Submitted 3 weeks ago by inclementimmigrant@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
TL;DR: The new Fable game removes the traditional good and evil morality system, focusing instead on a location-based reputation that changes with each settlement. Players won’t alter their appearance based on deeds but can customize their hero’s look with cosmetics and gear.
I don’t think the headline is fair at all. I think it’s there, just reimagined. And personally I think it sounds really cool. If I want the old system, I can play the old games.
Well, if I get what they’re doing this time, it’s different.
Heroes in Fable are driven by narrative forces, they are supposed to be literally heroes of a fable. Morality in these games is not reputation, it’s not supposed to be realistic, it’s like a natural law of the world. And, along with a few other character development traits, morality changes your character physically.
You can even “boost” your evilness with stuff like eating live chicks. Nobody witnesses you doing that.
There’s a whole shtick in Fable that sets it apart from most RPGs, in that, Fable never even pretends you’re a character among others. You’re one of 5 or so heroes destined to shape the story, and the rules applying to you are just different from everyone else.
It sounds like this time, they’re going for something a lot more classic, i.e. scoring how people feel about your choices.
What do you think I meant by reimagined?
Right? Also it’s not like the mechanic is universally loved. The good vs evil decision features of games (like in Fable, Infamous, Knights of the Old Republic, etc.) are often heavily criticized for being obvious, simplistic, forced, and sometimes even punishing to some play styles or mistakes by restricting some skills behind one alignment or the other.
I liked it as a mechanic personally, but I am also interested to see how the new evolution on the mechanic works. Maybe it’s shit, maybe it’s a more nuanced version of the old one. We’ll see.
I liked what Mass Effect 2 did. Scars that healed if you did good deeds and got worse if you were evil. Or you could pay to upgrade your sick bay, remove the scars, and disable the feature entirely. I roll paragon on the Normandy, but I removed the scars.
Morality systems are easy to break anyway.
One might argue that KOTOR semi-ruined a generation of video games with morality systems. I’m one. I would argue that.
Yeah, I fucking detest the way morality systems in games work.
I don’t think they’re a fundamentally unworkable idea, but very few games have even come close to doing anything good with the concept.
Most just offer you two equal but different benefits, let you pick between them, and call that morality. See Bioshock. And the Mass Effect / KOTOR system always sucked because it punished you for going down the middle (ie, playing a complex character).
One of the only good morality systems I’ve ever seen is Metro 2033. For those who don’t know, the game has a secret personality tracker. It gives you points for taking actions that are pro-social. You get a lot of opportunities in the game to refuse benefits or give up resources to help others. You are never directly rewarded for this. It doesn’t do the bullshit where you give someone some food and they go “Here’s an old gun I had lying around.” Being kind costs you. It also measures the time you spend interacting with people, listening in on conversations, that kind of thing. By the end of the game, if you’ve played your character like someone who cares about other people, you get an opportunity to make a better choice, that leads to a better outcome. If you don’t, the choice is never presented to you at all, because the character you portrayed wouldn’t even think there was a choice to be made in that situation. It’s brilliant, and it completely solves the usual Deus Ex / Mass Effect “Three buttons” ending where nothing leading up to it matters. To be able to make the good ending choice you have to have played the kind of character who would be willing to make that choice.
Then Kreia came and deconstruct the entire morality of Star Wars…
Morality systems are easy to break anyway.
I would say its more that morality systems are hard to implement.
If you make simple system where you loose karma from stealing and gain karma from donating money for orphans player can exploit that system easy. You would need to figure some other system. One could be system where after stealing or donating a certain amount you get a status that permanently raises/lowers your karma. But it really cant be permanent either because it takes away from player agency. How would you turn those things to a points. I mean stealing last coin from beggar cant be same that stealing a coin from a millionare. Also this kind of karma system makes so the quests in the game are black and white. You cant make a quest where dooming 12 orphans to die saves thousands from a plague.
How to implement the karma? Everybody magically hating you for low karma is just unrealistic. Should karma effect only some random events and set story points? Sounds fine, but then devs need to implement that system to the storypoints and its not easy to do so without railroading the players. Like Paragon/Renegate in mass effect 2. It made it so everytime the opportunity came to choose from the two, it took away from the real choise and it became just desition to wich stat you want to raise. Also choosing neutral choice was never good option, because in the end game you need to have one or other stat high enough to get trough gated discussions. You could roleplay and choose what ever you feel right, but then some late game options are just locked from you.
So basically like what Obsidian did with New Vegas reputation system after Fo3’s simplistic karma system.
new vegas still had karma for some reason. really makes it hard to be evil non legion
I don’t really care if they want to rework the good/evil system. What sucks is that they took out the body morphing completely so your character model won’t change with the skills they’re acquiring. Seems like a lazy choice, and doesn’t bode well for the rest of the game IMO.
Its not gone, its just more nuanced
Thank good the chicken kicking is still there
I’m not convinced by the trailer/gameplay we’ve seen so far as it just feels looks so bland to me. Hopefully I’m wrong.
“looks so bland to me”
So… It’s a Fable game then?
Seriously, when has this series ever been anything other than the unseasoned oatmeal of RPGs?
Yep, the first game was ok, nothing special, didn’t feel anything afterwards. I am feeling the same now.
The changes to the morality system actually sounded pretty cool to me, though what I read did not mention it would no longer affect your appearance. A lot of what they are changing sounds more like they are trying to make the game as close to what was originally promised instead of what we actually got, and the NPC changes were pretty chief to it.
Thanks for the TL;DR. The title led me to believe the post was going to be clickbait built off a nothingburger and it seems I was right.
Nelots@piefed.zip 3 weeks ago
A welcome change imo. The morality system in the Fable games were always heavily lopsided, with one side being strictly superior than the other. Though I will say that I did like the cosmetic changes it made.