muladhara | (no subject)

I just beat Fable III. IT IS THE WORST GAME!

Not from the point of view that it is a bad game, because it's not. It's good. But it made me make agonising decisions which affect the lives of the pixel people and AUGH.

Though I forget how short these games are if you go straight through the plot and don't do that many sidequests. But actually I appreciate that! Longer games are OK, but there's a point where I hit maybe forty or fifty hours of gameplay and I get bored. That's possibly why I find it so hard to finish games sometimes (that said, I've beaten EIGHT games this year so far! I think that's a personal record). Anyway, yeah, I wasn't expecting to have finished it by now.

I did really badly at it (I tried to be good. It's not so easy). I'm going to replay again, eventually (because I want to save everyone. And try out alternative decisions).

Some spoilery stuff:

I hate the parts in Aurora. The part where you're going through the cave is way too creepy. And upsetting because of what happens to Walter (I actually thought the Crawler had ripped his eyes out, and I thought that was what had happened to Theresa (I was wrong - but only because I haven't played the first game. Though I'm working on that)). And then all the flavour text in the city of Aurora. *shudders*

I also hate all the decisions about what to do after your coronation. I suppose it is possible to be good and save a lot of people BUT you'd need to buy up houses really early/be ace at jobs to get enough cash. Though I suppose once the rent's rolling in, it's rolling in (although it bugs me that they nixed that you get rent for times when you're NOT playing the game. Because that would've been super handy, though easily abused, which is why it was nixed, I'm guessing).

I want to punch Reaver into oblivion. But I think that's because Stephen Fry does too good a job of making him sound like the slimy git he is. I don't remember him being this awful in II, but it's two years since I played that last.

OH AND! I did the sidequest to get the bridge rebuilt in Millfields, so you can go and visit what used to be the Gypsy camp. I totally felt all teary, and was having a moment, and was promptly ambushed by Balverines. Which kind of ruined things, as you can imagine.

Talking of crying, I totally did at the end of the game when Walter dies. I knew it was coming (spoilery track names in the soundtrack are spoilery, and also I'd read spoilers on TVT), but it still made me sad. I think I got over-attached because of Bernard Hill, lol. Also I like his and the hero's relationship. And I played a female hero, so I suppose it ticked my (adoptive)father-daughter relationship box?

I enjoyed it though, would easily play again :)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I haven't played any of the Fable games, but I've watched a friend play through the first two, and a bit of the third one, and it seems to me that each game is worse than the last one. More involved, more complex, more features to explore, but also more glitch-ridden and with more punishing the player for doing good.

I still aim to play them for myself at some point (as soon as I get copies of my own, really), and playing through the third one will be entirely new for me because of how little I've seen played, but it is hopeful, at least, to know that it's probably better than I'm fearing.

I definitely agree about the glitches (I've had a lot of floating people and some hella lag, but luckily the game hasn't actually crashed). I'd also agree about punishing the player for being good (though I didn't notice it as much in II but, as I say, it's been a while since I last played that).

I hope you enjoy them when you get to them! :)

For Fable 2, I'm mostly thinking about what a big deal they made about how your dog is your loyal companion and can help you find treasure and all that, but unless you choose to be selfish at the end, your dog stays gone and that's part of the end-game that you don't get to keep up with. So even from a completion standpoint, unless you found every puppy-assisted treasure in the game before tackling the ending, taking the non-selfish option and bringing back everyone else's loved ones results in you not being able to do everything.

I don't remember it myself, but I'm not surprised. And I can see how frustrating that is as well (I never play games to completion, but I totally do get that).

Oh and here I was gonna say from the point of view of it BEING a bad game XD; I have a problem with me saying I'm gonna keep my brother alive so we can work together and use his army and yet the game plays absolutely no different than if you were to just slice his head off instead. It's just a useless choice that boosts your morality....which ALSO doesn't actually matter in the end because I am THE biggest prick in the entire universe, I raise all the taxes to the highest degree and made all the decisions that would ruin lives, and yet the game still considers me "good" because all the extra pimpin' cash I made by charging my kingdom out the wazoo I keep dumping into the kingdom treasury and of course I have like $100+ million in there and apparently putting money in (as opposed to taking out) is considered a hugely "good" action.

So there you go. I'm the most asshole-iest King that ever existed in every way and I'm above reproach because I exploit a loophole in the game that allows me to be viewed as a benevolent god anyway. *shrug*

I found it more exciting in that game to continuously marry and bang out kids and move them all around so I can populate all the towns with my different children and then kill off the wives as I need to.

I finished my game with 221 STDs and 47 children. No joke.

Fun game, just not a good one imo XDDDDD

Well of course donating money to the treasury's a really good thing to do - you need that money to save the people (hence all the shitty decisions about taxes and so on). I do think the eventual judgement on how "good"or "bad" your character is could be better refined, and better dealt with, but I can't even imagine how that would be programmed and then executed.

I wouldn't say it's a great game, but it's certainly not the worst thing I've ever played, and I enjoyed it.

I'm not sure how well you are acquainted with the stories of Peter Molyneux, the creator of the game, but he totally claims that Fable III was a gongshow. He's a man who's outrageously ambitious and passionate and has amazing ideas--like Fable was supposed to be in general wayyyy bigger and with more freedom and unique little details that were supposed to be "revolutionary" and "unlike anything you've ever seen" but he didn't understand that games like that take not only years but billions upon billions of dollars to produce.

And not sure how much it matters to you but Godus, his project he was working on earlier in the year is apparently in ruins before it's even released because of this as well. He left Lionhead studios and tried to make it on his own, knows nothing about game development (obviously) and has pissed off people all over Kickstarter because he's gotten a bunch of funding from them and is finding that the money is just quickly disappearing because the things he wants he can't realistically have with the budget and time he laid out for it lol.

But yeah. Trying to program things like that into the Fable games would have been crazy to try to do, people don't really understand sometimes how much money it really does take to create a game. I mean knowing that I still enjoyed Fable III for what it was but at the same time I still stick to it being like "It should have been better." XD; I also agree with you that it's not the worst thing I've played, either.

Yeah, I know Molyneux's notorious for overstating what stuff his games will be able to do. Which is why I'm glad I've not been into his games at any time pre-production. The trouble is, he doesn't seem to learn from his mistakes (he's been making games for 25+ years, so you would think that he would have by now, but apparently not, because he's still saying the same sorts of things).

I think he learns (the hard way, of course) from the mistakes he's making, like he's said he obviously needed more time and he realizes he needs more money but I think the bigger problem with him is more that he is truly an ideas guy and that alone. I don't think he actually has the proper skill, nor obviously the training that an actual marketing assistant and the game developers/programmers, etc. would have. He's good at what he does, but he's not a numbers guy for sure so he kinda keeps just ballparking shit and it's always gone wrong. He's got ideas, he's not organized and he needs people to do that for him.

That being said, learning from his own specific follies in the numbers and planning isn't the same as him not learning from the mistake of "oh hey, maybe I should have hired the proper people to do the things I can't do so well." That he for sure has never seemed to learn from hahaha!

*nods* Agreed.