Lionhead Games, the wonderful UK studio behind the Fable franchise may have shut down back in 2016, but it looks like we’re still getting a Fable 4, and it’s gonna be bigger than ever.
Fable 4 has been rumoured since even before Lionhead finally closed its doors, and while nothing has been officially confirmed yet, it’s essentially the worst kept secret in the business that Playground Games are currently working on the fantasy sequel.
As Eurogamer reported back in early 2018, Fable 4 is apparently coming from Playground – the UK developer best known for their work on the Forza Horizon series.
This report was backed up during E3 when Microsoft revealed they’d acquired Playground Games, and confirmed that they were working on a “AAA open world RPG”, which is definitely Fable – but apparently we’re supposed to pretend we don’t know that yet.
While details have been pretty scarce since, a recent number of job listings from Playground Games reveal that the studio is looking for no less than 177 new staff to work on their AAA RPG (AKA Fable 4).
Playground are looking for everyone from Gameplay Engineers, to Character Artists, to Creative Directors – all of this of course, implies that development has started or is about to start on the game in earnest, and the scale of this recruitment drive implies it’s gonna be one big title.
LionheadObviously, work on the game is very likely in its early stages, so we’ll have to patient as we wait to learn more. There’s also a very, very strong possibility Fable 4 will skip the Xbox One and land on whatever console Microsoft releases next.
Ewan Moore is a journalist at UNILAD Gaming who still quite hasn’t gotten out of his mid 00’s emo phase. After graduating from the University of Portsmouth in 2015 with a BA in Journalism & Media Studies (thanks for asking), he went on to do some freelance words for various places, including Kotaku, Den of Geek, and TheSixthAxis, before landing a full time gig at UNILAD in 2016.