Over the past few weeks, I have settled into a relatively nice gaming routine. With no MMO taking up the majority of my time as of late, and my desire to play Team Fortress 2 in a rut, I have settled with my Xbox 360. Thankfully for me, Swaptree trading and a few games borrowed from friends have been good to me, and as a result I have been able to play Fable II and Grand Theft Auto IV.
Now both games are ones in which there is a pleathora of things for the gamer to do. Fable II focuses back in on the choice between Good and Evil, and how your choices shape the world. In the original Fable, the developers over promises and under delivered by a significant margin. The talk of doing anything and everything was pretty much given way to either killing everyone in the world and becoming evil, or not killing everyone in the world and being a saint.
In addition the gameplay left much to be desired. You had the option of favoring melee, ranged or magic combat, but really there was only one option to be had. You had to get a good melee weapon and just smash shit, because ranged combat just didn’t hurt as much, and magic spells felt worthless and took too much time to cycle between them. So in the end everyone was decked out with mauls and warhammers and you just clicked on the attack button until everyone died. Plus they had this ridiculous system of you would take on a mission and be required to bet on how well you would perform it, and depending on whether you lived up to it or not, you got better gear. Overall, it was fun for a few hours but I ultimatley put the game down.
So what made Fable II so fantastic in my opinon? Tough to say but I really felt like I had a hand in the world and that I could do a ton of shit. Just for a small list of things that I loved?
- Being able to marry any girl (or guy) in the game with clear indication of what they liked in a person and what they disliked.
- Buy ANY house or business in the game, taking any of them for my house or renting them out.
- Giving money to businessmen, and watch them turn a shit pile of a town, into a thriving city.
- Combat that is a perfect blend of melee, ranged and magic, making each of them worthwhile.
- Following around and playing with my dog, who turned out to truly be my best friend.
- Being able to have a son with my wife, and watch him grow up and taking him to go see the world.
Overall, while the main plotline was very short, Fable II was super fun. Whenever I was put into a situation where they wanted me to do evil, and I worked against them and did good, I lost Experience as punishment. You felt the choices you made had definite consequences and I appreciate the effort that went into the programming. Granted a lot of the jobs you did in the game were very much casual gamer type of stuff, but that didn’t bother me as much.
Now on the other hand, Grand Theft Auto IV just pissed me off to no end. It was like Fable in that it’s a huge world where you can do anything, but I think it suffers most from having put out so many iterations of itself. There was #3, then Vice City, San Andreas, etc. So many versions of the game that despite how great GTAIV looks, I was just bored instantly. I’ve done all this before, and there’s no consequences to what I do. I can just slam into a police car and they won’t care. I run over people in the streets, nothing happens. It’s all bullshit and boring. I will be swaptreeing it away.
Now though I’ve started up with Fallout 3 and it plays like Morrowind and Fable. So big expansive world that you can explore, along with a morality system. Right now based on what I’ve played, I think this will be good.
So what have I learned? Lots of games are moving towards the idea that they want you to feel the freedom of doing whatever you want. That’s all well and good but give me some damn consequences. Without that, I’ll just get bored and throw your game away.
