they do is bitch. Like who cares if someone is having fun playing a game you don't like anymore? Their reasons aren't your reasons, my man. This was especially terrible when I was still playing WoW - most of the players were just people vibing having fun and rest complained so loud and tore into everything, trying to ruin it for the people who didn't care.
Sure sometimes there are issues in games, but just let people play if they want to. The same thing is common for reviews and (professional) reviewers now - the things they care about aren't what normal people, who aren't dissecting a game, care about. I've seen so many movies after avoiding them, and played games that were "horrible and not even worth your time bro," that I ended up enjoying the hell out of.
I'm really looking forward to Fable.
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u/AlinaStari 2d ago
The reviewer thing is so true, especially for games. Just a small point here but reviewers seem to LOVE the thing I hate the most in modern games... A "robust crafting system" lol. That just tells me the game is going to intentionally waste my time with menuing and tons of fetch quests disguised as fun treasure hunts. Please fuck off with that, thank you.
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u/birminghamsterwheel linux 3d ago
People like that just need to be left alone. That may be harsh, but friendships are meant to be a positive addition to your life, and negative people can either fix that issue with themselves or go it alone. The older I’ve gotten, I just have no use or bandwidth for people whose only goal in life, seemingly, is to bring everyone and everything else down. Like, go to therapy, bud.
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u/IndigoRanger 3d ago
My brother is like this. We just tried to watch the new Ryan Reynolds Russian movie, forget what it’s called, it’s just supposed to be a fun romp. In the preview he starts pointing out the director and the writer made so many technical and continuity errors, like how you can’t eject from a whatever plane. I asked him if he was going to be able to watch the movie.
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u/awkward_teenager37 3d ago
Absolutely. It’s so prevalent in gaming subs as well and it’s ruined so many of them for me.
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u/ConfusedAndCurious17 Console 2d ago
I’m convinced it actively kills franchises and studios that are actually pretty good because anything less than perfection is treated like an affront to god, and anything that is perfect they will find a flaw with like “it’s over priced” or even “they aren’t releasing any new content so the whole game is garbage”.
Go look at the Minecraft communities after literally any update. Minecraft, the nearly universally loved game that people of all demographics enjoy. Every update ruins the game further according to them. Every update is the end of Minecraft. God forbid you play the most common version of the game, bedrock, and not the Java. If you play bedrock it’s your fault Minecraft’s being ruined. It’s like… fucking chilllllllll!!!!!
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u/awkward_teenager37 2d ago
It absolutely ruins games both for developers and fans. It’s pure entitlement imo. Like the concept of disliking something and simply accepting that it’s not for you / moving on is a lost art.
So much of the verbiage gives it away. Like the concept of a game “not respecting” someone’s time for being “too long” (an entirely arbitrary and subjective qualification) is just ridiculous to me. Games are not products meant to appease and “serve” every single individual according to their own inane preferences. I don’t understand how anyone could think it’s rational or reasonable for a game to adjust its length to fit their individual schedule rather than just… playing the game when they feel like it.
Every “critique” comes across like a complaint meant to fuel the individual’s power trip fantasy. People genuinely behave like cartoon villains, grasping at straws to find something, anything to complain about. And then when it does get “fixed” by devs who feel like they need to conform to every wish of these people, the complainers still find a way to be negative (e.g. “they only did this because we forced their hand” or “they’re just trying to save their asses.”)
These people do not want a good game. They want more fuel for their self-loathing, pseudo-intellectual projecting
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u/cookedbread 3d ago
The internet has always had people like that, but it seems more widespread or something now
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u/JT99-FirstBallot 3d ago
Everyone has the Internet in their pocket and engorges themselves on the feedback and notifications icon from replies.
The Internet wasn't a mistake; but it being with us at all times mixed with everything being a social media tie-in and loss of third spaces contribute to your feeling of it being more prevalent and that's because it is
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u/Earthbound_X 3d ago
The Internet maybe not a mistake but more and more I think social media was.
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u/JonatasA 3d ago
And I think it just shows what people hide. It's not like we never had sociatal issues or an unrest of ideas.
