Fable

I tihnk it was a victim of it's own hype. As good as it is it was so long in coming and so hyped up as THE next great thing in RPGs that it sort of collapsed on itself. It didn't do everything Lionhead wanted it to do and some of that was stuff Lionhead said it WOULD do, and in gamers eyes it didn't do some things it COULD have done.

I myself haven't finished it yet becasue I suck... but I can appreciate it for what it is, and that's a very good game.

I gave it all sorts of love....I think it was a brilliant game. It was like Zelda to the next level. Sure they could've probably tweaked a few things, but all in all it was a really fun game. Def a testament to what Xbox is capable of as far as RPGs.

One word: Hype.

Not by the media or gamers, but by the game's creator. He touted it to be The Second Coming and perhaps the biggest and most epic RPG of all time.

While that probably was indeed the original intent, it fell well short of that feat.

But I do think it's a good game. If anything, those boasts were unfair to the game itself. Had it come in with lower (more realistic) expectations I'm sure it would have been much better received. Even still, it did receive some pretty good critical acclaim.

yeah there was def a good deal of hype, no question....but as far as being xbox's first real RPG attempt (at least as a blockbuster), i thought it was pretty good. it was a lot more complex than I expected, but it was still a lot of fun. IMO.

It could have something to do with the consequences being sort of questionable. Murder is better than divorce? If you kill the whole town they will reappear in a few days?

fun and fable is a weird combination to see in a sentence together. I can't think of any game more boring that was released for the x-box in the last few years - maybe tetris worlds comes to mind.

The graphics were nice, the sound was good (don't know about the score), but a lot of what there was to do in the world left me wanting something more fun, you know? Not more in the sense that there were promised features or such - but more in something engaging to do. I'd say this game was up there with Dungeon Siege as far as cruise control gaming is concerned. You really weren't so much of a participant but just some dude who presses buttons to advance to the next dull quest. It's telling that when you've reached the end of the game....you find yourself itching to play something else....where normally you should be savouring that moment that you've worked up to for the past 15-25 hours. Super Mario Saga on the gba was 12 times better than Fable - in terms of story, gameplay, and just all out fun.

Thank god I was able to get a good return on this from half.com

It was short, easy and had about 0 replay value. The RPG elements were almost non-existant, and character interaction had NO impact on the game.

If I had to compare it to anything, it wouldn't be an RPG. It was like a shitty version of RE4 or Gaiden.

It's one of those games where you get what you put into it. Personally, I love it. My first play through was about 20 hours, most of that just screwing around and looking for secrets (there's tons of them, and I could unlock very few of them...).

It's also quite fun to walk into the local school house drunk and wearing nothing but underwear while school is in session. It's also fun to get the school master drunk as he's conducting class. I need to play this again.

No, there aren't. With the exception of one bow, you can get everything in the game without even bothering to look around all that much.

If your first playthrough took 20 hours, then by RPG standards there wasn't that many secrets then.

Yep thats probably it, I'm a RPG fan and I look for more than 10-15 hours in a RPG game. Maybe if the story would blow me away, maybe if the consequences of my decisions would challenge me. Of what I been told its a ok story with good graphics and weird consequences. Its was hyped as the "next level of evolution in RPG's", its not.

Fable's not bad by any means. It's just nothing special.

I thought Fable was just fine, as did all my friends who played it. The people who fall for the hype are the same people who think the Halo series is the best FPS series ever.

Mister, I wanna shake your hand.

I rented it adn it was OK, but I enjoyed Morrowind a great deal more. Seems like there were more options/more to do.

Mongycore, you assert that Fable's boring. This is in comparison to turn-based RPGs? If you want to slay beasts by proxy, get someone else to handle the control for you while you shout a command every fifteen seconds. "Magic missile! Magic missile!"

Morrowind, Mr. Cobretti, is one of the deepest, most involved RPGs out there. It's from Bethesda, and is part of the stellar "Elder Scrolls" series. It can be very involved, but it can also be accessible to a gamer who doesn't want to spend his whole life playing it. Basically, the more you put into the game, the more you get out of it. You can be pretty much whatever character you want to be. I ended up with an acrobatic cat burglar that could jump practically 20 feet in the air from a dead start, and could shoot the wings off of a fly from a hundred yards with a crossbow.

