In Fable II, if you’re well-known you’ll attract a crowd of followers whenever you enter a town.
I never got in on the Fable game for the original Xbox, as I was too busy playing World of Warcraft or something during that time period. I ended up picking up the original game several months back for a few bucks since I figured I wanted to try it before the sequel came out. I played it for about two hours total, broken up over several various days. I had a negative initial impression on it at first, but as I played it a bit further it got a little better. The thing I disliked most about it was the game was running in basically low resolution on a 4×3 box on my LCD. It looked dated and the dialogue/humor/etc. was definitely not American. I sort of struggled to understand the nested action/expression system in the game, and it was not very intuitive.
You can laugh, flex, etc. and people you do it to give you a reaction, but the confusing thing is that when you hit the D-pad direction (left, up, or right for a different expression theme), it performs the expression but then switches to the next expression in that group. So say I want to perform a playful expression like dancing. I hit the D-Pad right and when it’s over, intuitively I would imagine that if I hit the d-pad right again, I could dance again. But no, the d-pad right action is now whistling – a different expression but one that still falls under the social category. I had a hard time grasping that for a while and didn’t like how the specific expression assigned to a button would change automatically after I used it. Regardless, I pushed on for a bit and found the combat enjoyable enough to get further into the game. But then it seemed to suddenly branch out too much and I didn’t quite care what to do next so I just stopped playing.
For this holiday season, I expected to be spending dozens of hours in one game only: Fallout 3. Fable 2 was more of an afterthought for me – after not really “getting into” the first one. But when I saw it for cheap I decided to pick it up. And I’ve discovered it’s actually pretty good.