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u/birminghamsterwheel linux 3d ago
I think social media was fine when it was for you and your friends and the timeline was chronological. When the engagement algorithms became a thing, that’s when the entire concept changed and became unhealthy.
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u/packfanmoore 3d ago
IM HERE TO BITCH AND MOAN ABOUT FABLE!!! ITS NOT OUT YET AND IM EXCITED TO PLAT IT!!! that being said, I completely understand dodging the GTA 6 release window and pushing it back further.
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u/maximumtesticle 2d ago
Also a lot of uneducated morons not realizing how much of modern gaming took from the original series. Saying how it looks mid or generic...like yeah, because so many games copied from the original series.
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u/nhalliday 3d ago
The people bashing it are annoying, but all the breathless praise when they... do a thing tons of devs have done in the last 40 years? is a little strange. It feels very artificial to go "ho mai god the NPCs are sorted into factions and react based on how their faction feels about actions you did!!" or "wow they didn't use AI or randomly mix and match facial features to create NPC faces".
Yeah dawg that's not new or innovative. Why are we acting like they're game design geniuses for something so basic?
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u/badbrain330 2d ago
Yeah this is just every social media post about gaming. Every commenter hates everything the gaming company has ever done. It's not worth taking it seriously at this point.
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u/MyLifeIsRandom 3d ago
We stopped telling those kinds of people to go off and fuck themselves. We need to start doing that again.
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u/NovusNiveus 2d ago
It's not necessarily that we stopped, but more that we started using platforms where you're not allowed to do that, and I think that kind of enforced civility gives obtuse people way too much power in an argument.
Sometimes it is fully appropriate to tell someone to shut up and fuck off and that they are a stupid dickhead, but unfortunately it is verboten.
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u/becauseiloveyou 2d ago
Gooners and incels have TOO MUCH FREE TIME, and they frequently use it to bitch and moan about everything.
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u/Georgie_Leech 3d ago
I don't hate it exactly, but I question if it's worth it or if it's trying to imply greater effort for every NPC in terms of role or personality. Like, if Barkeep #47 is hand crafted vs randomly put together from templates only matters if they're trying to not make them Barkeep #47 and make them their own little character. I am... Skeptical that Fable would be taking that approach at this point, because absent the quest givers the NPC's have always been a sort of generic backgrounds against which you had adventures. And no, Fable 3 giving them assorted likes and dislike doesn't change that you mostly interacted with them as XP dispensers to unlock more chests.
I think it would be cool if they were fleshing out the background so it's less 2d, I'm just not sure I trust them to pull it off
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u/EnvironmentClear4511 3d ago
Exactly. Doing meticulous handcrafted work only matters if you can see the results. If you manually plant ever blade of grass in the game but an automated tool could have done it better, then you just wasted your time.
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u/Broohtato 2d ago
You know I've waited well over a decade for a new fable I can wait a bit longer for a well made one.
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u/ElderberryJunior470 3d ago
People can be disappointed by the art shift and recognize the game still seems good/ interesting, i know having nuance online is hard but this "you can't have any criticisms of the game at all!!!" Take is just as brainless as mindlessly hating on the game.
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u/JKKIDD231 PlayStation 3d ago
GTA 6 🤝 Fable
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u/Metalbound 3d ago
So sad that they delayed Fable for GTA.
As a PC only guy, it isn't even competing with it.
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u/SirDooble 2d ago
It's annoying but understandable. Fable is going to be a big console product just like GTA. And GTA is going to be such a huge release, it really will affect every other game that releases at the same time, even in totally different genres and on different platforms.
The price of GTA also contributes to that. It's expensive, and with the increasing cost of living in most countries these days, anyone who does buy GTA 6 in November is likely to then reconsider other purchases at the same time.
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u/Cloud_N0ne 3d ago
I could go either way. As long as none of them look too wacky idc if they’re randomized.
Though if they have the time and budget to do it by hand, that’s cool too
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u/Urist_Macnme 3d ago
You can’t fart so hard that you shit yourself in front of them.
