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:
“Our morality system is more about shades of gray. It’s more about the subjectivity of morality that honestly we see in the world today. 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.”
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.
“One, I guess it’s about that high level principle I was talking about, that there is no objective good and evil. And the original games were predicated on there being an objective good and an objective evil, and you were somewhere along that scale, and that’s what determined how your appearance changed.
“But for us, that doesn’t really work. 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. So, that’s one reason that it didn’t work.”
Fulton also explains that moral judgement comes from society rather than from, like, some sort of cosmic force that makes your hair silver and your teeth pearly white when you’re nice to people. This means that your rep’s location-based, and since they haven’t invented social media in Albion yet? If you go to a new place, you can make a new you.
“You build [a] reputation based on the settlement, the town, the city that you’re in, the part of the world that you’re in. But 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.
“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.
