Between capturing the spirit of the original and introducing its own unique morality system – not to mention 1,000 handcrafted NPCs that you can mess with – Playground Games’ Fable is shaping up into something else. Unfortunately, it won’t feature a key aspect of the original trilogy that reflected your good or evil nature depending on various actions: Character morphing.
“That sort of character morphing feature, obviously a really central part of the original games. It’s not in ours. And I’ll tell you why,” said studio founder and game director Ralph Fulton to IGN in a new interview.
“One, I guess it’s about that high-level principle I was talking about, that there is no objective good and evil. And the original games were predicated on there being an objective good and an objective evil, and you were somewhere along that scale, and that’s what determined how your appearance changed.”
However, such an approach doesn’t really gel with Fable’s new morality system, where you’re a complete saint (or unbridled jerk). “For us, that doesn’t really work. The way I’ve described our morality system working, you’re never that thing, absolutely. You’re different things to different people based on what they like or what they choose to value. So, that’s one reason that it didn’t work.”
Another reason is due to how reputation works. Becoming a Chicken Chaser in one settlement is one thing, but that doesn’t apply when entering a new town or city. “When you go to a new place, a place you’ve never been to before, you walk in without any reputation, and thus nobody knows what to think about you,” continued Fulton. “And you can almost, through your behavior, through your choices, form completely different reputations, a completely different identity, if you like, in that place from the place that you were last time. And you can do that across all the locations in the game.”
Since character morphing relies on previous actions affecting your character, building a good or evil profile, it simply doesn’t work with this approach, which Fulton believes is “more important.” “And honestly, that ability to be completely in control of your identity and thus what people think of you felt more important to us than that legacy feature. So, it worked great in those games. It didn’t seem to fit in ours, so we don’t have it.”
Of course, you don’t need horns to really let loose with your evil tendencies in the new Fable, which allows for buying up people’s houses and then evicting them. Similarly, spreading the word about your incredible reputation can be done through town criers (and a hefty helping of coin).
Your actions will still define you, and whatever other versions of yourself that you want to portray, so step carefully when Fable launches this Fall for Xbox Series X/S, PS5, and PC. As for why Playground pursued a reboot or “new beginning,” as they call it, instead of Fable 4, head here.
