This weekend a product got me back in to blogging, but for all the wrong reasons. I had been looking forward to playing Fable 2 and really getting back to my RPG routes, I had this amazing vision of the next generation of Oblivion. In fact for all the sales hype from Peter Molyneux you would have believed we were witnessing the dawn of a new age in gaming, but as has been the case in recent years his claims have again proved to be completely unfounded.

So after putting a lot of my time into playing this game, (and I only continued as all the reviews said it got better as you went along). I felt I needed to put down in writing what I think really sucks.

1. Disjointed World

The world in general feels very disjointed - maybe because there are load screens (how 80’s is that?) but the world does not feel well put together and at no point during playing it did I feel well orientated, e.g. if I go north I find this, or go east a bit and I will find a castle. Again this may be because in Fable you always follow a path and cannot go cross country.

2. Repetition Makes Good Gameplay?

Am I really expected to sit in front of a swinging meter that I have to press a single button to stop to simulate me fashioning a sword? So I get to be a level 3 blacksmith (after a good 30 minutes of MINDLESS boredom) - and I have made a decent amount of cash (totally unbalanced amount in comparison to what you get from quests at the stage I was in the game.) - I get to another town and I am asked if I want to do the same for cutting logs? I laughed myself silly.

It is not even as if I get a special weapon for doing this? or that what I am making goes into the stores of the blacksmith, it really feels pointless.

3. No Mini Map

I watched a few interviews in which Mr M ranted about the virtues of not having a mini-map and that mainstream players did not understand them, I think this is a complete and utter lie, they did it because each area is small and a mini-map would have shown that off badly. The map on the pause page is static and is really hard to navigate, so if I cannot work it out, how is a mainstream player going to?

4. Missions repetitive

Apart from the core storyline the side missions are all really simplistic and repetitive, e.g. rescue the slaves, kill the robbers. And because you can just skip to a region you lose sense of location never have any adventures along the way, this is partly responsible for why the game is over in such short order (12 hours or less)

5. Morale decisions have no meaning

How over hyped was this again? The decisions like first time round are purely black and white, save the slaves or resell them to some else. The game has no conversation trees so all you get is yes/no decisions to make along the way and during any one quest you have to make only a few decisions and none feel like they have had any long term effect.

6. The Golden trail of Dispair

In a game like Oblivion when you get given a quest you can go around and talk to anyone most of the time they will have something useful to say to assist in the completion of the quest. The ‘follow the golden trail’ totally destroys any feeling of adventure - as you just follow the trail to the next objective - you are never encouraged along the way to interact with anyone else.

7. Dog sucks

How much was this dog over hyped? It has no gameplay value whatsoever, in fact its core ability of helping you find things actually contributes to Fables woes, and walking along a path seeing a big chest on the path and your dog runs up to it with a ‘treasure’ icon above its head is just stupid, like ‘I can bloody see the chest you idiot’. (oh and btw - chests on paths for no reason? other than the designers couldnt think of anywhere else to put them.)

Never did he actually help in any fighting that was useful (and I levelled him up a lot) - but he really was just a pain.

8. Economy, What Economy?

Much has also been made of the ability to buy every building in the world and other monetary elements that make you feel that the world has a true economy. I have really no idea if the claims of market economy are true because the game was over before it began, by the time I was rich enough to get involved in understanding the -cough- ‘complexities’ of each towns economy I was basically at the end of the game. I was also meant to be able to make money by trading items between towns, but frankly the interface to buy stuff is clunky - and that most shops only ever sell ‘one’ of each thing meant the money could be made far easier using the mindnumbing blacksmithing / woodchopping / headbanging.

9. Gameplay Balance Terrible

About 6 hours into the game I managed to purchase a sword for about 15,000 gold which served me all the way to the end of the game, I never ever felt under real threat from any bad guys as I just spammed the spells, no mana? no gameplay. I also never got to level 5 spells and I really did not need them. The interface for selecting spells is just so simplistic to make it very boring indeed, again having the ability to constantly cast spells is fun for 10 minutes, but its like using a cheat code - its fun for a while and then you realise you have spoilt the feeling that you need to work at something to get stronger.

10. Terrible Ending

When they ending came my Wife turned to me (who happened to be watching at the time) and said ‘Is that it?’ - I sat in stunned silence, the final fight was beyond pathetic (I won’t -cough- spoilt it for you). And then I was made to make a single ‘moral’ decision that would affect what happened next, what was the point? I wasn’t going to play the game any further afterwards, and especially in my case the decision I made meant that everything in the world was practically worthless (spoiler warning: I got 1,000,000 gold - which meant I could buy anything which basically meant any further adventuring totally pointless, I could buy anything I wanted, including the castle. This also means that any further add-ons will be pointless)

Reviews

I really could go on, every aspect of the game falls well short of expectations and this comes back to one point, how the hell did this get all the great reviews? either Microsoft did amazing job on all the games reviewers or I am mistaken?

Funnily enough my wife started playing Oblivion a day after I finished Fable 2 (she watched me play Oblivion when I first got it when it was released and she was a massive fan of Morrowwind) - well she has been playing the game about 12 hours (time it takes to finish Fable 2) - and she has barely got out of the initial first story line!

Fallout 3 turns up in the post tomorrow (fingers crossed) - lets hope for something better…

If you disagree please leave a comment, or come give me abuse on twitter