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Over the past 10 years, we've seen a lot of great Xbox games ship on Series X and Series S (amongst other platforms) despite their long development cycles, but others have unfortunately fallen by the wayside along the way.
We're talking games like Everwild and Perfect Dark — projects that clearly had a lot of potential behind them, but for whatever reason were ultimately canned by Microsoft. The same thing could have happened with Fable considering it was announced all the way back in 2020, but it's finally almost ready to launch at the start of 2027.
Speaking to The Guardian recently, Playground Games co-founder and Fable game director Ralph Fulton suggested that Fable has survived so long because "so many people within Xbox view Fable as vital to the DNA of the platform".
“I genuinely think Fable is an important game. What has protected us over a long development cycle is that so many people within Xbox view Fable as vital to the DNA of the platform,” Fulton says. “I would go a step further and say it’s important to video games as a whole. It offers a combination of elements that simply doesn’t exist anywhere else.”
Of course, it helps that Playground Games has a phenomenal track record when it comes to the Forza Horizon series as well, although that's certainly no guarantee of success - just look at what happened with Everwild and Rare.
And let's not forget that although Fable was announced in 2020, the contract was apparently signed for it in 2017, meaning it'll be launching a decade after the project began. That's a seriously long development cycle that Microsoft has probably been nervous about over the years, but the game is still alive and kicking 10 years later.
Based on what we've seen so far, we reckon that faith in Fable is going to pay off as well. The game looks fantastic and will surely appeal to fans both new and old, tapping into a potentially massive audience that similar games such as Hogwarts Legacy have managed to attain over the years. In any case, we'll find out for sure in just a few months' time.