I feel like the whole Fable situation with the trailer getting a pretty poor reception (22k likes and 15k dislikes as of now), was pretty much just a perfect storm of misunderstanding/misremembering by the fans and a few bad decisions on Playground's part.
I know that alot of people are angry and saying that Fable went woke, but I think that is being overblown. Yes, the character they designed for the trailer was relatively plain looking (some are saying she is ugly, but she isn't really ugly, just plain), but I highly doubt that Playground would give us a set female character and then make her that plain, Playground has character creation in Forza Horizon (albeit fairly limited), so I don't see why they wouldn't expand upon their character creator and give us more in-depth creation in Fable. It's also worth noting that the concept art that Playground released for Fable had a more attractive woman in it, so I really don't think they gave us a set-in-stone plain female character personally, we should be able to create our own female character and make her however plain, ugly, or beautiful we want, just like most games with character creators. Meanwhile, some are saying that a black man and/or a person wearing glasses doesn't belong in a medieval British setting, and while those arguments do have some merit in a historical context, Fable was never designed to be an accurate historical portrayal of medieval Britain, this decision by Playground doesn't mean that Fable went woke, the original Fable trilogy had both black characters (such as Thunder and Whisper) and characters who wore glasses, so if a black character or glasses in a medieval setting is all it takes to consider a game to be woke, then Fable was always woke. Alot of the backlash is coming from those 2 criticisms which are both largely based on misunderstanding of the situation and misremembering of the original games based on how long it has been since most people have played the originals.
However, I do think Playground made some mistakes on their part. For starters, they likely could have foreseen that the female character design they chose for that trailer would create backlash in 2023 when so many in the gaming community already feel like there is a conscious effort by western game developers in recent years to make female game characters less attractive than they were in the past. Secondly, they probably should have known that such a radical change in character art design from the original games, going from a more exaggerated, cartoony look to a more realistic look, wouldn't go over very well with much of the fanbase. Thirdly, they could have put a few more bits of actual behind the shoulder camera combat gameplay into the trailer instead of just the single like 2 second scene with the fireball spell, if more people had realized they were looking at actual in-game graphics instead of just in-engine cutscenes, then Playground would have faced less criticism about a lack of development progress 3 years after the announcement trailer. Lastly, while eyeglasses existing in the years where Fable is set is consistent with both history and the earlier games having characters with eyeglasses, the actual design of the eyeglasses they chose did look far too modern for a medieval setting, while they were made of wood in the trailer, the actual style and shape is consistent with modern black plastic glasses frames.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 14 June 2023
