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I may have gotten yesterday afternoon, but I’ve spent a lot of time getting videos and pictures up, and messing with the whole Pub Games ordeal (plus work, sleep, etc). It wasn’t until around 3 PM today that I actually got to sit down and start playing it to really play it, so I’m considering this the first day.

The Story (*contains mild spoilers*)

So far, the story is pretty bland to start off, and if you’ve seen the childhood intro (the 30 min videos I posted), you’d notice that it starts off similarly to Fable 1. I just get the feeling that your sibling (sister in my case) will wind being alive later in game (this is a guess, not a spoiler). After that the story is pretty much “I want to seek revenge on Lucien, and I need to unite 3 other Heroes to help me”. This might change later on in the game. It might also be different if you’re trying to take the evil route. But at the start, Theresa (the woman wearing the hood) pretty much tells you these things herself.

The Dog

I think I recall Peter Molyneux stating during an interview that his favorite addition is the dog. I don’t dislike the dog, but I don’t absolutely love it either. I can see being able to play without it just fine, but it is helpful at times. The AI works well enough that the dog doesn’t get stuck on a rock sticking out of the ground or something and he keeps up with you as long as it doesn’t find treasure. And the problem with it automatically going to the treasure is that sometimes you can’t find it when it runs off while you’re not paying attention. He’ll go around a corner or behind some rocks while the camera is pointed else where. And there’s no way to call him back that I can see. The only thing you can do is look for him, or run away until he finally runs after you to catch up.

If you teach him tricks, he’ll use them as expressions sometimes when you use expressions. I think this is supposed to work kind of like the friendly gestures in the creature stage of spore when you have allies in your pack, in that having him with you, doing a trick when you do an expression, helps gain a greater effect from the expression, such as more love, or fear, from the person your expressing to. (Did that sentence make sense?)

Teaching him new tricks or improving his combat ability or treasure finding ability simply requires you to buy or find books. All you have to do is select the book and press A, nothing else.

The World

One of the things I remember was supposed to be a big deal, along with the dog, is that the world is supposed to be much more dynamic. So far, I’m not seeing it. Maybe I just need to play it again later with an evil character to destroy a town or something. Otherwise, it seems about the same as Fable 1 in that you can kill all townspeople, buy the houses, rent them out, etc.

The world so far is much larger. It’s still split up into smaller areas like Fable 1 was. I was hoping they’d go for a large sandbox-like map (like GTA, WoW, etc where the world is one gigantic, streaming map). However, each area is huge on it’s own, which sort of makes up for it. It reminds of the difference going from Zelda: Ocarina of Time’s Hyrule to Zelda: Twilight Princess’s larger, re-imagined Hyrule .

But you still have to run long distances to get across an area. And some roads just seem unnecessarily long. You run through them the first time, collecting what ever treasure can be dug up, but after that it’s just a boring run down a generic dirt road, with the ocasional bandit or wild animal to fight.

The Combat

So far, it’s mostly the same as Fable 1. The combat multiplier is gone and replaced with this weird thing that judges how well you fought every time you collect experience orbs and it shows it to you in a percentage, such as 200% for a decently good fight, maybe 300-400% if you don’t get hit at all and mix up your attacks nicely. I generally don’t pay much attention to it.

Collecting the orbs is much easier now that it was in Fable 1, mainly because they seem to come to you no matter how far away you are when you hold down the button, and they clip right through objects so you don’t have orbs getting stuck on fence posts while you’re trying to suck them in. However, when you are sucking them in, you can’t move, no walking, no attacking, so you’re vulnerable to attack if you try to suck them in during a fight. I would have preferred it to be an auto-collect type of thing, like God of War, in that you don’t have to press a button to suck them in.

Switching between your melee and ranged weapon feels more fluid now. I don’t know how it was on the XBox version of Fable 1, but on the PC, it was Q to draw the ranged weapon, E for the melee weapon (or maybe the other way around), then mouse button to attack with whatever weapon you had out. On Fable II, it’s X to draw and attack with melee weapon, Y for ranged.
Lets say I’m playing Fable 1 on the PC. There are two enemies in the distance, so I start shooting them from afar, then one comes after me, so I draw my melee weapon and kill him, then change back to ranged to attack the other one in the distance. This would be: Q, Click, Click, E, Click, Click, Click, Q, Click, Click. Give or take some clicks. But on Fable II it’s more like: Y, Y, X, X, X, Y, Y. Much easier to execute, and makes it easier for me to mix up my attacks.

Flourishes and blocks also use the X button, which is a little weird at first, but once you get used to it, it works well. Tapping X swings your weapon, holding X blocks, and then holding X and holding LS in the direction you want to attack charges up a flourish.