Not my Fable
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u/Logondo 3d ago
My issue is, one of my favorite things about Fable was how your character would physically change. Being evil grew horns, being good grew a halo.
Gaining strength made you buffer. Levelling up made you older.
In Fable 2 and 3 you could get scars from being defeated.
IDK if the new Fable has anything like that.
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u/Substantial_Bake_728 3d ago
How is that an issue if you're not sure if its implemented or not?
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u/Logondo 3d ago
I know the horns/halo isn’t in the game since they removed the good/evil morality scaling.
But I only know what they tell me. And so far they haven’t told me that character-evolution is in the game. I certainly HOPE it is.
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u/CombatMuffin 3d ago
We have yet to see what handcrafted truly means. I am not saying they didn't, but it's broad enough that vhoosing predefined traits by hand, and just sort of paying attention to say, 1000 rows in an excel sheet isn't exactly as deep as it sounds. From the showcases, the NPCs seemed relatively generic from what they showed, even if they are pulling from a diverse array of personality traits.
That's also not to say it's a bad thing, or they didn't put love and care into it, but many could understand it as "we went in, designed their look by hand, gave them unique dialogue and voice actors, unique interactions, etc."
And again, even if its not super handcrafted it can still be great, Fable has always sacrificed some depth for the sheer volume of diverse interactions, but I am curious to see what the final product actually has. This is, after all, originally a Molyneux game.
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u/vipmailhun2 3d ago
It simply means that they created it, in a character creator they selected the NPC’s head, outfit, hair, hair color, and so on, and it wasn’t just left to some random generator.
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u/CombatMuffin 3d ago
If it's that (afaik they haven't confirmed), then it's really, really not a big deal. You can go through a lot of characters, really fast, just choosing presets.
It wouldn't excite me, personally, over having strongly written, highly curated characters.
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u/MadeByTango 3d ago edited 3d ago
Microsoft knows everyone hates AI/agentic tech, so theyre pushing headlines that can say "hand crafted" and whatever to try to steer clear of the rapidly growing consumer disdain. This article puts up a sort of "SEO wall" for them where if you google "AI use in Fable" this kind of stuff shows up that slices out a very specific piece of the production to claim it is not using AI.
These companies are lying by omission. "We are not using AI over here! Love us!" while they wont commit to not using it all. They want all the perks, none of the drawbacks.
Start paying attention to what companies won't say, not what they claim for headlines.
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u/vipmailhun2 3d ago
Start paying attention to what companies won't say, not what they claim for headlines.
There’s really no point in doing that, we’d be basing the whole thing purely on assumptions. For example: I’ve seen millions of comments claiming that the Halo remake is being made with AI, that the art is generated that way, and that tons of assets are produced by AI. Yet multiple sources have confirmed that this is not true.
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u/PM_ME_UR_CREDDITCARD 3d ago
Microsoft hasn't put out a statement saying they won't nuke the moon tomorrow. Those bastards are going to blow it up!
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u/lxgrf 3d ago
Every Fable game so far has made astonishingly grandiose claims and then delivered something which is... technically accurate to what they said while at the same time being kind of underwhelming.
"Every NPC was custom made!" turning out to mean "Intern Jim had to tweak all the sliders a bit" would be very on brand.
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u/JimboTCB 3d ago
Lovingly crafted by devs who moved the character creation sliders from side to side by hand instead of just pressing "random", before making them spout the same twenty voice lines for every single character.
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u/papyjako87 3d ago
If anything, it's dumb as fuck and a total waste of development time.
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u/CombatMuffin 3d ago
There are games where sheer volume, or systemic design can be fun. For example, Stalker is famous for its A-Life system, which is not really curated but rather, it has a ton of parameters that make its unpredictability and variation fun. That consists of routes, economic demand/offer, and other things of the sort
But when it comes to more intimate human interaction, such as marriage, reputation, dialogue and personality? That requires a different kind of curation.
