With this year's Fable reboot, the series is going truly open world with the backing of Forza Horizon specialists Playground Games, and that leads to questions about the size of the world and how it compares to other genre examples. In a new interview, Playground's Ralph Fulton has talked about just that - and how it all compares to the studio's premiere racing series.
In a chat with IGN, Fulton was asked about how big the world is and how it compares to FH. Here's what the Playground dev had to say:
"I'm used to fielding that question from my time on the other game. And the comparison is useful actually because it probably won't surprise you to know that in terms of just square miles, it's smaller than an Horizon world. Horizon worlds are designed to be experienced at 250 miles per hour. So, you cover the distance far faster in those games than you do in ours. In our game, you move at the speed of a horse at most."
Fulton went on to add "we had to build far, far more detail into it than we necessarily have to in a Horizon game", before going on to tease just how much detail will be present in 2026's Fable - and giving us a fun little titbit on the team's transition from open-world racer to RPG.
"Case in point, every building in the game you can go inside. So, every building needs an interior because you could rob it if you wanted, or you could buy it and live there with your family or with one of your families. So, I guess the focus just got pulled right in and we ended up building out much more rich detail at ground level,
One of the first things we did was we got our Fable character running around in Surfers Paradise from Forza Horizon 3, and it took an eternity to get anywhere. And I think that if we hadn't realized already, that was the moment it dawned on us like, 'Okay, we're going to have to play with some of our metrics here.'"
This is all sounding pretty good, and we're totally down with Playground focusing on a dense Fable world rather than something that has to hit a certain size quota. The long and short of it is that Fable will feature a smaller world than Forza Horizon 6, but one with much more granular detail due to the nature of its fantasy RPG.