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?

“We came at it from the perspective of looking at the world around us. Not necessarily a video game world, but the real world around us. How morality exists. And it felt to us like there just wasn’t any objective good, or objective evil. You and I can observe the same thing, and probably come to completely different moral judgments on it.”

This subjectivity is something Playground Games were adamant in including. Morality here is in the eye of the beholder. Fable, though, doesn’t stop there. This greater moral complexity even accommodates contradiction, mixing and matching sometimes opposing adjectives to form your own unique personality blend.

“I could be a charismatic thief, right? You can combine some things which are morally grey, and just see how people respond.”

Some players, however, might choose more underhanded ways to strike at the populace. For instance, making people homeless. Fulton describes playtesters buying people’s properties and raising the rent, thereby forcing them to live on the streets.

Just like with mass murder, you can also evict entire towns en masse, a possibility Playground Games had to prepare for. The developers provide a fixed slot on the street for each individual NPC in case their housing situation ever gets compromised.

“It kind of staggers me a little bit, but yeah, people seem really obsessed with that. To the point that every one of our settlements has to be designed to support the entire population sleeping rough.” If you’re sadistic enough, you can make hundreds of Albion townsfolk live in squalor while you strut around like a king. 

But what’s the end goal? What can you actually buy with the profits of your sprawling property empire?

There are expensive weapons and stylish armor, sure, but the real prestige comes with owning your own mansion. There are several in the game, each costing millions of gold. They have stately bedrooms, massive gardens, and in one case, its own hedge maze. “There are a wild range of properties,” says Fulton. The best are located in Manner Fields, an affluent district on the outskirts of Bowerstone. Owning a property here is, he says, “a really long play horizon for you to be able to afford that.” 

You could choose more virtuous endeavors. One deprived area called Copperbottom, also located in Bowerstone, needn’t stay that way. By investing money into the neighborhood, you can turn it from a depressing slum to a thriving borough. However, these changes take place under the surface. 

You can’t physically renovate an area using an injection of capital, but you can certainly transform its finances, investing into businesses and balancing rent so citizens get wealthier. That’s because Fable has its own simulated economy—but only as far as you can observe it. 

In other words, says Fulton, “We made the decision fairly early that we would only model up to second-degree ripple effects, on the basis that anything beyond that would become increasingly difficult for the player to observe.” 

In terms of both money and morality, “you’re kind of playing with a set of levers.” So, mercifully, players can’t gentrify Copperbottom’s characterful crooked walls and sloping roofs, even if, behind the scenes, that is essentially what’s happening. 

Killing everyone is probably the worst thing you could do, economically speaking as well as morally. Yet it’s a great indicator of Fable‘s impossibly ambitious scope. Playground Games built entire systems on the off-chance players decided to act in the most depraved way possible, like enacting mass murder, sending rent prices skyrocketing, then rocking up to the next town and acting like nothing happened.