At Gamescom 2026, Ralph Fulton, co-founder and game director at Playground Games, revealed that their upcoming open-world fantasy RPG, Fable 4, will allow players to kill every NPC in the game. If you wish, you can violently "clear out" the entire world's population, turning towns into ghost towns.
Fulton stated, "Yes, you can absolutely leave a town with no one alive." However, he also pointed out that the difficulty of clearing out locations varies. Taking the game's largest town, Bowerstone, as an example, "it's theoretically possible, but practically extremely difficult." Whereas with a smaller village, it's relatively feasible.
The challenge mainly comes from the game's built-in "defense mechanisms." When players start killing, NPCs will flee and hide, and guards will immediately deploy and continuously pursue the player. "They are the game's mechanism to prevent you from becoming antisocial," Fulton explained. But as long as players can handle the infinitely respawning guards, there are no technical barriers stopping you from taking everyone out.
Of course, Fable 4's iconic morality system will respond to player actions. If you kill a shopkeeper, you won't be able to buy from them anymore, since the owner is dead. Local businesses in the game, such as tailor shops, taverns, and bakeries, are all run by NPCs with their own daily routines. If players choose to disrupt them, they must "face the consequences."
Players' misdeeds will also result in negative reputation—but this reputation is limited to the settlement where the events occurred. In the world of Albion, news doesn't travel far. When you go to another town, locals will form completely different opinions based on their personal interactions with you. This means you can be a saint in one place and a villain in another without bearing a uniform infamy across the entire world.
The new installment makes significant adjustments to the iconic morality system, a change that has sparked controversy among some fans. Unlike previous titles where an action was universally seen as "good" or "evil" by everyone, in the new game, the same action might be despised by some but appreciated by others. Your moral image will appear as a "cloud of adjectives" floating to the left of your character's head, briefly visible only when entering a new location. It includes words like "charming," "friendly," and "hardworking," and if you choose to massacre everyone, labels like "violent" will also appear.
Beyond violent methods, players can also choose more subtle ways to harm residents—such as making them homeless. Fulton revealed that some test players bought properties and drastically raised rents, forcing original tenants onto the streets. Just like mass murder, players can evict entire town populations en masse. Developers had to prepare for this: reserving a fixed spot on the street for each NPC in case their housing situation is threatened.
"This surprised me a bit, but yes, people seem genuinely fascinated by it. To the point that we had to design every settlement to accommodate all residents sleeping on the streets." If you're cruel enough, you can leave hundreds of Albion's inhabitants living in squalor while you strut around like a king.
Playground Games has built a complete system for the most depraved actions players might take (massacre, rent gouging, then running off to the next town pretending nothing happened). Fulton summarized, "It shocked me a bit, but people seem genuinely fascinated by it."