Fable Is Ditching One of the Best Features of the Original Trilogy

January 22, 2026, 6:15pm

In the wake of its new gameplay presentation dropping today, Playground Games has confirmed that its upcoming reboot of Fable will be abandoning one of the most iconic aspects of the original trilogy. Since the original Fable launched on Xbox in 2004, the series has always featured a morality system that would change the look of the protagonist depending on choices made throughout the game. If a player fell on the “bad” side of the morality alignment, they could grow horns and begin to look demonic. Conversely, those who made “good” decisions would end up looking angelic. And while this system has always been popular with fans, it won’t be returning in the new Fable.

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Speaking to IGN, Playground Games founder and GM Ralph Fulton explained the decision behind not featuring a morality system that alters character appearances in Fable. Fulton made clear that a morality system is still present in this reboot, but it works on a more regional level. This means that your character is never fully evil or fully good in the eyes of those within Albion as your reputation is different within each town.

“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,” said Fulton. “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.”

“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,” he continued. “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. And you can do that across all the locations in the game.”