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Fable II: Arguably Better than Getting Your Head Crapped On
Author’s note
Fable has been a hit-or-miss series from Microsoft, with a few legit hits. This wasn't one of them. Unfortunately, a pessimistic review of a bad game doesn't really age well, so it isn't much fun to read.
AI Notes
Written in the afterglow of Fallout 3, which Steve calls "hands-down one of the best games I've ever played," and the comparison poisons everything that follows: twelve lowlights face off against seven highlights, and the fury lands less on the game's failures than on its manners. There's Theresa, the narrator who cannot be switched off and counsels caution around "ancient paper"; a social system built from belches, finger gestures, and pelvic thrusts; controls so accident-prone that an attempt to buy a $50,000 sword ends in an Inferno spell and a blacksmith fleeing across town. The complaint about busywork jobs, which explains that they exist in MMORPGs only to limit per-player CPU usage and are therefore not fun anywhere, is the spot where the game reviewer and the systems engineer turn out to be the same person.
Steve swears off Xbox and PC gaming forever before the numbered list even starts, a vow the 2012 Borderlands essays on this shelf quietly record him breaking. And his author's note above calls the piece not much fun to read, which is too modest: the game is forgotten but the invective has held up fine, and the lowlight about the color palette closes on a Matisse line that earns the whole entry.
Related listings
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2008
The Bellic School of Management Training
Its sibling from the same 2008 gaming run, three months earlier. Bellic School is the affectionate satire of a game Steve loved; Fable II is the demolition of one he did not.
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2012
The Borderlands Gun Collector's Club
The Borderlands posts are the long, analytic version of what Fable II does briefly — a game review that is really an argument about design. Fable II's point: craft cannot rescue bad taste.
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2012
The Borderlands 2 Gun Discarders Club
Another scorecard review where the engineering is fine and the design judgement is not — Steve grading a game's creative decisions rather than its execution, exactly as he does here.
From the peanut gallery
Read the rest of the thread · 14 more
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If you only have 5-10 hours/week to play the game, play balance gets even worse. Thanks to my lack of time to play and the ease of buying properties, I quickly was in a situation where I would turn on Fable 2 and be rewarded with 200K gold. WTF? It actually made the game worse because I NEVER wanted for money after buying a few things. I picked money as my reward at the end of the game and was rewarded with "more money than I'd ever need." Pfft. It was 1 million gold, but I already had 2.7 million gold due to the fact that I slept every night and usually had at least a 20 hour break in between gaming sessions.
Also, the kill for Lucien was kind of lame. I expected something neat and wound up bumping into him on a ledge (by accident). He plummetted to his death and game over. -
Nice rant. ;-)
I played Fable 1 Lost Chapters about 3 months ago on PC. After having read your review, I'm now wondering: Did they improve anything since Fable 1 and did they add anything new other than the dog?
Going through your Lowlights list, I see no improvements towards Fable 1:
1. Humor: Hardly present in Fable 1.
2. Theresa: There was some off-voice in Fable 1 which reminded you to check for new quests once in a while and sometimes explained basic things. It was not too annoying, though I ignored it most of the time.
3. Expressions: Completely useless in Fable 1. I never understood what this was for except to hit on girls, which worked better by giving them roses and diamonds anyway.
4. Retinal blindness: I loved the color and style in Fable 1. But I can understand that others don't.
5. Linearity: Yup, Fable 1 was very linear. I like linear games (as, for example, Half-Life 2 etc.), but Fable 1 was definitely too linear, down to the paths as you already said.
6. Controls: I played the PC version which had good controls.
7. Elephantine mammary glands: Fable 1 had this problem, too. I don't mind, though. And I don't think the characters are ugly in Fable 1.
8. Ass-kissing: Very irritating in Fable 1, too. Why do all the girls and boys love me? What's the purpose, other than to annoy me? What advantage or difference does it make that I marry one or several girls/guys? They aren't even jealous!
9. Too easy: Definitely true for Fable 1.
10. Demon Doors: This was some kind of achievement system in Fable 1, except for the Demon Doors which were part of the plot. Usually there was nothing useful behind them. At least at the time I managed to open them.
11. Misguided innovation:
- The getting-fat thing you mention was already there in Fable 1 and made no sense. Did the hero walk slower or had any other disadvantages if he was fat? I don't know. The whole thing was just a waste of good programming hours with no impact on the gameplay.
- Buying estate was possible in Fable 1, too, but only some of the houses were available for sale. Don't know what this was good for except to be able to marry a partner which didn't have any effects on the gameplay either.
