Fable's evil landlords won't grow devil horns, as reboot ditches classic character morphing due to a lack of belief in objective arseholery

The character morphing system which has facilitated many a dickhead protagonist sprout devil horns and red eyes in the classic Fables isn’t in Playground Games reboot, which is set to arrive this autumn. As to why they’ve opted not to bring back the chance to grow a halo or be beset by baldness due to your bastardry, the studio say it’s a matter of opting for more regionally-focused reputation system and aiming to mirror “the subjectivity of morality that honestly we see in the world today”.

Speaking to IGN following a hornless first in-depth look at Fable during last night’s Xbox Developer Direct, Playground founder and general manager Ralph Fulton confirmed that your character’s appearance won’t change in line where their choices indicate their moral compass to be pointing.

In reimagining how morality works for the reboot, Fulton said Playground have leant more into “shades of gray”, while still trying to remain faithful to the spirit of the original games. “It’s more about the subjectivity of morality that honestly we see in the world today,” he explained. “There’s no objective good, there’s no objective evil. You couldn’t get everyone in the world to agree that something is evil or something is good. That just doesn’t happen. That diversity of opinion I think is really clear these days.”

The classic Fables played around with the idea that you could be a cartoonish arch-bastard who slaughters villages and swears at babies just for the hell of it or an arch-paragon who spends every waking hour flitting around helping folks and complimenting their hairdos. In the reboot, Fulton said that “you’re never that thing, absolutely”. That’s not to say you won’t be heckled in the street by Albion’s residents due to your reputation for dickheadedness or saintliness, but the reboot handles this in a fashion that treats different regions or towns as more isolated bastions where you can be viewed differently.

Going to a new locale is designed to offer you a blank slate, with the effects of things you’ve done to piss off folks in other places not colouring how your new neighbours see you. As such, you can be loved in certain areas and reviled in others. “You couldn’t do that if you walked in with horns and a trident,” in Fulton’s estimation. “Your reputation would precede you in that instance. 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.”

While the regional reputation system sounds like it could certainly be plenty of fun in a fashion I’m going to compare to Fallout: New Vegas because I’m a white guy in my mid-twenties and nothing else immediately springs to mind, I do think there might be something lost in ditching the wonderful ridiculousness of the morphing system. Sure, people can’t not notice you’ve got devil horns, but that’s where the fun of developing the ability to convince or trick folks into thinking your horns are just some harmless physical quirk you’ve inherited could come in.

In a similar mould, the game’s showing at the Developer Direct mentioned the consequence of a choice over whether or to kill the giant Richard Ayode you run into early on being that his corpse can end up driving down house prices. My first thought was that it’d be cool if there are things you can do to double down and solve that issue, while inevitably creating others. For example, maybe you covertly manage to have the body’s flesh baked into pies. You then sell these to the villagers, and the house prices go back up. But, you’re left with a settlement of folks who either hate you because they’ve found out what you made them do, or start to develop a bit of a taste for their fellow flesh-haver in a fashion that makes you wonder if you should buy an extra lock for your nearby mansion. The latter consequence could also result in all of the town’s livestock suddenly deciding they like you a bit more.

The way new Fable’s handcrafted world full of named NPCs was presented in this showcase certainly suggests it could still have plenty of those sorts of in-depth interactions regardless of its approach to morality. Though, it’s a bit sad that one of the key elements of classic Fable’s simple fun has taken a backseat in favour of a change which might not fit as neatly into what makes the series stand out from the crowd in the eyes of long-time players.