Fable 3 Console
Hennie Jaffe
Fable 4, also currently just known as Fable, is a reboot of a beloved trilogy of fantasy action role-playing games (RPGs) originally developed by Lionhead Studios. However, the series is in the process of being revived under its new stewards Playground Games.
The Fable series is renowned for two things: enabling the player to craft exactly the kind of character they want and side-splitting dark humor. For some, the original trilogy stands among the best RPGs ever made, offering an emphasis on player agency that rivals some of the best single-player games. Fortunately, if Fable 4's latest trailer is anything to go by, it looks as though we can expect the latter in spades. While we've not seen any reveals as to the upcoming game's mechanics, the latest trailer did show off some stellar writing, as well as a hilarious performance from British actor Matt King.
That said, we do know that Fable 4 will be an RPG. It also seems likely that it will follow the mold of its predecessors, offering real-time action with plenty of quests to complete and places to explore. Whether we'll see the return of Fable's iconic morality system remains to be seen, but I can't be alone in wanting to play a fantasy protagonist with a stonking pair of devil horns like you could in the original trilogy, right? Read on to find out everything we know about Fable.
Fable 4 will be released for Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, and PC sometime in 2025, where it will be available on Xbox Game Pass from day one. It's unknown if it'll arrive on Xbox One consoles, but it seems unlikely.
This Xbox exclusivity makes it exceedingly unlikely that Fable 4 will arrive on a PlayStation console. We'll have to wait until the game is shown again, as currently, we have no information on when it's expected to come out.
The latest trailer for Fable was released at the Xbox Games Showcase event that aired on June 9, 2024. It was another cinematic trailer, showing Peep Show actor Matt King playing a retired hero. It was a fun trailer but once again offered a distinct lack of concrete information about the wider plot or game mechanics. It did reveal that Fable will be arriving at some point in 2025. You can check it out below:
Right now, only three Fable trailers have been released: the latest one, the world premiere announcement trailer, and the one shown off at Xbox Games Showcase 2023. While we wait for more, you can head to the official Xbox YouTube account to keep an eye out for new info.
While we've yet to receive any concrete details about Fable's game mechanics, there were some glimpses of what we might be able to expect in the latest trailer. Sword combat was shown, with a warrior depicted in battle with a bandit before performing a sort of finishing move, throwing them to the ground.
Another shot of gameplay showed the main character throwing a fire bomb at a group of enemies, suggesting that these sorts of items might also be making a return. Unfortunately, this is all we've seen so far, alongside some in-engine cinematics.
That said, Aaron Greenberg, general manager of Xbox Games Marketing at Microsoft, did make it clear after the reveal that "it's obviously going to be a role-playing game" (via GamesRadar). Though this gives us little to go on in terms of specifics, it confirms that Fable 4 will likely place an emphasis on storytelling, character customization, and player agency, much like its predecessors.
We don't yet know much about the Fable 4 main character, but there are a few details we can glean from the teasers we've seen so far. First, it seems likely that the main character will be a 'hero' of some kind. This could potentially spell a connection to The Guild of Heroes - a powerful organization of do-gooders who feature in the original Fable (2004).
It also seems likely that our hero will have to do battle with Richard Ayoade's giant at some point. The Fable franchise is no stranger to including celebrated actors and comedians. Fable 3 famously included Monty Python veteran John Cleese, comedian Stephen Fry, and actor Simon Pegg. The inclusion of Ayoade in Fable 4 beyond just a cameo in the trailer seems likely, given this tradition.
While it hasn't been confirmed, it also seems probable that our main character will also be highly customizable. The Fable games have always been big on letting you tweak your character physically and cosmetically and it would be odd for Fable 4 to not continue the trend. We might also see the return of appearance changes based on character morality, too. In the original trilogy, evil choices would net you devil horns and sinister-looking eyes while good choices would get you a halo and angel wings. We imagine Fable 4 will iterate on these systems in some way, though we're not sure quite what's in store at this stage.
Fable is coming out in 2025
Thanks to a new showing at the latest Xbox Showcase event, we know that Fable will be released in 2025. A new trailer was revealed as well, featuring Peep Show's Matt King.
