Fable 2 Options

[Kiln]

Alright everyone that is interested in a brief review of the first game and some of its features can read it below or you can simply look for the highlighted fable 2 section if you don't care about that sort of thing. Anyways it starts below the line.
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The original Fable
If any of you remember hearing of the first fable while it was in development then you also remember the many let downs that came with the game's release on September 14, 2004. If you didn't hear about it and played it you probably were impressed by several of its included features. Many of the features that were supposed to be implemented into the final game were cut, dumbed down, or just seemed unpolished. The company promised greater customization and long lasting effects of the player's actions...those of us who played this game didn't quite feel any long term difference because of our actions...in fact if you killed dozens of people all you had to do was leave town for a few minutes and then everything would be the same as when you left it. In the end several things were cut or didn't feel like they had enough time invested in them.

The customization was limited to a small supply of clothing, haircuts, and tattoos which are added to the same exact character for everyone that plays. Also the lure of having to "grow from an adult to a child" was not that amazing since it was done through just a few minutes of playing through your child, teenage, and then advancing into your adult years in less than a half hour. Though this game was somewhat disappointing to most gamers who had followed it from the beginning it was still a decent game with some interesting points like the good and evil system and the leveling system as well. These features were rendered nearly useless since the entire game and all of its side quests could be completed in less than ten hours.


Fable 2
Now in 2008, some time after the release of the first game, Peter Molyneux and his crew are at it again with fable 2. There is a little gameplay footage on IGN and I must say that I'm impressed so far with the way the game looks and is played. According to Molyneux, the towns have been replaced by huge cities and castles, primative guns have been invented, people can roam to a much greater extent, and players can choose between male and female characters now.

The game takes place 500 years after the original with characters experiencing more of a colonial setting. Characters will be able to have a family in this game, including a wife/husband, and children. Males will be able to get women pregnant and women will be able to get pregnant. Your children will look upon your actions and see you as a role-model and react accordingly.

According to wikipedia which is usually a very trusted source of information: "Albion is expected to be 10 times the size from the original game with 11 fully free-roaming regions and roughly 30 dungeons to explore. There are around 100 augmentable weapons, 70 augmentable clothes, and 20 different tattoos and haircuts. There are only eight basic spell types, but they are upgradeable to varying degrees, allowing for around 80 spells. There will be more than 160,000 lines of "AI-driven dialogue", over 150 unique quests and more than a half-dozen minigames."

The game will also feature drop in/out co-op on the xbox 360 allowing you to play with a friend on one console. They refuse to comment on if it will be available through xbox live and insist that they have yet to reveal all of the games features to the public in the video demonstrations.

Interesting links
Article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable_2
Videos via IGN: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable_2

[Agent Griff]

From the videos I've seen, this game will be godly. I also like the fact that Molyneux has been more down to earth with this one, and that he had a video in the backdrop whenever he was talking about the game. Still, how can you not be fooled by this man into buying a game?

But regarding the first Fable, I played it back in 2004 after my father bought it in France. The manual was in French but the game itself was English and I enjoyed it immensely, not being privy to the hype of development. I bought the game after reading an article about it in Official Xbox Magazine in which they praised it like Molyneux was stuffing money into their pockets for every ten words they wrote. I loved Fable, however, in spite of the short story which you could finish in under 17 hours, even if you did all the extra quests and explored all areas. I liked the environment, and the way the character could get scars and change during gameplay based on how you played.

It seems Fable 2 will bring back all this and much more. The environments seem as colourful as ever and they actually remind you of being in a fairy tale. The new dog feature seems quite nifty and interesting, and I also like the fact that marriage has been extended. Whereas in the previous game you could only marry and have sex, now you can have protected and unprotected sex and also have children in the process. This, to me, seems like a great idea.

I also read that you could be an adulterer and cheat on your wife/husband and have your own little bastards if you were the more evil type.

The good/evil choices are not as plain as they were in the past game. If in the previous game, when having to choose whether to do a good thing or evil thing, the good thing was something pleasant while the evil thing was unpleasant.

Now, I read an example of a choice the player will receive in the game. At one point, the hero is in a forest, and a pretty little maiden enters the same forest innocently. An spirit at that point shows himself to the player in order to test him and the player must pass through this test, in order to advance the story. The spirit offers the player a choice. If he is to advance in the story, he must have his face gruesomely scarred. Either that, or he can have the pretty little lass that just entered the forest be horribly disfigured by the spirit, if the player doesn't want to go through the rest of the game as a disfigured creep. That is the price of Good and Evil, however.

I can't wait to get my paws on this game.

This post has been edited by Agent Griff: Aug 4 2008, 07:15 PM