I have not kept up with Xbox games recently. This summer I played KOTOR twice (once dark and once light) and now I am playing Prince of Persia. At the rate I play, that should take me up to Halo 2’s release, at which point I will be fired from my job and surely will be divorced. But I WILL SLAY THOSE COVENANT BASTARDS! :wally
Back on topic: Fable is kinda intriguing to me…but I’ll probably buy it later when the price falls and I am burned out on Halo2 (2008?) . I am looking forward to Molyneaux’s game BC. that looks like it could have potential.
Sort of. Consider Black and White for example. It’s largely a horrible, crashing mess, but the AI for pets is pretty incredible. I’ve read reviews where the pets were trained to eat only the males of a specific enemy tribe and ignore females and other males. Another pet would throw temper tantrums if left alone too long, then pick up the trees that it was told to stay near and throw them directly at the camera. I tried to train my pet gorilla to rescue people from the water, and it started working, but I got fed up with all the other crap that didn’t work right.
My housemate got it, and I’ve been playing quite a bit. It’s okay.
The essential problem is, it’s not enough of anything.
It’s not enough of a sim-life game like Black&White. Sure, your character changes as he becomes more evil or more good; villagers live their lives on a normal schedule that unfolds as the game clock ticks on. But it doesn’t feel like you’re really doing anything, or affecting anything, or that there’s much there there. Like Morrowind- a large place to explore, but still kind of sterile in the end.
The RPG element is nearly completely linear. You get to choose between certain “good” and “evil” versions of quests, but that’s about it.
I think the worst part of it is how useless some of the special features are. Your body shape changes based on how much you eat, what stats you build up, and you can get tatoos aplenty to cover yourself. But since you’ll be wearing armor all of the time, it’s impossible to actually notice any of the changes. My character is still the bulky plate wearer he’s been for half the game, despite my stats hitting certain thresholds.
It’s a fun game.
However I am disappointed, because they set the release date back atleast 3 times… and you would think that after that… they would have a nice, complete, perfect game? No… But they DID decide to take out many features they had promised on putting in! And they did decide that it wouldn’t be on Xbox Live!
Extremely beautiful graphics… very short, but definetely with replay value (if you play good one time, just be evil the next).
I agree with the linearness disguised as a non-linear game… You pretty muchly have to do the main quest, to get more sidequests, or to get farther on certain sidequests.
But all in all, I love it. But it had So much potential… :rolleyes:
I just got an X-Box today, and Fable was the game I got with it, because a bunch of my friends have it and said good things about it. I like it. It’s fun, and I could care less if it’s linear (some of the best RPG’s are linear, KOTOR and Neverwinter Nights are linear.)
I laughed so hard for about five minutes at one point in the game:
There are these things in the game called ‘demon doors.’ They hide prizes and so forth behind them. To open them, you have to do something. It might be have a good character, kill some monsters, or be fat. (Seriously. I have found a door that won’t let me in unless I’m a fat-ass.) Anyhoo, so far I’ve only opened one door, and I had to kill a lot of baddies to do it (he summoned wave after wave of things for me to kill.) Upon completion, he said (in a deep voice):
“You have passed my challenge. I an knackered! Go on, get through, then!”
I got it when it came out and just finished it. Great fun! I really ended up enjoying the game. It is fun how your character becomes more ‘real’ than other RPG avatars. I had this nasty scar when I young in the game across the right side of my face. After I got older it faded away, but there were still traces. Also people will comment on how they like your beard or how cute you are (it’s really funny to find all the celeb whores who’ll want to marry you when you are a Legendary Hero).
It is fairly short, but chances are that much longer and it may have gotten a little too much. It was a very good length for what it was. Maybe if in Fable 2 they expand the story and create a lot of different countries (or such), a longer game can work.
For all the stuff about a ‘serviceable’ story, I found it very enjoyable and somtimes surpising. Though I will admit it was easy to get through (the game wasn’t that hard).
All in all, a very good game. If it didn’t have the hype, it’d be hailed as one of the better RPGs.
Well, I ended up buying the game because I had some money burning its way out of my wallet. I beat it a few days ago, and now I will tell you what I think.
Meh.
Combat was fun, but the difficulty was screwy. About 2/3 of the way through when I started mastering my chosen skills (melee with magic to speed myself and slow the enemy), suddenly battles got hell of easy. All I really had to worry about was having enough mana potions for big fights. Also, I felt like if I didn’t happen to pick the Slow Time spell the last battle would have been nearly impossible due to cheapass tactics by the Big Bad. As it was it was pretty easy.
The prizes behind the Demon Doors were disappointing too. Too many of them were things I could have bought at the shops.
The story had some good moments, but it wasn’t fantastic or anything. Your ability to affect the game world with your actions was nowhere near the level of Fallout, whereas Lionhead was claiming that they would surpass all other games. And the opening and closing movies were possibly the lamest ones I’ve ever seen in a game. Bizarre and incomprehensible I can deal with, but these were just plain pointless.
And to top it all off, your character doesn’t have an actual name, ages far too fast, and when he hits 50 he looks like crap. Not because he looks like an actual 50 year old, but because he has wrinkles and callouses in extremely strange places and patterns.
Moral: Molyneux is, after all, both pretentious and incompetent, and generally full of crap.
I had started another thread about this game, and in general agree with the meh assesment.
Whatever plans Molyneux, may have had for the game, I get the idea he just scraped them and created KOTR Fantasy instead. Much of the game, including the idea of actions-affecting-alignment-affecting-appearance, and the use of "force push," seem influenced by KOTR. I get the feeling Molyneux had a copy next to him the whole time he was putting this together, but just couldn't manage to put a game together that was nearly as good.
The physical changes you character goes through seems to be something that the game designers were realy proud of, but I hated this. Give me one good reason why your character ages, not as game time passes, but as he levels up. The designers seem to think that players thrill to the idea of their character giong from a 20 year old to a 65 year old in a matter of game days. Adding to this sillyness is the fact that your character is the ONLY person in the game for whom time seems to pass. At the end of my second playing of the game, my character was 61, and looked older, while his "big" sister still apeared to be in her twenties.
Then there are the alignment changes, as you get more good, or evil you also change physically. Halos or horns, yep subtly all the way this game.
I agree with sturmhauke about the demon doors. Really, the prizes behind these shoud have been better. You think with such impressive guardians, there would have been something better than the everyday treasure found in the chests.
All in all, while it was kind of fun, it was just another role playing game, and I liked KOTR and Morrowind much better.
So, has anyone played the new "Bard's Tale" yet?
Eh… I ended up really liking it. I thought the story was good fun and liked building up my character. I didn’t really consider it ‘Meh’… just waaay too short :D.
:wally