Xbox re-reveals Fable
Fable was finally re-revealed during the Xbox Games Showcase 2023 event. Not much was shown, but it's clear that the game now has a strong tonal direction and comedic vibe to it. Hopefully, the next time we see the game, we'll get a look at the game mechanics as well as what to expect from the story.
I like F# and somewhat dislike vanilla JavaScript. When I found out that you can write front-end using F#, I was perplexed. That's how I met Fable - a compiler which translates F# into JavaScript via Babel. There are already a plethora of different languages which can be converted into JavaScript. So, why choosing F# specifically?
This is not a tutorial about F#, so I want to suggest checking out the awesome fsharpforfunandprofit and you can decide for youself. But for me personally, F# is a very powerful, pragmatic, functional language which allows to write succinct, statically typed (bullet-proof!) code without any semantic noise.
I want to write front-end with statically-typed language. Today, TypeScript is standard de-facto if you want to write 'JavaScript-with-types'. But still, you must understand what exactly TypeScript brings to the table. You must be prepared mentally. If you're too accustomed to type-less (dynamic) code, migration to TypeScript will be painful. You must embrace the types and learn how to use them otherwise you will be writing the same old JavaScript.
For me, Fable was a rough start. It's a fresh technology and as F# is not that widespread in the wild (in comparison to JavaScript, TypeScript), information about Fable is scarce. The official example projects are not easy to comprehend when you just want to start simple. They usually involve some tinkering around.
In order to bootstrap a project you could use an official guide, but personally I'm not using that approach much. You will be redirected to fable2-sample repository, but it's not that convenient to navigate inside (as for my taste). There are a bunch of projects with different setup and it's hard to find a really 'empty' project. Even 'minimal' one is not that 'minimal' and contains Fable.React, Fable.Elmish.React dependencies. For a person who just want to start, it could be overwhelming.
In dotnet world we use dotnet new commands to start new projects. I would like to do the same with Fable, but there are no official templates. That's why I created templates project where you just type dotnet new fable-empty and an empty project without redundant dependencies is created.
In order for Fable to interop with JavaScript eco-system, we must ensure that all needed libraries are installed with npm. For such a simple example, we won't use many dependencies, just the core ones in order to start the dev server and run Fable compiler.
Very basic webpack config. All we need to know right now is that content will be served from ./public folder (must have index.html created there), server will be listening to port 8080 and the bundle.js (an app) will be generated in ./public folder.
In order to utilize the full power of Fable and F# we need to write some interop code to glue F# and JavaScript together. Our minimum job is to understand how to map JavaScript types to F# ones. We also can use some helpers in the form of TypeScript type definition files, more on that later.
In this tutorial we'll implement window.alert() (which is absent from Fable.Core), Math.random() (which exists in Fable.Core, but we'll implement it nonetheless and I'll show additionally how you can find what is implemented by default and what's not), a little bit of DOM API and p5.js lib.
Let's start with window.alert(). Firstly, we need to understand what we try to implement here. Is this a JavaScript library, a React component (heavily used in real Fable apps, but we won't touch it here) or maybe something global?
window is a global object in JavaScript. Next thing, what is alert() call actually do? Does it accept parameters? These questions are usually answered by comprehensive documentation. Let's open it and see how it can help. From docs, we see that alert function accepts one optional parameter of type string.
Pretty easy, but I want to point out one important thing. Have you noticed that we wrote Math and not math where jsNative is used? Thats's because by importing it like that you must be sure that F# name is exactly the same as a JavaScript one. JavaScript API is Math.random(), not math.random().
If you want to work with DOM you don't need to recreate all the bindings from scratch, there is an official library! It's called Fable.Browser.Dom. Also, there are all other sorts of default stuff implemented in this official repository.
There are several approaches which we can take here. We can open node_modules/p5/lib/p5.js and try to decipher functions and types, but I personally don't recommend to do it (only if you have no other choice) if you have access to the source code. Because what's stored in node_modules could be packed/abridged/minified version of the library.
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