Playground Games confirms Fable's main quest runs about 20 hours
Xbox and Playground Games detail the reboot's length, with side content and life-sim elements adding potentially unlimited extra hours.
What to know
- Playground Games and Xbox confirmed Fable's main story takes about 20 hours to complete, with roughly another 20 hours of side content.
- Life-simulation systems—business management, relationships, home customization—are described as effectively unlimited in playtime.
- The confirmation triggered debate among players over whether shorter, tighter games are preferable to sprawling 80-100 hour open-world titles.
The dispute Whether the confirmed ~40-hour total length signals a well-paced game or an undersized one for its production scope and expected price. · positions read across 91 posts and comments
A shorter, well-paced game is preferable to long, padded open-world titles.
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“Give me a short and tight 15-30 hours that are well paced, backed with a great story/gameplay, and I'm thrilled.”
Any_Pangolin_197 · reddit ↗
The length feels short given the game's scope and price, and may disappoint.
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“Fable games have never been super long. But given the details and work put into this, plus newer day and age, I would have expected longer. I'll be waiting for a good discount.”
Breathe_Of_Aether · reddit ↗
Replayability and depth matter more than raw hour count.
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“I'd rather have a shorter game with more replayability. That's something Fable has always done well at.”
Ahayzo · reddit ↗
Playground Games Developer of the Fable rebootXbox Publisher
The record 14 articles and posts · last 30 days
- summary covers to here · Aug 30, 5:25 PM · 10 pieces above arrived after
What people are saying 24 voices from 1 site · best of 91 · verbatim
- How much extra playtime will the life-sim/open-world elements realistically add beyond the quoted 20+20 hours?
- Will the final retail price match the shorter length players are debating?
- Aug 31
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Knowing absolutely nothing of Fable, I'm rather surprised, given the world they've been showing off. It seemed like it was meant to accomodate a longer experience. Even if the main quest was short, I would have expected more side content. 15-20 hours for that part as well seems very low for the kind of RPG this is promising to be in the videos.
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I dunno about that, although I guess it depends on what scale of time you're talking about. Games overall have gotten much, much longer over the years. I've been gaming since the mid 90s and Elden Ring was the first game where my first playthrough cracked 100 hours, followed a year and a half later by BG3. Both games started to wear on my towards…
- Aug 30
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I like long epic games, crimson desert 40 hours your still in starting area it was great it was epic This fable game you install it on friday and uninstall it on monday Its so weird you guys are getting mad that people wanted a big open world rpg Like i could get your point if this some indie game made in a year 9 years and 300 million i expected…
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Yes the older fable games were shorter. It was also a much different time in gaming. Standards have changed. Technology has advanced. 30-40 hours for an open world rpg game in 2026/2027 is definitely on the short side. That doesn’t mean it won’t be an amazing 30 hours, but it is short. And game devs typically over hype their playtime a bit. For a…
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I can see that. for myself though i could have done with a few more quests. I mean, half the time, was spent waiting for Takamara to call me. I've done two playthroughs, first time i offed myself on the roof. NOT KNOWING that was a thing. Second time i tried getting the 'secret ending but was missing some 'key information' to get there. Might give…
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I felt like Persona 5 was the perfect length. If anything, I'd actually argue it was too short . That's mainly because of the time limit but there was so much in that game I would have loved to do but didn't have the time to do it. And I sometimes felt like I was getting through the dungeons as quickly as possible rather than savouring the…
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I don't see this as an issue in and of itself, but this game has cost Xbox so much that it's hard to see how it got to this point. It does not look like a game costing hundreds of millions of dollars. 8 years doesn't explain such a short main game. That they pushed Turn 10 to change the Forza Tech engine to support this game (which I still think…
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Time is often brought up as a factor, then why did only a quarter of players finish The Witcher 3? Even if someone doesn’t have much time to play, they can still go through the main quest and skip the side quests, yet only a quarter reached the end. With 80–100 hours, the game is full of repetitive content. I’m absolutely sure that in Elden Ring…
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I could go with slightly less side content. Like maybe 10 hours worth, honestly, and I'd have felt it perfect. 30 - 35 hours for all quests would've been more than enough to me, and that obviously doesn't include all optional interactions you'd maybe do with NPCs using their NPC system. Because that's how I treated RE9, really. It was a really…
