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At last, the Fable reboot has shown off a lengthy 30 minute gameplay demo touting the word cloud-style reputation system that’ll decide whether its 1000+ NPCs laud or heckle you as you traipse through their peasant hamlets. Every character has their own values and every decision you make has consequences! Unless you have enough gold, Playground Games is quick to reassure us, because then you can just pay for a new reputation.
Fable’s gameplay demo starts off with a lot of things that I—an RPG and life sim fan with a fondness for systems and strategy—am really liking the sound of. All sorts of actions have an impact on your adjective-based reputation. Sparing someone’s life makes you “merciful” in the eyes of the settlement you’re in, and doing so by negotiating makes you “shrewd” while dropping a ton of cash on fancy clothes increases your reputation for being “rich” and firing random arrows in town makes you “reckless.”
Fable soaks up all that info and feeds it back to you in some pretty direct conversation menus. Megan the Merchant, “an ambitious commoner” likes you because of your reputation for being “shrewd” and she thinks you’re “savvy.” Megan is like the translucent colored tech of the early aughts, the way I can see straight into the gears making her tick, but I don’t mind the transparency. Systems-driven games are fun because they let me see the system and play with it.
That cloud of reputation epithets can do all sorts of things, like make a merchant who dislikes you jack up their prices or an employee who hates you blow off their shift, generating no profit for you.
Playground Games reinforces multiple times during the demo how this type of reputation is all about subjectivity, complexity, and shades of grey—quite different from the horns and halo ‘good vs evil’ system that the original series creator Peter Molyneux said it’s “a real shame” to see go.
What Playground Games also mentioned multiple times during the demo was how you can just bypass the system they’ve built if you shell out some gold.
“If I don’t like my reputations in Silverbrook, I can pay the town crier to change them,” Playground says. “I give them gold—a lot of gold—and they spread a new reputation for me. If you’re rich enough you can change what people think of you.”
I can think of a few real-life rich people who keep desperately attempting to make that true.
Playground Games didn’t give a peek at that town crier menu in the demo, so I can’t say exactly how it works. It is a bit of a bummer though, to build this highly reactive morality and reputation system and then give us an opt out. They even reference later the possibility of changing your reputation through your actions.
“Once I’m known as a killer and a criminal it’ll stick with me until I put in the work to change what people think or until I’ve made an expensive visit to the town crier,” Playground Games reiterates.
RPGs in general, and Fable in particular, always encourage you to collect and hoard a robber-baron pile of gold by the time the credits roll. So the penalty to change your reputation manually seems like a finger wag more than a consequence. Making choices and then regretting them is what save scumming is for.
It also comes across as lacking in confidence, this sort of “don’t annoy the player” design ethos of a big-budget project. That obsession with a frictionless experience as the requirement for broad appeal just doesn’t hold up when some of the biggest RPGs in recent years, critically and financially, are things like Disco Elyisum, Baldur’s Gate 3, and Kingdom Come Deliverance 2, all of which proudly challenge and inconvenience us at times—and insist we live with our choices.
Despite that, I am still quite interested in this morality system Playground Games has built that, as they say, creates more interesting reactions than a single-axis reputation system can. I’ll simply not visit the town crier, I suppose.
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