It wasn't hype that I had a problem with, it was a 10 hour hack & slash dressed as an RPG that was the problem. The people who got taken by the hype were expecting "the greatest RPG of all time". The people who got shit on were the ones expecting an RPG at all.

Halo is the best console FPS on the market. I do concede that if a company can give me a game as fluid as Halo with a better single player campaign, I wouldn't hesitate to take the crown from Halo.

I think you would get a big kick out of Deux EX: Invisible War. FPS with a gov conspiracy angle, where you control how the whole game plays out. Multiple endings, depending who you do or don't team up with/kill off. Every element of the game can be tackled different depending how you like to play.

it's a funny thing when the wife makes you wear the wedding ring for a day....all these retards start coming out of the wood work looking for some action.

assert...I think I pretty much said Fable is the dullest game I've played in recent memory. what does this discussion have to do with turn based rpgs? Fable is an rpg game done horribly wrong. Mainly, that statement comes from the fact that the story did not do anything worth writing home about. It also has to do with the fact that, as otis stated earlier, the game is too easy. It's not that hard to come up with the strategy of using any of the assorted magics to give you an edge while you mash away at the attack buttons...defeating anyone that happens to cross your path. Golden Axe had more appeal....

why I'm wasting time with a moron who just popped into the thread for baiting purposes....consider yourself ignored.

Whoa, easy big fella! No offense meant. Golly.

Frank, if you've got a PC that can run it, I'd go for the PC version of Morrowind, along with the Bloodmoon expansion. Bloodmoon adds a new continent full of viking culture, and the ability to become a werewolf, with all sorts of cool different plot stuff. You actually have to soothe your bloodlust nightly in wolf form by killing an NPC!

It is. It added a lot of depth if you happened (by chance or by design) to become a werewolf. Every night, you'd change into wolf form, and you had to be very careful that no one saw it, or you'd be kill on sight in your normal form as well during the daytime.

If you get Morrowind Game of the Year Edition it includes Bloodmoon.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/AS...486938-2931167

Edited because that was the UK Amazon site.

I didn't know they made that for the X-Box.

Well there you go, Frank. Enjoy.

X-box RULEZ!!!! ;-)

I borrowed Fable and beat it in three days, the whole time that I was playing all I could think was "Wow, Fallout so kicks this game's ass."

Seriously, aside from graphics(which were okay, but too cartoony for my tastes) Fallout, a frelling 5+ year old game, is better than Fable in every way. Fable had boring button mash combat, Fallout had a detailed weapon system with dozens of guns and melee tools and ways to train your character. Fallout's NPCs were cool and had character, Fable's sucked. If you did something bad in a Fable town you could always pay off your fines (even for mass murder!) or run away from the laughably ineffective guards and stay out of that town for five minutes or so, if you tried to pull that shit in Fallout with anything less than power armor and a minigun you got pumped full of lead by trigger happy guards with assault rifles. Fallout had the better story. And most importantly, Fallout had touches of absurd humor and useless but fun little details.

Frank, MORROWIND:GOTY is easily my favorite RPG I've played. But the key thing to remember is patience. It's slow to build a character, but the rewards are worth it because they feel legitimately earned.

Piece of advice: if you're southeast of Vivec and you see a drunk mudcrab on an island, don't kill it. Just sayin'.

Oh, kill pretty much all of 'em. Just don't kill that one.

have fun with the cliff racers...

And remember, if a villager hits you first, you can murder the SHIT out of him without legal repercussions.

Morrowind, though it's a great game, is not for the casual rpg-er. There are TONS of conversations, and you'll often have to ask the same questions over and over to different people in order to get the information you seek. Keeping track of quest goals can be difficult if not downright frustrating. Combat is simple and not exactly engaging. Spells are great, and the sheer variety of them and the ability to create your own adds much to it, but again, it can be daunting. The map is enormous, travel can be difficult, and finding a particular quest-related building, cave or dungeon is often trial-and-error. The game is deep, but there's not much to interest a casual dungeon-crawler.

I'm betting you'd have liked Fable a lot more.

It's the inevitable trade-off of RPGs. If the world is small, like Fable, everything feels too easy. One minute you're a fourteen-year-old kid with a dull practice sword, a few hours later you're a world-renowned explorer with Excalibur and hellhounds at your beck and call. Huh? I wonder why no one else bothered to conquer the world before me... seems like a weekend project.

