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- The Fable reboot will feature over 150,000 lines of dialogue
- Playground Games says multiple studios have recorded over 1000 hours of VO this year alone
- The studio says, "It takes a lot of work to balance all of the systems, but that's part of the challenge that we've been relishing"
Playground Games has said that more than 150,000 lines of dialogue have been recorded for its highly anticipated fantasy role-playing game (RPG), Fable, an impressive system that it "relished" making.
That's according to Playground founder and general manager Ralph Fulton, who shared some fun statistics about the game with the press during a Q&A at Summer Game Fest and revealed that a good chunk of Fable's dialogue was also recorded across multiple studios just this year alone.
"There are over 150,000 lines of dialog about VO in this game, and the lion's share of that is in that system that you should be seeing today [in the demo]," Fulton said. "We've had multiple studios set up running in parallel for over 1000 hours just this year alone, just recording VO, so it's a huge machine, because the vision that the guys have for this part of the game just requires that way of writing."
While impressive, it raises the question of how this will be illustrated in-game without the RPG feeling too bloated. When asked if Playground sees a risk of this being "too systemic for a world that you want to feel immersed in," Associate Game Director Will Kennedy didn't think so, explaining that everything is "handcrafted" with a purpose.
"We've got 1000 handcrafted [non-player characters] NPCs, over 1000 handcrafted NPCs that you can interact with," Kennedy said. "We put a lot of time, dedication into thinking about all of these different systems that we have in the game, and that handcrafted part of something that's actually really beneficial in terms of the way you're talking about, because we have a game design team and other teams that care deeply about what we're building, and they can really grab hold of the work that's being done and apply that craft.
"Our game design team [made] sure that that [every] NPC made sense. It takes a lot of work to balance all of the systems, but that's part of the challenge that we've been relishing, and we think the game over the past half an hour that I've shown you really stands on its own two feet and shows how well everything you've been doing with that."
Fable has been in development for a very long time, but will officially launch on February 23, 2027, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, Series S, and PC.
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