Fable creator says it's 'a real shame' the reboot is dropping the horns-or-halo morality system

The Fable reboot in development at Playground Games is, understandably, going to usher in some changes to the series that was last seen in 2010. One of the most notable is an overhaul of the game's morality system. In the Fable of old, doing good would eventually result in a halo hovering over your head, and doing evil would naturally result in devil horns growing out of it. The reboot is eschewing that high-vis representation of moral fibre, though, and original Fable creator Peter Molyneux thinks that's "a real shame."

In an interview with IGN, Molyneux said he doesn't know why Playground made that change, although he does have a few ideas. "It's hard to do that because to do it well in today's incredibly high definition world just makes it more tricky," he said. "And to do that and to allow different genders, that doubles and triples your work. But I wonder if there is going to be a little bit of evil alignment and good alignment in there. I hope so."

For the record, the rebooted Fable will have a morality system, it just won't be as black-and-white as its predecessors. Playground founder and general manager Ralph Fulton explained in January that morality in the new game is "more about shades of grey" in the new game, and the "subjectivity of morality" that we see in the real world.

"There's no objective good, there's no objective evil," Fulton said at the time. "You couldn't get everyone in the world to agree that something is evil or something is good. That just doesn't happen. That diversity of opinion I think is really clear these days."

Fulton's insistence on moral relativism ties into the absence of horns and halos in the Fable reboot: The way you're viewed by people in the game will vary based upon their own values and beliefs, so one man's angel is another man's devil.

The Fable reboot, called simply Fable, doesn't have a solid release date yet but is currently slated to arrive sometime this fall. Molyneux's own new project, Masters of Albion—his swansong, so he says—launched into early access this week on Steam. It's still in a rough state (early access, remember) but so far, PC Gamer's Shaun Prescott likes what he sees.