Playground Games has confirmed that its Fable reboot will drop the series’ classic feature where player characters physically change based on moral choices.
The studio’s founder and general manager, Ralph Fulton, explained to IGN that while morality-based character morphing was central to the original games, the system doesn’t fit with how the reboot handles player choice and reputation.
Why Playground Games is dropping a popular feature
“That sort of character morphing feature, obviously a really central part of the original games. It’s not in ours,” Fulton told the site, explaining that the original system relied on a rigid scale of good and evil that applied to the entire game world.
“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.”
He continued to explain how each town or city will serve as a blank slate upon first visit, where NPCs won’t have preconceptions of who the player character is.
“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.” Visible signs of morality, like walking into a bar with “horns and a trident,” would undermine that system, Fulton said.
As a result, Playground Games decided that giving players control over how they are perceived in each region mattered more than preserving the legacy feature.
“It worked great in those games. It didn’t seem to fit in ours, so we don’t have it.”
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