Morality morphing was a big deal in the Fable games of old. Your character would, famously, actually change appearance to match how good or evil they were. Do a lot of murders and you’d grow horns and find yourself surrounded by flies. Help people out (or do a lot of murders but also donate loads of money to the church) and you’d get a halo. Just like real life.
But it won’t be a feature of Playground Games’ upcoming Fable reboot and, at a recent demo at Summer Game Fest, associate game directors Craig Littler and William Kennedy chatted about why.
“Our take on morality: it’s updated, it’s modern, it’s nuanced and complex,” said Kennedy. “Every NPC has their own moral lens to judge you with.” In other words, Fable is postmodern now, and the denizens of Albion have jettisonned your archaic notions of absolute morality in favour of their own boutique definitions.
“If you think about that,” continues Kennedy, “you might have a set of reputations, but different NPCs think about them differently, so how can you have a single visual representation of that? It wouldn’t really work”.
Kennedy’s not saying anything markedly different than what Playground co-founder Ralph Fulton has said before, though this is the first time I’ve seen Playground say it’s going for something “updated” and “modern” with its take on Fable.
It’s an interesting pivot. It might be nearly two decades since Fable 3, but the trailers we’ve seen thus far from Fable—pretty zany and heavy on Richard Ayoade—suggested to me it was going for a similar larger-than-life and comedic tone as the original games. Trying to do real morality on top of that feels discordant to me, but hey, it’s not like I’ve played the game. Maybe it’ll all make sense when it’s out.
Anyway, Playground is committed to its vision. “There isn’t a single scale of good versus evil, that’s just not compatible with our vision for Fable,” said Littler. “The reason that’s important is, when I go to every new settlement, it’s really a blank canvas for me to craft a new identity for my hero, so I can have a completely different experience in every single one I go to. If I turned up with horns, it would be pretty clear who I was as soon as I walked into a settlement.”
In other words, remember how you reinvented yourself when you went to university? Fable 4 is about that. I’m gonna try out being a goth.
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