Sometimes I don’t get around to playing a game until it’s been out quite some time. This is because I typically do not have access to the latest games for a while. Maybe this will eventually change but until then, here’s some old news about some almost recent-ish games.
First is Fable II, in some ways better, and some ways worse than Fable. I believe each game had an opinion on how you were to behave. For example, in the first game, you are expected to be evil. By coincidence, I decided to be the nicest guy to walk the streets of Albion only to find that.. wow the spell check actually recognizes Albion as being spelled correctly. Anyways, I found that the game almost tried to force my character to be evil. I talk to a shopkeeper, and he would twitch slightly, causing me to steal his precious apple from the counter, and get fined by the guards. I stop to look something up, and get arrested for standing in the shop past nightfall because I forgot to pause.
Well, in Fable 2, I decided to screw the law, and play how I wanted my character to. I made one character, and found that he just wound up being leashed to a storyline that caused him to kill bandits left and right to go where he needed and perform good deeds every time I turned around, for every one evil quest, there were 4 good quests, and they usually paid more.
By the time I had gotten out of the spire, my character looked more like a 600 pound blob running around, because at one point I got stuck one time in a position where I had almost no HP and no potion shop in town, forcing me to down several beers to restore my health. I even got a title for being so fat, yet that was the only time my character really ever ate anything in the game. Even running around day in and day out did nothing to reduce his fat. It turns out that unlike Fable, Fable II requires you to eat certain foods to lose weight and that is it.
Well, dissatisfied with my character’s railroaded good alignment I decided to make a new character, female this time so I had something more pleasant to look at while playing. In this case, I was going to be a completely selfish character, not going on wanton murdering sprees, but not really sticking her neck out for somebody without the promise of gold either.
First thing I notice, is that again, there are hardly any evil jobs to do. At first she ended up racking up a large amount of good points before ever getting a chance to do anything evil. To counteract this, I made a statue of her pointing and laughing at the town. Emotes are an odd thing in this game though, anybody who is near you is effected by your emotes, and everybody who passes by will stop and stare at you.
This resulted in a situation where I had taken a job to kidnap somebody and sell them into labor. I go find a person matching the discription and start emoting, by the time I have him like my character enough, suddenly I have a crowd of 18 people who now think I’m a saint. I then head over to the temple of light, and find that somehow one of their monks is in love with my character, and so decide to go sacrifice him for being too much of a pacifist to be helpful when danger is around yet will gladly break any abstinence vows for some random adventurer.
I check my alignment, and I am considered a purist. Even after going to the spire, which I won’t give specifics on to avoid spoilers, I did every evil thing I could, my good/evil alignment was still neutral, with my corrupt/pure meter showing more towards pure.
In the spire, you get your head shaved and get bulky ugly armor as a uniform, honestly, it made her look like a male character for that entire segment. By the time I got back to land, I checked with the freakishly huge Hammer, to find my character was about the same size as her.
I checked, apparently improving your melee combat skills forces your character to ‘gain muscle’ and not in a healthy toned way, but the blocky, clunky, and bulky muscles that make her no longer look like a slender fencer with a small side arm, and more like a behemoth with inappropriately tiny weapons.
This is a point that the game seems to utterly fail at, is that there is no limit on how much your skill effects your physical appearance. If you want a thin character, they can’t melee. Willpower’s lines look good at first, but by the time I mastered my inferno spell I had so many lines all over my character’s body I could no longer tell if she was supposed to be tan or blue.
I did like though how you now hold down the button to accept quests, and steal things, its not quite a confirmation prompt but it is a lot harder to steal by accident. Though having it be the same button as sprint makes the mildly annoying, but much more tolerable situation of being forced to run slowly if you go near a quest or job starting point.
What I would suggest about this game that would improve would be
1: A way to adjust the level of effect your skills have on your appearance. While alignment is optional, most of the time you do need to put points into all of your skills, or at least two of them to get good exp bonuses and win fights faster.
2: Multiple storylines. The last game wanted to force you to be evil, by offering ‘you can be evil and get this great thing, or good and get nothing’ repeatedly, as well as making it too easy to break the law. This game makes it too easy to get away with anything if you do misbehave, and then loads you up with tons of good alignment points to keep you from being evil if you don’t blatantly butcher everybody in town once or twice.
I’d like to see a good and evil storyline, so that you can choose to either destroy the world or save it, rather than following the same path and just choosing at the end what to do. Possibly a neutral storyline as well.
Combat is reasonably fun, and I like how it is easier to switch attack methods while fighting, even if it does make your character a 600 pound body builder to pick up a sword. I haven’t completed the full storyline, but it seems fairly straight forward, and not extraordinarily deep, which I did find to be a little disappointing. Overall though its a decent game, just that it doesn’t deliver to expectations in the categories it seems to promise greatness in.