samutzCom

New patch out today, but I have no idea what this one does. Co-op was already available from the patch I downloaded last Thursday.

Joystiq says that there are rumors that this patch makes you corrupt if you cheated:

“Although unconfirmed, we’ve heard various sources say that those who cheated at Pub Games start the game with full corruption, rendering you quite hideous in appearance.”

At the moment, I don’t believe this to be true, because you don’t start the game with your Pub Game earnings. You have to merge your patron with your new character after the childhood intro. Also, my character is still 100% Pure and Good after applying the patch. I’ve had him standing around Bowerstone Market (unpaused) for the past half an hour while I look for info on the web, and nothing has changed on him.

Update: Went back in to Pub Games, cheated up 50k, went back to Fable II. Still nothing changed.

This ends my coverage of pre-release Fable II info.

The game is out now and everyone can finally play it for themselves. Enjoy the game!

I’ve already started posting info on various achievements at Achievement Hunter. If I didn’t post on one, it’s either an obvious/easy one to get or I haven’t gotten it yet.

Edit: As if it wasn’t bad enough that the Rooster Teeth sites go down every Monday from people waiting for the latest RvB, but it seems they also chose tonight to update the site to the new version they’ve been working on, further increasing downtime and slowness.

Cheating in the Past

The glitch was an accident. It would not have been patched if they wanted it to be there. LH didn’t know about the glitch, so they couldn’t have been tracking it.

Your gold count is stored on your 360, not on XBL’s or LH’s servers. This is proven because I’ve been playing Pub Games without the patched version. The 360 does not let you play a game on XBL unless it’s got the latest patch for that game. If you select not to patch it, you are forced to play it without being logged in. So while you are playing and earning gold on your unpatched, untracked, and disconnected version of Pub Games, no data is being sent back to MS or LH.

A lot of people have been suggesting that there will be a patch on release day for Fable II or later that will know that you cheated. Again, I don’t believe there’s anything in your save file that says your cheated. So Fable II couldn’t know.

Cheating in the Future

I thought for sure that the release disc would include something so that you could only transfer gold and items from the patched version of Pub Games, and if you had the original, unpatched version it would make you update it first. But they didn’t. They could still release a patch that does this, but you can remove your patches whenever you wanted to cheat.

The only way they could stop you from cheating now is:

1. The Pub Games you download from XBLA could already be patched, if you didn’t have the original unpatched one already.
2. MS could remove the ability to remove patches/updates from your harddrive (which could happen with the NXE, I suppose).
3. Later Fable II discs come pre-patched to not allow gold from the unpatched Pub Games.

If anyone has any other ideas of how things could go wrong, let me know (post a comment). I might be overlooking something, but the more and more people ask about it, the more thought I’ve put in to it, and I am certain that MS and LH won’t know you cheated.

Setsuna pointed out that the chest I found earlier is actually where you go to redeem the prizes you get from the Fable II: A Hero’s Tale website. I checked it out this morning and was able to redeem all the prizes by playing the mini-story again and choosing different paths. However, the prizes don’t seem to appear in the game instantly. I had to reboot the 360 before they would appear. It may be that you only have to restart the game. You also have to be logged into XBox.com for it to send you the items. Otherwise the website returns a “Page Cannot Be Found” error.

Thanks Setsuna.

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.

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It finally gave me my items when I went to a Game Master in Bowerstone. I started to play Keystone with him, then changed my mind can cashed out. Upon loading Bowerstone, the game gave me my 5 items. Still no penalties that I’ve seen.

I soon found a better gun from the Blacksmith though. The will potion was handy, as it gave me about 3000 will points. The Hghroller’s Coat just adds +5% Attractiveness. The dog book teaches your dog to do a back flip. The hairstyle card adds 10% Attractiveness.

This speculation has been debunked. See: Fable II: A Hero’s Tale Website Prizes

By the looks of this screenshot, it may be possible to transfer your items from the XBox version of Fable (original or Lost Chapters). I can’t find any info on it on fable2.com. This may have already been reported somewhere, but it’s the first I’ve heard of it.

I have won all 5 of the items from the Fortune’s Tower tourneys, however they do not appear in the game. I read the manual and it only says that I can use the items in Fable II, but does not say how. It does say that you need an XBL Gold account to transfer gold and items, which I do. So I thought perhaps I needed to update Pub Games to get them.

So I patched my Pub Games. Everything so far as stayed the same except I can no longer cheat. I loaded up Fable II and still had my gold, but still no new items. So I removed my updates (see below), cheated up about 20,000 more gold, loaded Fable II, and my new gold appeared there as well, but still no new items. Perhaps I need to collect them from some one or some place in the game. Or it could be a bug in the game.

I’ll post another update later if I do find them.

I also wanted to note that there is already an update for Fable II. This update is to add/enable the online co-op feature that was originally announced to not be available at release, but later announced to have made it in time.

Anyway, I do believe now that the exploit was not intentionally added to Pub Games. I think it was an actual glitch, otherwise it would not have been patched. Lionhead and Microsoft should not have anyway of knowing if you cheated or not.

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Since I’m waiting for video to upload to YouTube, I loaded Pub Games with XBLive disconnected (I don’t know if there’s a patch yet, but I don’t want to take the chance) and merged my new character with Poe, the one I used to gain over 100,000 gold in Pub Games. I was charged 500 gold for the merging and wasn’t told of any penalty. I then played Fortune’s Tower a bit and earned around 4-5 thousand gold using the exploit. Went back to the XBox dashboard, reconnected to Live, and loaded Fable II. Loaded my character and sure enough, the gold is there. Checked my alignment, and I’m still slightly good from my previous good deeds.