Fable has 1,000 'handcrafted' NPCs, and you can apparently marry every single one of them

A Fable character looking dandy — (Image credit: Playground Games)

Fable developer Playground Games seems to have its priorities in order: its reimagining of fantasy world Albion is full of beautiful scenery, the tone remains goofy, and there are choices to make that leave an impact on the people around you. More important than all that, though, is that Albion's citizens are each unique, and you can woo every single one of them.

"We maybe once thought we could procedurally generate them," Playground founder Ralph Fulton told IGN in an interview. But that idea quickly went out the window as the Fable team decided they "wanted to craft every one of these NPCs from their name, to their appearance, to their personality traits, to [their] moral worldview … to where they work and where they live and what their family unit is."

Albion being populated by 1,000 distinct characters is clearly a big talking point for the new Fable, but I got a chuckle out of Fulton bringing up—unprompted!—that you can put a ring on all of them, too.

Despite my cheeky polygamy line above, it's unclear if Fable supports multiple simultaneous marriages, or if it in fact requires you to get divorced if you become smitten with chaotic good Greg the baker down the block after starting a family with Teresa the stable hand. Fulton could even mean you'd have to have 1,000 distinct Fable save files to experience marital bliss with all of its NPCs, which would, indeed, be "a bit of work."

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Wes has been covering games and hardware for more than 10 years, first at tech sites like The Wirecutter and Tested before joining the PC Gamer team in 2014. Wes plays a little bit of everything, but he'll always jump at the chance to cover emulation and Japanese games.

When he's not obsessively optimizing and re-optimizing a tangle of conveyor belts in Satisfactory (it's really becoming a problem), he's probably playing a 20-year-old Final Fantasy or some opaque ASCII roguelike. With a focus on writing and editing features, he seeks out personal stories and in-depth histories from the corners of PC gaming and its niche communities. 50% pizza by volume (deep dish, to be specific).

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