Gaming: New Fable's Morality System Will Live In 'shades Of Gray', Which Is...

Everyone always calls me chicken chaser. Nobody asks why I chase chickens.

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 chan

Source: PC Gamer