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Comedy TV Classics Inspire Fable PS5 with Interview Cutscenes

Ever since the 2004 original released on the first Xbox, the Fable series has always embraced British comedy. So, as the franchise transfers hands from Lionhead Studios to Playground Games, that legacy continues.

In the trailers released prior to the announcement that Fable is coming to PS5, footage showed Richard Ayoade giving a piece to camera and commentary over gameplay and cutscenes. This is a filmmaking technique called mockumentary interviewing, and the clip wasn’t just produced for the trailer; these scenes are actually in the game.

You can see the technique in the trailer from June 2023 below:

Speaking to Xbox Wire, the founder and general manager at Playground Games, Ralph Fulton, revealed the studio has been inspired by comedy TV classics like The Office, Peep Show, and The IT Crowd as it adds a certain style of humour to the upcoming game.

“We were inspired by the incredibly rich variety of British comedies that have been around over the last 20 years, like Peep Show, The IT Crowd and so many others,” said Fulton. “We started with The Office, which again started out as quintessentially British, but also travels really, really well.”

This inspiration extends to the kind of mockumentary interviews you’d see in The Office, which is a device that’ll also be used in Fable. “I’ve never seen it in games before,” added Fulton. “But it allows you a way to really neatly tell a joke or drop a little bit of character detail in a way that would feel really clunky in a dialogue, but suddenly feels entirely natural when you do it to ‘camera’.”

In other words, we need Matt Berry in this game.

Fable is scheduled to launch on PS5 alongside Xbox Series X|S and PC in Autumn 2026. Are you excited to see this kind of interviewing technique be used in a game? Let us know in the comments below.

[source news.xbox.com]