+34
Fable's take on morality sounds pretty neat—if only it weren't so eager to assure us we can just buy out of it.
For the quickest way to join, simply enter your email below and get access. We will send a confirmation and sign you up to our newsletter to keep you updated on all your gaming news.
Join the club for quick access. Enter your email below and we'll send confirmation, and sign you up to our newsletter. Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Contact me with news and offers from other Future brandsreboot has shown off a lengthy 30 minute gameplay demo touting the word cloud-style reputation system that'll decide whether its 1000+ NPCs laud or heckle you as you traipse through their peasant hamlets. Every character has their own values and every decision you make has consequences! Unless you have enough gold, Playground Games is quick to reassure us, because then you can just pay for a new reputation.
Fable's gameplay demo starts off with a lot of things that I—an RPG and life sim fan with a fondness for systems and strategy—am really liking the sound of. All sorts of actions have an impact on your adjective-based reputation.
Sparing someone's life makes you"merciful" in the eyes of the settlement you're in, and doing so by negotiating makes you"shrewd" while dropping a ton of cash on fancy clothes increases your reputation for being"rich" and firing random arrows in town makes you"reckless.
"Fable soaks up all that info and feeds it back to you in some pretty direct conversation menus. Megan the Merchant,"an ambitious commoner" likes you because of your reputation for being"shrewd" and she thinks you're"savvy.
" Megan is like the translucent colored tech of the early aughts, the way I can see straight into the gears making her tick, but I don't mind the transparency. Systems-driven games are fun because they let meThat cloud of reputation epithets can do all sorts of things, like make a merchant who dislikes you jack up their prices or an employee who hates you blow off their shift, generating no profit for you.
Playground Games reinforces multiple times during the demo how this type of reputation is all about subjectivity, complexity, and shades of grey—quite different from the horns and halo 'good vs evil' system that the original series creator Peter Molyneux What Playground Games also mentioned multiple times during the demo was how you can just bypass the system they've built if you shell out some gold.
"If I don't like my reputations in Silverbrook, I can pay the town crier to change them," Playground says. "I give them gold—a lot of gold—and they spread a new reputation for me. If you're rich enough you can change what people think of you.
"Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team. Receive email from us on behalf of our trusted partners or sponsorsPlayground Games didn't give a peek at that town crier menu in the demo, so I can't say exactly how it works. It is a bit of a bummer though, to build this highly reactive morality and reputation system and then give us an opt out.
They even reference later the possibility of changing your reputation through your actions.
"Once I'm known as a killer and a criminal it'll stick with me until I put in the work to change what people think or until I've made an expensive visit to the town crier," Playground Games reiterates. RPGs in general, and Fable in particular, always encourage you to collect and hoard a robber-baron pile of gold by the time the credits roll. So the penalty to change your reputation manually seems like a finger wag more than a consequence.
Making choices and then regretting them is what save scumming is for. It also comes across as lacking in confidence, this sort of"don't annoy the player" design ethos of a big-budget project.
That obsession with a frictionless experience as the requirement for broad appeal just doesn't hold up when some of the biggest RPGs in recent years, critically and financially, are things like Disco Elyisum, Baldur's Gate 3, and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, all of which proudly challenge and inconvenience us at times—and insist we live with our choices. Despite that, I am still quite interested in this morality system Playground Games has built that, as they say, creates more interesting reactions than a single-axis reputation system can.
I'll simply not visit the town crier, I suppose. Lauren has been writing for PC Gamer since she went hunting for the cryptid Dark Souls fashion police in 2017. She joined the PCG staff in 2021, now serving as self-appointed chief cozy games and farmlife sim enjoyer. Her career originally began in game development and she remains fascinated by how games tick in the modding and speedrunning scenes.
She likes long fantasy books, longer RPGs, can't stop playing co-op survival crafting games, and has spent a number of hours she refuses to count building houses in The Sims games for over 20 years. Best gaming laptop 2026: I've tested the best laptops for gaming of this generation and here are the ones I recommend.
United Kingdom Latest News, United Kingdom Headlines
Similar News: You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Anthropic spins a Fable of a tamer, safer MythosCompany also changes data retention policy
Read more »
The Fable reboot won't have horns and haloes because of its 'nuanced and complex' take on morality, and also because you're going to constantly reinvent yourselfIt's like uni all over again.
Read more »
Xbox drops over 60 minutes of gameplay for Fable and Halo: Campaign EvolvedTwo of Xbox's biggest games have received extended gameplay videos, showing a better look at both Fable and Halo: Campaign Evolved.
Read more »
It blocked us at 'hello!' Anthropic Fable 5 refusing innocuous promptsHyper-vigilant safety classifiers turn Fable into cautionary tale
Read more »