On the other hand, in large scale games like Morrowind, the gameworld does a much better job of matching the scope of the real world. That means... well, you spend a lot of time doing mundane things like travelling and talking... like the real world, after all. The payoff comes much later. Because in Morrowind, when you kill a god (and you CAN kill gods) you feel like you've accomplished something epic. You understand why no one else has done it in the gameworld, because it was long and hard as hell. Also, in a game like Morrowind you can attempt things no one else may have done... Finding every goddamned island, or killing literally everyone in the game (thousands of NPCs), or stealing all the gold in the game without being caught... etc. Small achievements (killing some rats) serve to give proper perspective to the large in-game achievements (attacking Almalexia). And after all that there's the vast universe of mods, assuming you're playing on PC...

That doesn't make killing rats less boring. But, for true immersion, nothing else but those mundane details really sell the gameworld.

What makes Morrowind great is that you can really and truly strike out on your own path, which games like Fable don't allow. You can be the character you want to be.

I'm sorry, we really should've warned you that it's not a fast-paced kind of game.

Recently started re-playing through Morrowind with a completely amoral PC than the last time (a High Elf Spellsword, currently around Level 68). Now I'm running a furry-coiffed custom class Khajiit assassin-type, and am having a blast once again backstabbing, pillaging, murdering, and generally being a world-class grade-A cock-munch.

Didn't join the Thieves' Guild at all the last time 'round (rose to the tops of both the Fighters' and Mages' factions, as well as the Imperial Legion)...so it's nice to play things a bit differently this time. One story from my last character that perhaps some of you folks might relate to:

Was working my way through the House Hlaalu quests, and one of the high-end nobles in Caldera (in the Guv'nor's Mansion) starts to assign me a quest that entails ebony smuggling to a guy in Ald'ruhn...only I'd already killed the guy much earlier on in the game.

Y'see, back when I was pilfering every residence I came across for every little, tiny item I could hock to obtain my, ummm...skooma fix...I stole some Dwemer artifacts from this guy's place and sold them. Later on, when completing the Legion quests, one of the fort commanders tells me to go and obtain these same Dwemer items as "evidence" that this dude was an illicit smuggler.

Dug myself into a dilly of a shithole, now.

Couldn't track down the Dwemer items at any store, including my usual fences -- this was probably late enough into the game that their inventories had already "respawned" back to their original stocks. Thought I would try and "plant" some Dwarf items that I already had access to in his house, and -- GASP!! -- "discover" them.

Turns out, after going to the crate that once upon a time contained the artifacts, and replacing them with the new ones, that the guy DID take unkindly to me doing that, and chased me out the door in a huff. Thought maybe I had a chance at finishing this one up, after all.

No such luck. Back at the fort, when I presented the Legion commander with my "evidence," it made no difference whatsoever -- she was still giving me the same orders I started out with. Evidently you have to
possess the original items from his actual house, elsewise the game doesn't even "count" them as being bona fide for the purposes of the quest.

Crapola.

So, desperate to resolve this quest and ascend ever further in the Legion ranks, I butchered the guy in his own home. The fortress leader was a bit...dismayed...by my choice of conflict resolution, but she accepted it, and gave me my next assignment.

And I got knighted, eventually.

Problem was, once I began running errands for House Hlaalu, things finally came back to bite me in the ass. Mr. Light-in-the-Loafers Himself, Crassius Curio in Vivec, had me keeping tabs on the aforementioned Caldera guy, who gave me that ebony-smuggling quest I referred to earlier. And unfortunately, his erstwhile contact in Ald'ruhn just *happened* to be...you guessed it. So now, here I am, having finished circa 90% of the other Hlaalu quests, constructed my stronghold near Balmora, etc...only according to the walkthrough at Gamespot, Crassius Curio still has several quests to assign me, but hasn't done so yet.

...Anyway.

Just started playing Fable: The Lost Chapters on my 360 and I'm having a blast. I'm only a little way in so far but the tone, art design and score are really making me enjoy the time I spend with the game. I also like the fact that improving strenght and toughness makes your character look bigger whereas sneak and other stuff makes your character a lot more gaunt. It's certainly not as clever as Morrowind or Oblivion but it is a lot easier and prettier.

Anything's pretier than Morrowind.

Fable was damn addictive, and I'm really looking forward to the sequel.