Fable is set to use mockumentary interviews with its characters, similar to The Office, to help tell its fantastical story.
After being dormant for 16 years, the Fable series is finally making its grand return in 2026. After being announced in 2020, new developer Playground Games, best known for the Forza Horizon series, confirmed in the January Xbox Developer Direct that the reboot will arrive sometime in the autumn.
The long-awaited RPG brings a number of features that fans have come to expect, from deep character customization to a morality system and romance options.
It also retains the quirky Britishness that was hard to ignore in the original games, and Game Director Ralph Fulton has revealed iconic British comedies have had a massive influence on the project. In an interview with Xbox Wire, he namedropped the likes of Peep Show and The IT Crowd, but The Office appears to be the biggest touchstone.
“Not just that IP, but a lot of the techniques and the devices that it’s popularised, you know,” he said. “It’s that really grounded, awkward style of humour which really appeals to us.
Fable reboot to use mockumentary interviews in its story
Nearly all of the trailers we’ve seen so far have included sections where a character talks directly into the camera as if they’re being interviewed.
It’s the same technique used by many mockumentary films and TV shows, including The Office, the UK version of which was created by Ricky Gervais in 2001, before the US adaptation became a huge hit. But it turns out this isn’t just a creative way of framing a trailer; it will actually appear throughout Fable.
“The other cool thing about The Office is something we’ve kind of nicked. You’ve maybe seen in our trailers that we have a sort of mockumentary interview style,” Fulton continued. “I think a lot of people assume we just did that for those trailers, but it’s actually a device we use throughout the game.”
He went on to explain that by having its characters talk straight into the camera, the team can “neatly tell a joke or drop a little bit of character detail” that might feel “clunky” if it were crammed into a normal cut scene, and he’s “never seen it in games before.”
This won’t be the only nod to classic sitcoms, either, as Fulton also revealed that some of the actors who brought these shows to life will be part of the voice cast. We already know about The IT Crowd’s Richard Ayoade, who plays “vegetable enthusiast,” Dave, and the likes of Matt King from Peep Show.
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