- Busywork jobs didn't exist in Fable 1, except for fishing, which was fucking annoying.
Apart from that, the tatoo/haircut/beard thing was completely useless, as was all this being-good/being-bad stuff. Did it have any consequences in Fable 2 when you killed all your followers? In Fable 1 everybody loved you when you were good, and everybody ran away when you were bad. Other than that, the gameplay did not change a bit.
As you can see, not much seems to have changed since Fable 1. Haven't they learned anything?
Fable 1 isn't a bad game. But it is not good, either. It's just mediocre. And so is Fable 2, as it seems.
The programmers and artists working at Lionhead are doing a really great job. Judging from Fable 1 (and B&W and The Movies) and the screenshots of Fable 2 the production quality is really great. The game design however is bad on many levels. This is a problem Lionhead had with every game since Black&White. It is really sad to see that all the good afford on side of the programmers and artists is wasted in a dull gameplay. -
Try... world of warcraft.
The nice thing is the game ever evolves, and it a really complex game mechanisms with several different playstyles (player vs player, player vs environment). So every few months the game changes as the devs patch it, change mechanics, and so on.
It's quite the little game... one I'm sure you won't recover from! -
Use Gamefly. That way when you get a real stinker you can just send it back. I only had to play 1/3rd of Mirror's Edge & the new Prince of Persia to be thankful that I didn't actually buy the darn games.
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Fable was designed by a British guy. That explains the scatological humour.
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Yep, I'm definitely glad I rented this one from GameFly. Not worth $60 (or $160 in your case!), but it was a fun game to play through.
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Have you tried Gears of War 2? I hear it's far better than Fable 2, and is rivaling Fallout 3 for GoY on the 360.
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All I can say is try Wyvern
http://www.cabochon.com
(just in case you forgot) -
Tobais said:
"Buying estate was possible in Fable 1, too, but only some of the houses were available for sale."
Every house and shop in F1 became available for sale shortly after its occupants or owner was killed. Want to own your hometown? Go on a murderous rampage! -
Other fruits and vegetables don't make you fat, just meat and pies. The humor was juvenile and they tried too hard to make it easy, but my wife and I both really got into it. I loved the feel of the combat, easy as it was, and we liked buying up towns and weapons and augments.
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Man, I was pretty harsh on Fable 2 for having what I thought were pretty bad concept of good/evil 'choices,' but your total burn of the game was hilarious to read. I loved the bit about toasting the shop keeper. I did something similar by accident. Too true.
I really hated not being able to off the Pirate Hero.
It was an OK game, but if I had to do it over again I would wait for it to go down in price before buying it. -
If being young at heart labels me a dipshit...
My wife played it about halfway through and enjoyed it, I also found it amusing. The coop elements are also appealing.
The handholding narration, vibrant art, and easygoing aesthetic reminded me a lot of the show Pushing Daisies. Fans of that may find it cute.
Not a hard-core game in the slightest, but a fun toy, and good for new gamers. -
An alternative to the $100 wireless dongle is to get a computer with wifi and an ethernet port. Connect your 360 to the computer and use Internet Connection Sharing.
I know it's a bit of a hack and hardly worth it for many, but as my monitor doubles as my Xbox display, it seems to work out nicely -
I do the same as Matt, though in my case my TV doubles as my computer monitor. Works great; only downfall is that the computer has to be on to use anything online. But since it's on almost all the time anyway, everything's groovy.
I personally found the game much more enjoyable after I decided to be unspeakably evil to the point of absurdity.
I never got mobbed by peasants on account of them all running away, screaming. And those that weren't running away were on fire. Or dead. Frequently both.
You said you set the blacksmith on fire by accident? I did it on purpose. Repeatedly. Then I bought out his property and fired him; with his own money!
Come to think of it, I think it really just boils down to this: no matter how much the game annoyed me, I always felt better after burning something.
Yet, despite my pyromaniac tendencies, and borderline psychotic behaviour... I picked my dog in the end.
And before I go; on the subject of humour, the stand-out joke for me was the quip about how the guildmaster from the previous game died...
— Itsnoteasy · 6:51 AM, January 13, 2009
You don't need a network connection to install games to the hard drive. All you need is a version of the NXE (New XBOX Experience) firmware installed. ONE way of doing that is connection to Xbox Live with the console and downloading it. You can actually download the update to a PC, burn it to a CD and use that to update your console.
So you wasted $100 when you could've done it for the price of a CD-R.
— Unknown · 8:14 AM, December 26, 2008