Just the same, all ranged attacks are done with Y. Tapping Y shoots at whatever’s being auto-targetted. Holding Y lets you go in to a 3rd-person, over-the-should view that lets you manually aim.

I haven’t gotten much into the will powers yet as I’ve been mostly going with a mix of Strength and Skill. The spells currently available to me are:

• Shock: Which appears to send lightning bolts down on your enemies.
• Inferno: Blast a ring of fire around you. This was in Fable 1, I think.
• Time Control: Slows down time.
• Blades: Shoots magic blades at several enemies at once.
• Vortex: Creates a storm with powerful wind that knocks your enemies around. Much like Storm from X-Men.
• Chaos: This is like a confusion spell. It’s supposed to do weird things to the enemy, such as make them attack each other, run away, or supposedly even fall in love with you.
• Force Push: This is the only one I have at the moment. I think there was one similar to it in Fable 1. Its an AoE that knocks your enemies backwards. You can also focus it at a single enemy to knock them back farther than the AoE.
• Raise Dead: Simply brings corpses back to life to fight for you.

B is the button for using will powers. Just like in Fable 1, you hold it down to charge it after you get higher levels of a power. It also looks like you can only assign one power at a time. I’m not sure of this because I only have one power.
Having it assigned to B bugs me though, because sometimes I press B, out of habbit from other games to try to cancel something, and accidently use my power, scaring the townspeople nearby.

The Glowing Trail

Well, that’s what the game calls it. You migh have seen it in videos. It’s a glowing yellow line that runs on the ground to help you find where you need to go for your current quest. You can change where it points to in the Quests/Maps menu. You can set it to lead you to side quests, shops, your families, etc, but only if they’re in areas you’ve already visited before, with the exception of the main story quests I think. I have quests listed in my menu that I can’t find because the game tells me I haven’t been there before and have to find them myself.

The glowing trail works most of the time, like the dog, but sometimes doesn’t always work so well. Some times it doesn’t appear at all when it should. Several times, I’ve had it point one way, then when I turn to go that way, it instantly points in the opposite direction and doesn’t make up it’s mind until I run away from the point it was screwing up at. Every once and while it also runs right through impassible objects, such as fences and walls.

Other Notable Comparisons to Fable 1

Note: I’ve only played the PC version of Fable 1 (with the Lost Chapters).

• After a specific point early in the game, you can spend your experience points at any time, instead of having to go somewhere to do it (such as the Guild in Fable 1).
• The minimap is gone. Probably because each area is so big. There’s a map in the pause menu, but its small on my screen and I find myself never needing to look at it.
• The quest card system is gone. Instead quests seem to just appear in the Quests/Maps menu without any notification. And all that does is point you to where the quests starts. Most of the quests start at a person with gold exclamation point over it’s head, like World of Warcraft.
• No more teleporting to gates. Instead you can have your character sort of auto-walk to places you’ve already been to using the glowing trail function. For example, if you set the trail to lead you to your home, it’ll ask you if you want to go there automatically and tell you that X number of hours will pass in the game’s time. Going from Bowerstone to the 2nd town you come across skips you ahead 29 hours. It won’t always take you to the exact spot that you want to go, but it’ll put you as close as it can in that area.
• You can also hold A to sprint now, which is a big help when traversing the large areas.
• Clothing doesn’t seem to affect your defense. This maybe just because I haven’t found any real armor. Instead, your defense relies on your Toughness I think. Instead clothing is more cosemetic and allows you to customize your character. You can even use dyes on clothing to change its color. It also affects your Scariness, Attractiveness, and Cross-Dressing stats like Fable 1.
• Boasts seem to be gone (when I say ‘seem to be’ I mean I haven’t run across it yet). You can still get trophies from quests and show them off to people though.
• Fishing seems to be gone. But now you can swim! And there are spots in the water where you can dive to find treasure.
• You can also jump down ledges now.
• Silver keys are no longer found in chests and fishing spots and whatever goofy places they were hidden in in Fable 1. Instead, all the ones I’ve found so far are just floating a few inches above the ground like a platforming game collectable. And your dog can find them too. Although I usually spot them before the dog since they glow brightly. Silver chests still give you crap sometimes though. “What’s in this chest? Oh… dog treats.”

I’m sure there was more I wanted to list, but I can’t think of them right now.

Glitches

Besides the problem with the glowing trail, the only bug I’ve seen is that some 3d objects seems to just vanish at different camera angles. I’ve seens this happen to the water surface of a pond, and leaves on a large tree. That’s pretty much it though.

Conclusion

It’s still a great game. It plays a lot like Fable 1 and improves on it in many areas. However, so far it’s not the revolutionary game Peter Molyneux made it out to be.

I still need to play for a few more days. Maybe I’ll think differently after I get deeper in to it.