One of the most intimate ways a modern Open World RPG can make the in-game world and it’s inhabitants wrap around the player is by incorporating a morality system that at least in some ways, comes close to real life. And developer Playground Games’ upcoming Fable, which was revealed in this year’s Xbox Developer_Direct, aims to do the same with some new flairs up it’s sleeve, and it seems both innovative and compelling in more ways than one.
In an interview with Xbox Wire, Playground Games’ founder, Ralph Fulton, broke down the nuanced and complex morality system of the upcoming Fable which intends to overhaul how we experience morality in videogames generally.
“How we think about morality in the world today has really informed how we wanted to represent it as a game system in this game. That’s to say: there is no objective good, there is no objective evil. Really it’s just about people’s subjective opinions and what they choose to value in someone else when they make that judgment.”
“So, as you saw in Developer_Direct, our version of morality isn’t a sliding scale – we’ve chosen to anchor this around the actions you do, and specifically the things you do in Albion that are witnessed by at least one other person. So, if the things you do are seen by one or more people, you’ll start to earn a reputation for that thing. Obviously, we always use the chicken kicking example, because kicking chickens is classic Fable.”
“So if a person sees you kicking a chicken, you will start to get a reputation as a ‘Chicken Chaser’ – and if enough people see you do it, or you do it a lot, that reputation will become one of the things you’re known for in that settlement. And people will react to you based on what they think about that particular reputation.”
Fable is slated to release in the Autumn of 2026 for both the PC platform and the Xbox Series X|S with a PS5 version also confirmed to arrive around the same time.