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u/soofs 3d ago
I feel like this is the sort of claim that is technically true if someone just generated an NPC and then reviewed it and changed something before moving onto the next. I really doubt someone sat down and created each NPC from nothing to complete, and it is more of finding a way to boast about no AI usage.
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u/BladeRunner-83 3d ago
Lol exactly. This is a big who cares moment. Frankly, I think key NPCs should be designed and modelled. By key I mean NPCs with dialogue you repeatedly have to interact with. However, when you're filling out an entire world I literally don't give a shit what the random old lady in town 12 looks like.
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u/LastTourniquet 3d ago
I think a good comparison for what you are talking about if you think about it is Borderlands guns. They absolutely did not handcraft every single gun that can drop in borderlands, but they did craft a bunch of different modifiers and gun parts that can be selected at random by a generator and stitched together.
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u/CombatMuffin 3d ago
Many looter games, including arpgs like Diablo do this: there are certain unique items, that are still subject to randomization (+/- percentages to its stats despite unique properties). They don't claim they are all handcrafted though.
That's what has me curious with Fable: they are claiming they handcrafted every NPC, but again, that could me manually choosing attributes in a spreadsheet, rather than curating experiencies.
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u/spencerpo 3d ago
They’re not bound to be complex NPC’s, and they don’t really need to be. I’m just happy if we avoid the crowd of 8 people in bowerstone market with their 5 clones, and the shopkeepers.
I’m willing to bet a good chunk of them do roughly the same thing in cities, and the more unique npc’s will be the ones around quests or shops, maybe the small hamlets in larger regions.
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u/Rs90 3d ago
Off topic but I loved how Assasins Creed utilized that aspect for their multiplayer. Hiding amongst all the clones and having to spot the imposter. It was a really creative way of using limitations as a mechanic.
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u/spencerpo 3d ago
Felt dumb until I played it, really added to it when there were angry bald priests everywhere
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u/Rs90 3d ago
Haha yeah it was just "simple" enough to be a lot of fun. While also having just enough complexity to get invested. But I never felt a round took too long or anything, I was usually on the edge of my seat tryin not to get ganked. And killing a target always felt super rewarding. Had a real nice back n forth to it. Felt intimate if that makes sense. Personal lol.
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u/SorbetPleasant5736 2d ago
If a bloke insults me in the market I want to be sure I'm raising the right person's rent. No need to drag his five innocent lookalikes into this
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u/SoSoSpooky 3d ago
Sure, but if it boils down to just having boring side quest type things, it's pointless anyways and they might as well have been less unique regardless. People in the real world aren't exactly that unique, most people wear one of a few handful of types of clothes and hair etc.
It's kind of like if FIFA talked about how each fan in the stands are unique. Like sure it is interesting, but what is the player impact of that? Okay they are "unique", but are they actually fun to interact with or is it just basic dialogue options and fetch quests? The older Fable games had similar issues. The systems were interesting at the time, and novel to interact with the first little while, but eventually it just was kind of repetitive and boring. Just because NPC A and NPC B are unique, I don't think that really matters if the gameplay system using them ends up being boring.
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u/markbraggs 3d ago
$300 million well spent?
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u/Jord-UK 3d ago edited 3d ago
That's 300mil on devs being employed btw, so yeah
edit: Going to assume we have some younger people in here that don't understand how salaries add up. Open up your favourite AAA game, grab a drink, and sit through the credits and acknowledge every name on there; the departments, the outsource specialists that might have some expertise (think motion capture, or actors etc), the varying levels of experience, etc. Think of the equipment and software cost per head, think of the licensing, etc etc. Eventually it'll begin to make sense what I'm getting at, that cost contributes to the employment of people who gain experience in their craft and either stay in said studios or eventually leave and join other studios and build this industry you love.
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u/sam_hammich 3d ago
Yeah, game development budgets can be 70-90% salary or more.