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Well I seriously doubt the idea was for you to interact and get whatever out of every one of those NPCs in one playthrough. It was likely meant to hang with nice ones if you play a certain type of playthrough, hang with ass holes in another, hang with straight up evil in another, hang with another type, etc. etc. Which is honestly, a good thing…
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As a completionist I tried to finish AC Odyssey when it came out. Not an AC fan at all but love Greek aesthetic so played anyway. Got about 30% of the way through the main story while doing all the side content I could find before I realized I’d played about 50 hours already. I started to get so bored and started feeling much more critical about…
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I just beat God of war 1, 2, 3, and 2018. Never played them before, 1 2 and 3 were roughly 9 to 12 hours (depending on deaths, Hug Your Family and Zeus mostly) 2018 was a casual 25. 20 to 40 hours is honestly perfectly fine for me, I'll be more concerned if the side content isn't engaging. Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk were some notable ones, I…
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I'm wondering what the issue is with the development anymore. It's not the length of the game, but this is 6.5 years in development so far. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle took only 5 years. Shadow of the Tomb Raider only took 3 years. I'm wondering why they have a different length? Is there some game changing mechanic in here?
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Yep, this. Very few games boasting over 50+ hours really make it worth it. Imho, even the "greats" that are lauded today get really boring and tiresome around the 40 hour mark, because you really are just doing the same rote thing over and over by that point. They've long overstayed their welcome. Would much more appreciate an amazing 15 - 20…
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I find that unless the story is tight af and the writers are great anything beyond 60 hours is often a slog and I stop playing. This doesn't bother me one bit and it tracks for Fable which never had long story modes anyways since you were meant to re-play the game multiple times. This one with all the relationship stuff, with every single NPC etc…
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I mean, good. Honestly best news I've heard from a game in awhile. Manageable expectations. It's fine to just have a decent length game again (probably should have more of these than we do the gigantic ones, honestly). If it means the game has solid, varied gameplay for 15 - 20 hours and not a bunch of slightly tweaked repetitive crap spewed all…
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I definitely expected this to be a 100-hour plus adventure but ngl a shorter time is actually pretty appealing. It also helps me to understand how they're gonna make the NPCs as fleshed out as they say they will; there's simply a lot less game than I thought there would be.
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Yeah, if you don't become the landlord for the entire kingdom it doesn't take that long. Most of the fun was just messing around in the world. Doing the jobs, bounty hunting, buying properties, seeing how many simultaneous marriages you could have to farm good points, etc.
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There's evidence that they were going to be used for something but whatever that something was was never actualized. This current play through, I found a small island with a dead bear on an altar and a ship with corpses hung all over it. There really wasn't much else there, except for this massive WTF set up.
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This isn't a Molyneux Fable game though, it's being made by people who grew up playing those games but want to do it better. I say this as somebody who genuinely loved the first two games and thinks quite highly of Peter Molyneux, even though I acknowledge his games often fell short of what he promised. I still think the dog in Fable II had some…
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For real. Half of the time these 80-100 hour or more games are just filled with junk anyway to artificially extend the playtime past anything meaningfully enjoyable. Give me a short and tight 15-30 hours that are well paced, backed with a great story/gameplay, and I'm thrilled. It's not even that I can't do 100 hours, or don't have to time to…
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Huh? Older rpgs werent short. Bg2 was like 100 hours without expansion. Fallout 2 was not much under that either. Neverwinter nights was probably around 100 without expansions to. Final fantasy 7 simmilar. Classic rpgs by no means were short. Most were quite long when you include side quests
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Origins was the last AC game I completed. I think it's the best of the newer AC titles. They got it right the first time and then did what Ubi always feel compelled to do, unnecessary filler and bloat. And Origins wasn't a small title either, there's whole regions the main quest doesn't touch, but they leaned into Witcher 3 style exploration to…
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Yea I don't have a problem with a game being that long, but I'd rather have a shorter game with more replayability. That's something Fable has always done well at. You will probably easily be able to get way more than the 30-40 hour estimate out of it because it's the kind of game that's worth starting over from scratch and actually getting a…