Fable Is Abandoning One Of The RPG Series’ Defining Mechanics And Fans Aren’t Happy

During yesterday’s Xbox Developer Direct, we got the most expansive look at the Fable reboot we’ve seen yet. Playground Games is picking up the series after original developer Lionhead Studios shut down in 2016, and it definitely feels like the studio is modernizing the action RPG series with an open world and a new morality system. With that new morality system, Fable is changing what was one of the core pillars of the series: your appearance will no longer be determined by whether or not you’re making good or evil decisions. In fact, it’s abandoning the idea that any of your actions are objectively good or evil altogether.

For those that didn’t play any of Lionhead’s Fable games, like many games of the early 2000s they have a binary “hero or villain” morality system where doing things like helping people in need would move you toward the “good” side of the spectrum while doing things like skinning people alive in front of their weeping mother would move you toward the “evil” side.

In the Fable games, the decisions you made would gradually alter your character’s look, with good characters appearing pristine and almost angelic, and evil players growing horns and turning into a monster. I tended to play evil characters in these games and wasn’t thrilled that my characters were turning into uggos, but that’s the contract you sign when you play these games. Playground Games’ Fable, however, is approaching morality differently, and so this mechanic is going out the window.

As illustrated in the showcase, Fable is trying to handle morality in a more “subjective” way, which essentially means the game won’t treat your actions as simply “good” or “evil,” but rather that NPCs will react to the things you do based on their own proclivities. So you can kick people out of their homes as their landlord, and some rich idiot who lives for that shit might still think you’re a standup guy. Since things aren’t so black and white this time around, Playground’s Ralph Fulton tells IGN it’s abandoning the morality-based appearance-changing system of previous games because there is no “objective” morality system to attach them to.

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. 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.

From a roleplaying perspective, I get why this decision was made, and I’ll be glad that my future bald, bearded gay won’t have to look like a demon while I’m trying to woo the men of Albion. But it is leaving behind what was a core pillar of the Fable series back in the day, and long-time fans who have been waiting over a decade for a new Fable are reacting accordingly.

they've confirmed in an IGN interview that your actions will not transform your appearance. 😠 That's a core part of why I love Fable and I'll miss that.

Everything else looks fantastic, though. Smart evolutions, faithful vibe, incredible environments. I'm happy to be excited. https://t.co/aqiDTHLR2o

— Jake Baldino (@JakeBaldino) January 22, 2026

wait what?? that's like Fable's whole deal! https://t.co/E9mzl8OvZO

— Paul Tassi (@PaulTassi) January 22, 2026

“NPC’s and how your character looked reflecting your actions was pretty important for me,” Disastrous_Fig5609 wrote on Reddit. “You watch the character grow up from childhood, then you watch them grow into a hero or a villain. You might not be able to plant an acorn and watch it grow into a tree as you play the game, but that element of shaping the world around you with your actions still somewhat persisted with shaping your character with your actions.”

“The location based reputation is cool, but it absolutely could have just been a dual system,”  ForestBrah01209 wrote in the same thread. “One town will see you one way, another town will see you a different way. However, if I’m absolutely evil and move to another town, I’m still absolutely evil, even if my new neighbors think I’m just another stranger or even a nice guy. Shame that I won’t be able to rock the devil horns anymore.”

Fable is the first game in the series to have a character creator, so at least it’s not like everyone’s characters are going to look the same. We’ll see if there are enough character customization options to let players at least manually emulate some of those old Fable transformations when the game launches in the fall.