Microsoft has confirmed that Fable has been delayed until 2026, giving developer Playground Games more time for their revival of this classic RPG series.
The news came from Head of Xbox Game Studios Craig Duncan – formerly the Rare Studio Lead until being promoted last year – who was speaking on the latest official Xbox podcast.
“We previously announced the date for Fable as 2025, we are actually going to give Fable more time and it’s going to ship in 2026 now,” he said. “While I know that’s not maybe the news people want to hear, what I want to assure people of is that it’s definitely worth the wait, and I have unequivocal confidence in the Playground team.”
Duncan also shared some new snippets of footage, beyond what was previously shown in the trailer last year, showing a snippet of combat against a werewolf, goblins, bandits in the city, and a cutscene with some cooked eggs and a bear trap. Nothing too deep, but little snippets to demonstrate the continued quality of the visuals that Playground are cooking up.
“Just think of the visuals of what you expect of Playground Games,” he said, “plus amazing gameplay, British humour, Playground’s version of Albion inspired by what’s gone before with the franchise, but their take in quite frankly the most beautifully realised version of Albion you’ve ever seen.
“So really excited about the plans and really excited about the future and I want the community to understand that we do these things for the best of the games and the teams, and ultimately that results in the best games.”
This time will naturally be used to refine and polish the game further, but there’s probably some broader strategic planning here. It’s potentially a similar situation to the release of Avowed. That game was set for a late 2024 launch, but with Microsoft seeing that the end of last year was (at the time) packed with other big game launches, they chose to bounce it back to early 2025 to try and find it a little more breathing room.
For Fable, the elephant in the room is GTA 6. While Rockstar’s games have traditionally been prone to get a big delay, Take Two has repeatedly stated that it’s on target for the end of 2025. Other publishers are sensibly wary of going up against what is inevitably going to be the biggest game of the decade, so we’ve already seen EA announce the next Battlefield with a flexible release window to try and dodge GTA. It makes sense for Microsoft to do the same, even though Fable is in a completely different genre.
Fable is coming to Xbox Series X|S and PC, at the moment. Who knows if it’ll pop up elsewhere later down the line. Probably will, though.
Source: Xbox Podcast
