// PC GAMER — GAMING
You can just bypass Fable's reputation system with enough gold, which seems like a waste of its 'complex, nuanced, take on morality'
Fable's take on morality sounds pretty neat—if only it weren't so eager to assure us we can just buy out of it.
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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."
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