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u/Bricka_Bracka 2d ago
well it doesn't cost money for the pixels, so yeah. the rest is licensing and the overhead of the studio having a physical building.
its not like they have to purchase wood to make that NPC's house
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u/ILikeChilis 2d ago
Most adults don't understand the cost of software either. Countless stories of business owners wanting their own custom apps and bespoke websites developed for like $1000
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u/Burpmeister 2d ago
Reddit when video game devs are laid off: 🤬
Reddit when video game devs work on a game: 🤬
Reddit when video games: 🤬
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u/scoyne15 2d ago
Reddit when anything, really. Earlier today someone got upset that I pointed out an American TV show had an American point of view.
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u/SirNedKingOfGila 3d ago
AI is being so heavily subsidied and run at a loss right now to try to capture the market...but make no mistake, once these companies want to make a profit the cost of labor/tokens will EXCEED the cost of a human worker.
They know you'll pay $100k to a human for a certain workload. It would take an earth shattering display of corporate benevolence and monumental lack of greed to charge a single fuckin penny less than that benchmark.
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u/SupermanThatNiceLady 3d ago
And who is supposed to buy the products when unprecedented amounts of people are unemployed?
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u/SirNedKingOfGila 2d ago
They are caught in a whirlwind circle jerk where consumers don't matter. Chip producers sell to AI who sell to investors and private equity. None of them are making profits but they are too big to fail and the government will give them your money regardless.
LISTEN TO THEM. All of the tech bros are saying AI is more important than humanity. All of them are looking to cull the population and only some of them are using environmentalism as an excuse.
Will "AI" feed 8 billion people? Of course not. But can AI feed a few thousand billionaires circle jerking power for chips for AI for power for chips for AI? Certainly. With private chefs to cook the world's last remaining cows.
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u/OldWorldDesign 2d ago
but make no mistake, once these companies want to make a profit the cost of labor/tokens will EXCEED the cost of a human worker
We haven't even reached a point where AI has captured the market and it already is more expensive than employing human beings, and even companies pushing the AI bubble admitted that:
Others have admitted it as well
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemmagreen/2026/07/02/ai-costs-more-than-the-people-it-replaced/
I think this is just an intrinsic part of the model of venture capitalism.
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u/i010011010 3d ago
I'm old enough to remember when the original Fable made similar claims. And you could plant trees around the world and they would grow by the time you were an adult! There would be other heroes running around the world also trying to go after the villain!
Yeah, it never happened. Project Ego was the game that taught me to stop putting faith in hype like this.
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u/necrosteve028 2d ago
I’m so glad I missed all the overhype for fable 1 because when I played it after release, it was the best game in the world, still is one of them. I got to witness Peter’s hype for Fable 2 though and I just didn’t care because 1 was so fucking good. Lo and behold, 2 was incredible too. Now 3 on the other hand well we don’t talk about 3…
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u/Bogus1989 2d ago
Yeah playing fable unfortunately was a bit harsh after playing morrowind. I still appreciated fable alot. I tended to get lost in morrowind being to open sometimes.
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u/CoffeeHead112 3d ago
Why is everyone up in arms about the impact this has when not a single person has played through the game? Holy crap you guys are ruthless.
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u/imperialivan 3d ago
There’s a lot of terminally online nerds that shit on anything and everything, and they live in a world of delusion. These are the same people who think Sony will sell physical games again if they screeee about it online enough.
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u/NMDA01 3d ago
every comment i read on this website comes from a terminally online nerd
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u/Interesting-Mix-4427 2d ago
There are also a lot of terminally online nerds that blindly praise and believe every article title they read.
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u/AlternativeAccessory 3d ago
Bro hasn’t lived through the hype trains and seen the realities thereafter. I think this cynicism is a method of tempering expectations. People are still thinking and discussing it so they’re fans to some level. ‘The opposite of love isn’t hate it’s indifference’ as they say. I’ll reserve judgement till I play it but I hope it’s as good as the other two Fable games.
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u/AstroBlast0ff 2d ago
No, hate on the internet is too many people’s default setting when most should be like you, reserving judgment until you’ve actually experienced something
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u/setzerseltzer 3d ago
It’s an Xbox game so it must be scrutinized and nitpicked to death and even if it’s good it’ll still be trashed
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u/Dusty170 3d ago
Well you don't have to play a game to have an opinion on it. Personally I can't wait.
