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The Fable reboot’s whimsical fantasy world is full of 1,000 NPCs who are each handmade by the developers at Playground Games, but that’s not always how the new feature was handled. Originally, the devs randomized everything about the Living Population and, as you can imagine, that made much less sense.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ about the series’ incoming comeback, game director Ralph Fulton delved a bit deeper into Fable’s Living Population – the villagers and business owners and bums and criminals and soon-to-be partners who make up the game’s world, and who can have wildly different personalities and needs.
“We individually picked everything about every NPC to make it into an NPC that you could read, that made sense top to bottom,” Fulton explains. We’ve seen how that plays out, too. Some NPCs might be attracted to your fat pockets if you get rich enough, while others might turn their nose up and call you a snob.
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“We originally had a tool that would randomize it, and just ‘roll’ an NPC, and that would have been a massive labour-saving device,” Fulton goes on, explaining that the studio would have saved itself “so much time” if the devs had chosen to shuffle the 1,000 NPCs. “What we found was, they just didn’t make as much sense.”
Randomizing the Living Population would often lead to inconsistencies in how an NPC looked and acted. Imagine a vegan butcher or a hairdresser with an unflattering hairdo. Instead, the handmade approach let Playground Games build up communities that run on some amount real-world logic, plus a little fairytale charm. It should make marriage, divorce, and situationships all the more interesting.