Fable 2, Prose and Khans

mcgrue — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 07:16:46 +0000

(concept art from Fable 2)

A very bullety review of my experience in Fable 2.

Almost Instant teleportation to points of interest I’ve been to before (via the quests menu). Nobody in the entire world likes crisscrossing maps you’ve re-tread 800 times prior to get to the new event, and Fable 2 lets you avoid that without any hidden costs.
The golden trail of never-get-lost. The golden trail is your friend.
The fact that I can be rewarded for sacrificing my wife to a dark and uncaring god!
Stephen Fry as a polyamorous, pansexual bastard!
The open-endedness in this one actually appealed to me, which is rare for fantasy sandbox games (where my usual reaction is to become bored or frustrated within the first hour and bailing out).
I was rewarded with xbox360 Achievements for having an orgy and for taking on multiple wives!

You can’t cancel quests that you’ve accepted. I accepted “Blood Harvest”, but I can’t back out of it. This current character is a good one, damnit!
The menus are both clumsy and slow. Pressing ‘up’ at the top of a menu or ‘down’ on the bottom of a menu should loop to the other side. I should have the option to stay in a menu after using something, too, in case I want to gorge myself on XP-producing pie (or the much less fattening potions), or if I want to go on a skill-learning book reading spree.
The jobs are too boring. I really wouldn’t mind having some actually engaging decisions added in there. Just some occasional bonuses or decision gates on top of the “press the button at the correct point of the sliding meter” would do it.
Townsfolk who get trapped around you while doing jobs can be incredibly annoying. At one point I had a horde of children all playing tag around me at the blacksmith’s. I quit the job and was very sad to find out that you can’t murder children.
The “games of chance” all annoy me. What’s the real point of them? To grind to level 5, I had to get an auto-fire controller and buy a lot in spinnerbox.

Ben McGraw's Egometry » stephen fry