Film

This Xbox Game Pass Day One Game Has GOTY Written All Over It

31 January 2026

After being in development for nearly a decade, Fable is scheduled to release later this year, and if Playground Games can deliver on the scope it’s promising, the day-one Xbox Game Pass addition may be a Game of the Year contender. Game of the Year awards are passed out left and right, but because of its immense viewership every year, The Game Awards and its large panel of media judges have become the de facto most prestigious iteration. Despite 12 opportunities to claim GOTY, Xbox has never done so.

Up until the Xbox Developer Direct on January 22, the Fable reboot was something of a mystery. Forza Horizon developer Playground has taken the reins after Microsoft closed original creator Lionhead Studios in 2016, and there has been some trepidation regarding the new steward’s ability to make an open-world fantasy RPG. Fable‘s gameplay overview at the Dev Direct managed to impress, however, and it’s starting to look like Xbox Game Studios may bring home its first GOTY from The Game Awards.

Everything About Fable Looks Incredible

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This detailed look at Fable has caused it to shoot up my personal most-anticipated list, and has assuaged any concerns I had of the game potentially straying from the original trilogy’s tone. Beyond my keen interest, though, Fable simply looks impressive. The detailed lives of its NPCs seem to expand massively on one of the series’ core attractions, a sort of medieval fantasy life and town simulator that constantly ran in parallel to its main narrative.

After RPGs grew larger throughout the 2010s, the pendulum is starting to swing the other way now, as players want more interactivity and depth, rather than nameless, effectively faceless crowds meandering about. The original Fable games always felt genuine in making your character a part of the world, since you had so much influence on townsfolk and Bowerstone itself. It’s incredibly refreshing to see the new Fable‘s first major gameplay showcase harp on such roleplaying elements, rather than trying to dazzle with absurd square mileage.

You can get married, start a family, help or antagonize beggars on the side of the road, become a landlord, make decisions that impact the housing market, and more. Fable has always been a satirical exploration of, well, fables – and their narrative conventions. Its protagonists are known generically as heroes even in-universe, and such systems, with each NPC resultantly having an opinion of your character, helps bring out the absurdity the series is going for.

The depth of its combat and the quality of its story and character writing remains to be seen, but Fable‘s big unveiling at the Developer Direct makes an incredibly strong first impression of its gameplay. We’ve seen how a reactive world can be a GOTY signifier with Baldur’s Gate 3‘s win in 2023, and Fable seems well on its way to courting a similar reception.

Could Xbox Finally Bag GOTY?

The cruel irony for Microsoft is that two of its studios secured a Game of the Year win before they were acquired and brought into the Xbox Game Studios fold: Blizzard for Overwatch in 2016, and Activision as the publisher of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice in 2019. In comparison to the other members of the big three, PlayStation has won thrice, for God of War (2018), The Last of Us Part 2, and Astro Bot, and Nintendo took the top spot with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild.

Broadly speaking, blockbuster triple-A fantasy games tend to do well at The Game Awards. Dragon Age: Inquisition, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Breath of the Wild, God of War, Sekiro, Elden Ring, and Baldur’s Gate 3 all won GOTY. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is also fantasy, of course, but it is an outlier in that it came from a much smaller, lesser known studio. Just based on the kinds of games that tend to do well in TGA voting, Fable seems to have a fairly strong resume.

That does, however, bring us to the elephant in the room regarding these kinds of premature GOTY discussions. Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to release on November 19, 2026. This is right around the time of TGA’s eligibility cutoff each year, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s set for later than the 19th simply to accommodate GTA 6. It’s one of the most-anticipated games of all time, and is expected to be cutting edge as far as open-world games go, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s guaranteed a win.

Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption 2 lost to God of War in 2018; Grand Theft Auto 5 won GOTY at TGA’s predecessor, the Spike Video Game Awards (known as VGX for its final 2013 iteration).

It’s obviously too early to say anything definitively, but Fable has its stars aligning for a potential Game of the Year run. Xbox arguably needs the prestige that comes with such an award; the brand has had a rough year with hardware sales cratering and Game Pass’s price increase being met with ire. There are sure to be some surprising hits in 2026, though, so there’s no telling yet if Fable really will be in the running, but right now, it looks like a potential GOTY candidate is coming to Xbox Game Pass on day one.