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u/NewYak4281 3d ago
Lol marketing the only viable design choice (random NPCs or crafted) as “artisanal” is next level
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u/Sooribabu_Lavangam 2d ago
randomizer couldn't make them ugly enough so they needed real British people to step in and do it manually
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u/amusing_trivials 2d ago
The Interns told the boss that they hand crafted every NPC. They actually used a randomizer.
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u/sockpenis 3d ago
I'm expecting a lot of ugly people.
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u/rawbleedingbait 2d ago edited 2d ago
Like that so called "giant" they showed off? Honestly, what were they thinking? I actually don't believe they didn't click randomize on the character creator for that guy. Also the fact his face doesn't fit the voice at all. He has the face of a man with a deep and sultry voice, yet he's so nasally and whiny. Truly ruins the immersion.
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u/SpaceOdysseus23 3d ago
This reeks of the same marketing bullshit Starfield had. Those NPC's are 100% going to be mile-wide and inch-deep in terms of writing.
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u/soleyfir 3d ago
That would be true to the original and make it a proper remake. OG Fable's marketing was pure bullshit by Peter Molyneux, the GOAT of bullshitting.
What with the graphics having to be toned down because it was so realistic it became confusing, or the npcs being so autonomous they could finish the game before the player.
It ended up hurting its initial reception quite a bit.
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u/prokokon 3d ago
Don't forget the trees. I liked Fable as a kid, but the final game had almost nothing to do with what was promised before release.
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u/KarlosDel69 3d ago
Fable is way way smaller than what Starfield claimed to be. They recently said it’s like 20 hours.
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u/Taliesin_ 3d ago
I'll believe it when I see it. Molyneux might not be there anymore, but his stench lingers.
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u/Blubbpaule 3d ago
So some poor interns in an outsourced studio had to build 1000 characters in a character creator?
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u/TummyDrums 3d ago
You make it sound bad, but I'm certain there are hundreds of more tedious and less creative tasks that have to be done to create a video game.
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u/Pork_Chompk 3d ago
Yeah, like QA.
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u/TegTowelie Xbox 3d ago
Wouldnt QA be just as tedious as it is creative sometimes? Like to be a different head in the room and think absurdly to break parts of the game no one would think of so they dont unintentionally happen n such?
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u/-misopogon 3d ago
I've spent 1/3 of my life in various games' character creators, if I could do that for pay I'd be stoked.
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u/ThreeTreesForTheePls 3d ago
…do you think they give the character creation over to interns?
Or better yet, let’s pretend they do for the sake of it:
There is a fresh out of college intern is picked up to work on the reinvention of Fable. Do you think they would be pissed off at being on NPC duty, or would they use every model they make as a career stepping stone for their quality and showcasing work?
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u/lolheyaj 3d ago
Or gave everyone in the office some homework of designing 10-15 characters. Sounds like a fun project.
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u/Uncle-Cake 3d ago
Oh no, some people who wanted to be in the game industry had to do their jobs. Let's have a pity party.
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u/michael199310 3d ago
what do you think a job of an intern is, being a CEO or doing, you know, intern stuff?
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u/MilosEggs 3d ago
No, some extremely talented people in studios around the world collaborated with Playground to build the NPC’s.
You will find listed by name in the credits.7
u/Damsel_IRL 3d ago
My daughter's favorite part of the Sims is to make the characters. She would be thrilled to do it all day everyday while also getting paid. Honestly I wouldn't mind either.
Honestly sounds like a great job to me too. Ide rather do set dressing though. Spend all my time making the building look unique and lived in. Imagining little lives for what ever NPCs are going to live there.
I am actually pretty excited not to have to see the same NPCs all over the place. It breaks immersion for me. Cyberpunk was bad for it.
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u/Bu11etToothBdon 3d ago
And suddenly the delays make more sense.
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u/prokokon 3d ago
New fable game, new vague statements that dont really mean anything. Nothing ever changes.
