// KOTAKU — GAMING
Letting You Be A Complete Psychopath Reveals The Scale Of Fable‘s Ambition
Fable lets you kill every NPC. If you want to violently depopulate the world in Fable, you absolutely can. People will start appearing again eventually, but in the meantime it’ll be a ghost town. Most games would make the characters immune or flash a game-over screen if the player went off-script. Fable is trying to revel in it.
“Yeah, you could absolutely get down to nobody living,” says Playground Games cofounder Ralph Fulton at Gamescom 2026, the game director on Xbox’s upcoming open-world fantasy RPG epic.
Some locations, however, are harder than others to purge entirely. Fulton uses the game’s biggest town, Bowerstone, as an example.
“In theory, yes, and in practice, I think it would be extremely difficult to do that. Let me take you out of Bowerstone and put you in a smaller village? More feasible.”
The challenge lies in what happens when the murders start. Firstly, NPCs run and hide. Secondly, guards show up. Albion’s finest will start hunting you, and they won’t stop. “They are the game’s defense mechanism against you being a psychopath,” says Fulton.
If you can deal with endlessly respawning guards, however, there’s technically nothing preventing you from taking out everyone. Of course, this being a Fable game, there will be consequences for your actions.
For starters, if you kill a shop owner, you’ll no longer be able to use them to buy stuff. It makes sense. After all, the owner’s dead. This is a world in which local businesses, like tailors, pubs, and bakeries, are staffed by NPCs with their own routines, and if you disrupt that, as Fulton says, “it’s kind of on you.”
You’ll also earn a thoroughly negative reputation, but there’s a caveat. This reputation is only for the settlement in which you committed the foul acts. In Albion, news does not travel far. Visit a different town or village, and residents there may have an entirely different perception of you, based on their personal experience. This means you can be a saint in one place and a sinner in another, experimenting with your morality without becoming universally known as a complete bastard.
That morality system is one of Fable‘s signature features, but the new game makes changes to it that have proved controversial with some fans. Previously, a given act on your part was either considered good by everyone, or evil by everyone. Here, however, while some may despise you for certain actions, others may admire you for them. Additionally, here your ethics are expressed as a word cloud floating to the left of your head, and temporarily visible as you enter a new location.
It’s built from thousands of adjectives like “charismatic,” “friendly,” “hard-working,” and if you ever decided to kill everyone in sight, “violent..” So, why the change?