I picked up my copy at lunch. MetaCritic metascore from 26 reviews is 89 (range: 100 to 78).
I am excited, but cautious after what happened with the original Fable. But one reviewer did say
so I have some hope that my excitement is warranted.
I had also played Fable II Pub Games so I can start out with a bit of gold and some cool items.
Anyone else planning to play?
Maybe. I’m separated from my Xbox right now and that makes me a sad panda. Maybe I’ll have time to fit it in with Grand Theft Auto, Call of Duty, and Halo.
…Or not.
I’m a sad panda too!
Mainly because I have to wait til Friday! Despite the dev time being British! Booo!
…Want some bamboo? There’s some in the bucket over there.
I’m an even sadder panda. My wife told me that I’m not allowed to buy any more Xbox 360 games until after Christmas.
So it makes my Xbox print $100 bills? 
Dude, find a new, more understanding wife, or at least try to talk some sense into the old one!
She tells me that if I can behave up until then I’ll get a copy on Dec 25. I told her that I could just go buy it today, have it early and then not have to worry about behaving. She laughed… a little… and still said ‘No’.
I’m playing it now. It’s much the same as the first one, which isn’t a bad thing. The graphics, IMHO, are not greatly improved. The story seems ok so far. I do like the combat controls because they are very simple.
For some reason I can’t figure out how to get a mini map on the game screen. If you can’t then that’s bad design because you have to pause to look at the map.
I’m only about 2 hours in though.
I played a couple of hours last night, and my impression thus far is similar: very reminiscent of the first Fable (for all the good/bad that conjures). Some annoyance removal, such as not having to return to “base” to train-up, but like Cubsfan I can’t really find a decent map. The Regions map is tiny and without much detail, especially when viewing a city map trying to locate a particular kind of shop.
I’m also having difficulty trying to get the expression I want to use to appear on the D-pad. I remember in Fable I (IIRC) that you could assign certain expressions (such as hero pose) to a certain D-pad slot, but I’m not finding how to do that now. And as a big “shock” power user, I miss Fable I’s way of having the lightning automatically dance from one target to the next.
But overall I’m really enjoying it, and not regretting the purchase in the least. The transfer of my gold from Fable II Pub Games was smooth and painless, giving me a bit of a headstart.
The dog is a nice touch, and is yet one more way they’ve kept some of the side-activities while eliminating the hassle (in Fable I you had to semi-randomly dig around with your shovel to find buried treasure; in II the dog will often find the dig-here spots for you).
I played it for about 4 hours and I quite like it.
There is no minimap, AFAIK; I totally hate the navigation system; it’s just so hard to find shops in the game and the towns are so huge.
That said, I do kind of enjoy the development of character system, the magic and the combat. The appearance styling leaves much to be desired, IMHO, and so are the social interactions.
Quests have some annoying bugs; often time they will just pop up in your journal without mentioning where it is and you cannot quick travel there because “you haven’t found the location”. I like the idea of quests automatically appearing in your journal, but sheesh, do let me travel there!
Do they have plans to release this for the PC?
According to VideoGamer in an October 1 article:
A few more snippets has Molyneux dodging the question. My WAG is that he doesn’t want to dilute the current exclusivity of the 360 version by saying anything right now, but I’d suspect a PC version would be out in 1+ years.
Though I haven’t personally encountered anything major yet, there are many posts at the Lion Head forums (and elsewhere) regarding major, game-breaking, character-ruining bugs.
For example: DO NOT play co-op in the initial “child” phase; if you are the “henchman”, you will likely lose all of your money, items, and experience upon returning to single-play.
Other glitches (single player, non-co-op) mentioned include various forms of being stuck, which on the low-side prevent completion of the main quests, and on the high-side prevent any further play by that character.
sheesh? really? THose are the kind of bugs that cause automatic fail/kickbacks from standards testers. What the hell were they thinking? Even Microsoft’s standards testers usually find that crap and immediately kick it back to the devs to fix. Guess they get more lenient with big-name game releases, but still, that’s pretty bad. There should be no progression stoppers in games released these days, it’s simply unforgivable (not to say I won’t be getting the game as soon as I have some free time to actually PLAY the freakin thing…)
I think much of the incredulity on the boards has been: how could these get past QA?
Other games have bugs, sure, but here’s the kicker that makes this orders-of-magnitude worse: they made a design decision to allow only one save slot, to enforce the idea that you should have to live with the decisions you make in-game. That choice, which isn’t well-received on its face, has become the disaster that those who get stuck in loops or other character-stopping constructs don’t have a previous save-point to reload.
My husband and I have been playing this since Tuesday and we LOVE it. As far as bugs go, there have been a few times where my quest trail got confused, and insisted the quest was directly behind me no matter which way I was facing. It fixed itself after a few minutes eath time though. I haven’t encountered any game-breaking bugs as of yet. The 360 isn’t playing nice with our network at the moment, so we haven’t gotten the patch yet.
One complaint. We both HATE the auto-camera in co-op mode. It seems like most of the time either he or I can’t properly see what our character is doing.
I’ve noticed you need to work a little harder to keep your spouse(s) happy. So far I’ve had two divorce me because I didn’t come home often enough. The first one I had a baby with and he took the baby with him. 
It’s a bit annoying to have to interrupt my questing/exploring all the time to go flirt with my spouse, but at the same time I like the fact that it kind of makes you take marriage a bit more seriously. In the first Fable I had a spouse in every town that I could buy a house, but in Fable II if you try to do that you’ll end up doing nothing but visiting them to keep them happy!
I like that if you let you character get fat, your character actually looks fat. In the first one your stats would say you’re “obese”, but there was very little change in the character’s appearance. My current Fable II character is HUGE, with cankles and sausage fingers and everything.
I’m not a sad panda anymore; got it, and am playing it do death. Very much like the old Fable in melee and ranged combat, the magic’s different though; a bit fiddly, by the time you’ve charged up a decent attack the enemy is slicing your face off. The only way I’ve found to stop this is by first casting the level 1 time spell, then charging up a level 3 spell, then time again finally finishing off with a level 2 spell to off any survivors. It’s very hard to play pure magic for this reason; the level 1 ranged spells are so weak you might as well use guns, and swords are needed for when the enemy close for melee anyway.
as a former QA tester I can pretty much guarantee you it DIDN’T get past QA, the DEVs just didn’t fix it, most likely due to time constraints. (meaning it will hopefully be fixed for the online co-op update). Still, that sort of thing is unforgiveable, though I can’t tell you how many of our bugs used to get “KS’d” (known shippable, meaning they know it’s there they’re just gonna ship it without fixing it anyway) but A and S level bugs (progression stoppers are ALWAYS S level bugs) should never be shipped with a game, that’s really surprising
Does you character still age like Dorian Grey’s photo album?
One of the minor quibbles that I had with the first was that you aged a few years every time you leveled up. By the end my character was over 60 and looked like it, while the rest of the world hadn't aged at all. It seemed very silly to have my character looking like his "older" sister's grandfather.
I slot Time Control as my first level. It helps a bit. First level spells aren’t that useful, I agree. But by level 3 and 4, they are doing quite a lot of good for me. Shock is better than Inferno as it stuns the target. Blades I am finding to be useless; Vortex seems to be a useful crowd control even at level 1. I can’t even be bothered with Chaos.