Playground Games is doing a lot to adapt classic Fable in modern ways with its upcoming reboot, but that doesn’t mean the Forza Horizon maker is being completely faithful. Classic Fable’s binary good and evil morality has been hugely overhauled, for instance, partly to represent how “morality exists in the world that we live in today.”
“We talked about how it kind of felt like some games had moved on in a more sophisticated way to discuss morality,” studio general manager Ralph Fulton told GamesRadar+ in a recent interview. “And certainly, when we looked at the world, there’s no objective good, there’s no objective evil. I think there’s nothing you could do in the world that would unite everybody in the belief that it was good or evil, right? It’s entirely subjective, and I think that’s also really interesting. It’s certainly interesting as a game system, and that’s kind of what we’ve pursued.”
RPGs in general have almost entirely moved away from good and evil binaries, too. Compare Mass Effect’s morality, which existed along a linear bar that would go up and down, to Dragon Age: Inquisition’s, where decisions more so affect how individual people and factions feel about you.
“We’ve pursued a much more shades of gray approach to morality, where the things you do are the things you do, and if you do them enough, or if enough people see you doing them, you’ll gain a reputation in that particular settlement, that particular area of the world, for doing that thing,” Fulton explained.
The Playground Games lead said the way the new Fable approaches things is “an approximation in a game system,” sure, but it still “is more probably representative of how morality exists in the world that we live in today.”
The Fable reboot’s system also allows you to craft “different combinations” of reputations, which can apparently lead to unexpected, more granular reactions from the people of Albion, who will loudly heckle or praise you in public. “In that classic Fable way, they act as this kind of Greek chorus and tell you exactly what they think about the things that you’ve done,” Fulton added. “And I think that is classically Fable, and I think the fact that it works in this maybe more nuanced morality system is a really great thing in our game.”
Fable head says “we can’t try to make a Lionhead game,” and the RPG reboot isn’t fantasy either: “We all know what fantasy is – it’s The Witcher, it’s Skyrim, it’s Lord of the Rings”
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