New Fable game removes feature core to franchise's DNA

The new Fable game doesn't have a good and evil morality system, therefore players won't change appearance based on good or evil deeds, Playground Games has officially confirmed.

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In the original Fable games, your choices changed the world...and they also changed you, giving you devil horns or pristine halos depending on your actions in-game. But the new Fable game that's coming out this year removes this feature entirely. The trailer's tagline seems to make it clear; "your choices change the world," but they don't change you. At least not this time.

In a recent interview with IGN, Fable game director Ralph Fulton explains why the feature was removed, saying that there is no stark black and white good and evil in Albion. Plus, being a majestically glowing hero or sinister villain would conflict with Fable's new location-based reputation system, which technically lets you start anew every time you visit a previously undiscovered location.

• Read more: Fable has a 'living population' with over 1,000 named NPCs that can be interacted with
• Read more: Xbox reveals new Fable release window, coming to Xbox, PS5, and PC at launch

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The different Fable alignments of good and evil. Photo credit: Fable Wiki

Here's what Fulton said in full on the topic:

"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.

"There's probably a couple of reasons.

"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.

"There's another reason, which is in our game, you build 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.

"And you can almost, through your behavior, through your choices, form completely different reputations--a completely different identity, if you like--in that place from the place that you were last time.

"You can do that across all the locations in the game.

"Now, you couldn't do that if you walked in with horns and a trident. Your reputation would precede you in that instance.

"And honestly, that ability to be completely in control of your identity and thus what people think of you felt more important to us than that legacy feature.

"So, it worked great in those games. It didn't seem to fit in ours, so we don't have it."

While players won't morph into ghoulish ne'er-do-wells or light-adorned heroes in the new Fable, Playground does plan to let players customize their hero in various ways, including cosmetics like clothes and hairstyles, as well as various loot like armor and weapons that change in-game appearance.

Fable releases in Autumn 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.