The new Fable's morality system will live in 'shades of gray', which is a huge shift for a series where being too mean made literal devil horns grow out of your head

An evil character in Fable with horns spiking out of their head. — (Image credit: Lionhead Studios)

Videogames used to be simple, dangit. If you got too many good points, you'd have a halo above your head and everyone would tell you how much of a cool good guy you were. If you had too many bad points, you'd grow literal devil horns and be stinky and mean and wear black and red armour. Well, at least that's how it was in Fable (the old one), but things are changing for Fable (the new one).

Speaking to IGN about the upcoming reboot, Playground's founder and general manager Ralph Fulton explained the studio's decision to drop alignment entirely in favour of a reputation system:

I would argue that the idea there's no objective evil in the world is maybe a bit much—there's plenty of ways we're all horrible to each other that aren't really up for interpretation. But I'm willing to be charitable here and say Fulton just means that things are a smidge more complicated than "bad points make you bad" which, fair enough. That's something I agree with, and I prefer when moral choices are actually about trying to thread the needle in a terrible situation.

Instead, the new Fable will have a reputation system "which allows you to build reputations based on the things you do within Albion", which should lead to a situation where the game's NPCs "react to [you] based on the individual, almost unique worldview that they each have. And I think that's probably a more nuanced view of morality, but it's super interesting and it's also just packed with potential in gameplay terms."

This does mean that what Fulton calls the "morphing" feature—the horns or halo thing—won't be present in the new Fable. "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.

"You can almost, through your behavior, through your choices, form completely different reputations, a completely different identity … And you can do that across all the locations in the game." Which, he wisely points out, would be hard "if you walked in with horns and a trident." I'd quibble and say it depends on the party you're going to, but—yeah, fair enough.

Harvey's history with games started when he first begged his parents for a World of Warcraft subscription aged 12, though he's since been cursed with Final Fantasy 14-brain and a huge crush on G'raha Tia. He made his start as a freelancer, writing for websites like Techradar, The Escapist, Dicebreaker, The Gamer, Into the Spine—and of course, PC Gamer. He'll sink his teeth into anything that looks interesting, though he has a soft spot for RPGs, soulslikes, roguelikes, deckbuilders, MMOs, and weird indie titles. He also plays a shelf load of TTRPGs in his offline time. Don't ask him what his favourite system is, he has too many.

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