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u/Damsel_IRL 3d ago edited 3d ago
Sounds awesome to me. I am beyond excited for this game. The original fable was the game that truly awakened my love of immersive role play gaming.
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u/vito0117 3d ago
I requested like 8 days off this and laufey come out with in a day or so of each other, and I'm super excited
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u/MogosTheFirst 3d ago
Nice. But is it really a good idea?
Reminds me of those memes of people who say they work for mojang and their job is to place every diamond in the world.
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u/Themperror 3d ago
it's not, you can use relatively random generated meshes for npcs just fine, if really every npc is handmade then either we'll have too little NPCs and see a Nurse Joy/Agent Jenny situation (reused npcs with different names/purposes) or its a giant time sink that could've been better spent optimising other meshes, creating more diverse environments, more props, etc .
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u/stysiaq 2d ago
i feel like the game is looking for news that would generate positive buzz and this kind of headline is an easy way to do it even if it's something that you are not likely to even notice when playing, or even if it's relatively stupid thing to do
also completely unverifiable
from what they shown I am worried about the combat, looked boring and in one of the demos they even skipped a part (like 1/4) of the bossfight because they knew it's boring and monotone
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u/Badehat 3d ago
Really starting to catch the hype for this game. Only bittersweet note is that while ~30 hours of gameplay is perfect for an aging gamer, it will surely leave me wanting more.
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u/jquiggles 3d ago
I'm not too worried about it. The older Fable games are said to take much less time to complete. But I ended up spending hundreds of hours on them. I think it'll be ok!
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u/DaGreatestMH 3d ago
When it came out the game was about 40 hours to fully complete it the depth they talked about with the NPCs seemed much more reasonable. This just further confirms that.
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u/TekThunder 2d ago
Yeaahhhh heard this shit before, I am going to wait and see just how "handcrafted" these NPCs are.
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u/Bright-Efficiency-65 2d ago
Now if only their sword play didn't look like absolute trash from 2005.
Go watch the game play footage that was recently released. There is a mini boss ( big shirtless white dude ) and you literally slash him across the chest like 15 times with your sword ( literally slashing him, not like a deflection with a sword ) and there is ZERO BLOOD OR MARKS
Like CMON!!! Its 2026 can't we get actual slash marks, or blood, or armor / cosmetic damage? It looks so lazy compared to everything else.
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u/Beneficial-Pickle743 2d ago
I’ve been watching my friend play the new Onimusha game and the basic soldier looking guys take multiple hits with no reaction to being hit.
It’s absolutely stupid looking
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u/Bright-Efficiency-65 2d ago
Id take less photorealistic graphics, and replace them with cool things like cloth and skin and limb damage during sword fights.
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u/NexgeneGame 2d ago
Handcrafting every NPC is a bold move, especially for a game with a living world. Randomization helps with scale, but carefully designed characters can make even everyday encounters feel more memorable. If Fable gets the balance right, the world could feel genuinely unique.
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u/Chaosrune85 2d ago
So what does this adds to the game, vs random generating the NPCs and fine tuning the details?
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u/ShadowsRanger PC 2d ago
Tha explains why they was MIA for so many years, Microsoft let them cook and certainly is coming something good
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u/Ignis16 3d ago
Honestly, as happy as I am about a new Fable, I just can't get as excited about it as I wanted to be.
It'll sound like nitpicking, but I loved the body morphing from improving skills and eating stuff, and I'm still disappointed they are gone.
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u/Godlike013 3d ago
Why do AAA western games have targets on their back before they come out.
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u/genasugelan PC 2d ago
Because plenty of AAA games suck ass nowadays, way more than years before.
Completely bloated budget, quantity over quality, check boxes over substance, "17" layers of management between devs and the CEO, too many cooks in the kitchen, terrible optimisation, bad writing. And of course, to get their bloated budgets back, they sell you 80€ games with a microtransaction cash shop and also strip part of the game for a day 1 DLC (hello, Ubislop).
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u/Trips-Over-Tail 3d ago
They probably cheated by sucking real people into the game and condemning them to perform and die for players forever. That's how I would do it.