‘Fable’ Reboot Cuts Series’ Famous ‘Morality Alters Appearance’ Mechanic: “For Us, That Doesn’t Really Work”
In providing a fresh example of ‘new owners fundamentally misunderstanding the appeal of an IP they’re attempting to reboot’, Playground Games’ general manager Ralph Fulton has confirmed that the Fable franchise’s signature mechanic allowance of a player’s moral choices to affect their appearance will not be present in their upcoming reboot due to an apparent clash with the game’s new approach to the concepts of good and evil.
Ask anyone who sunk a significant amount of time into any of the now-closed Lionhead Studios’ original Fable trilogy as to their favorite memories from their playthrough and odds are almost all of them will make some reference to their alignment-and-behavior based appearance alterations, with those who leaned towards pure heroism recalling an almost Super Saiyan-like transformation to their physical form and the more corrupt and villainous reveling in the slow-but-steady growth of their own set of demonic horns.
Given the near-universal appreciation of this mechanic, it was far from surprising when IGN‘s Wesley Yin-Poole and Ryan McCaffrey asked Fulton during a recent interview if the game’s “more fluid, good and evil system”, as revealed in passing during the Xbox Developer Direct 2026, would prompt physical changes to the player’s avatar
However, what did raise eyebrows was Fulton’s response, wherein the Forza franchise’s former creative director declared, “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.”
Continuing, Fulton further detailed, “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. And 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.”
To this end, when asked at the conclusion of the interview if Fable creator Peter Molyneux had “seen this game yet?”, Fulton tellingly admitted, “To my knowledge, he has not,” before clarifying that, regardless of his direct input, Playground Games, ” “as a team, I think, wear the responsibility of carrying on the franchise really heavily.”
“I think it’s something we’re all conscious of. Everybody who’s on this team, and this isn’t PR, we’ve built a team from scratch for this project. And the thing that unites every single person is that they came here to make Fable. They didn’t come here to work for Playground Games necessarily. They came here to make Fable. Everyone is first and foremost a fan. And I think everybody is really eager with anticipation to see the reaction we get from everyone, from fans all over the world when we finally show some stuff at Dev Direct.”
At present, the Fable reboot has yet to receive a specific release date, but is currently planned for a Fall 2026 debut on the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, and Windows platforms.
