First Fable II: Game Episode is live News

More free things please:D

This is a rather good idea. Sort of like a return to the level limited shareware that was so common way back.

Woo Fable!

bet it will be cheaper to pick this up new than download all the episodes.

Wicked idea. I love it. When I find myself bored one day with nothing else to do - this will be my friend.

i liked it to start with until it became rapidly apparent that it was a very linear game, and not the more open game that reviews etc seemed to suggest

Will buying the full title by episode cost more than the full boxed edition on Amazon (about £16)?

If nothing else, I welcome the return of the extended shareware "demo".

First bit of Fable II for free? I think I'll have some of that :)

I like that it's a new way to go about downloadable games. It's not like they can string it out for hundreds of episodes, we know just now it'll be 5. Curious to see how this'll work out for Lionhead, but I'm certainly grateful for the free chunk of game.

EDIT: I had a bit of trouble using that link since it's the US one. Not that it's much difference, but should you need the UK one:
http://marketplace.xbox.com/en-gb/games/...

Fable 2 isn't a linear game by any means. If you're the sort of person who will zip through the main quest line without wandering off the beaten path, you'll finish it quickly. If you run around doing side quests it'll last a fair bit longer. If you actually play around with world, you can spend hours without progressing things one bit.

The Fable games are some of my favourite console titles ever, but I can totally understand why people don't like them. You need to have the right "videogames as toys to play with" mindset or they'll just come across as short, pretty action RPGs.

Fable is Peter Molyneux's Shenmue, albeit not quite as charming.

i know what you are saying, and that is what i was expecting. Just didn't seem like that at all to me. From only being able to follow set paths physically (i.e. not roam around in the countryside) to the other mini-game sort of things. I just sort of stopped playing it, maybe i'll try again soon

I see the future, and it's full of things like this...

Also, Fable is great.

@tachometer I totally disagree. Fallout 3 was made for the more jaded players but Fable can be played by almost all.

Did somebody just put "PressAtowinable II" and "Shenmue" in the same sentence?

How much for installments?

Microsoft might want to offer their users an affordable hard drive upgrade so people can actually give them money for things like this. But as long as Microsoft's "On Demand" stuff is so ridiculously overpriced (as well) I guess hard drive space won't really be a problem for me.

I approve of this free episode though.

This is a very interesting idea, I hope it goes well for them.

"It is an atrociously overrated game with a ludicrously pedestrian story and non-existent characters. What the hell is wrong with everyone? Why can't anyone else see it?"

OH NOES, WHY DOESN'T THE REST OF THE WORLD SEE IT MY WAY WHEN I'M CLEARLY RIGHT?!

Seriously. ¬_¬

So I can download this free bit and then be able to play the add on without having to rebuy a copy? If this is true that's awesome... if not I'm just stupid and misread it. Would my save load up in the DLC though? This could be sweet if I had a bigger hard drive! 20(13)Gb fills up pretty fast!

SHAREWARE FTW

@MrED209
Very well said. Unlike the first game, Fable 2 wasn't even over hyped. There wasn't all that much press about it, and when they did announce new features, we always had gameplay videos. If people were disappointed this time, it was purely because THEY wanted it to be something it's not trying to be.

It's a fun, rather trivial action adventure game, that I personally enjoyed a lot and got a lot of playtime out of. I'd like to see a bit more depth added to certain aspects for the sequel, but it most certainly does not need to try and be the Elder Scrolls/Fallout.

Buying the new GoTY version would be much cheaper in the long run, but it's nice to be able to download the first part of it as a demo to try it out.

I loved both Fable and Fable 2, infact I'll go as far as saying I found a good portion of Fable 2 to be.... charming.

So, haters can STFU and GTFO ;)

"It is an atrociously overrated game with a ludicrously pedestrian story and non-existent characters. What the hell is wrong with everyone? Why can't anyone else see it?"

Either A) because everybody else is completely and utterly wrong, B) because you are completely and utterly wrong, or C) because people have wildly differing tastes, and not everyone likes the games you like, or the bands you listen to, or the films you watch, or the books you read, or the food you like etc, and every one of them probably has a bloody good reason why they like what they like and not what you like, and that if you think the answer is A there's a bloody good chance you're either extremely arrogant, incredibly insecure, or just a complete prick.

Its a great idea, I downloaded it earlier today. Only problem with it, is that it 'saves' your acheivements until you have downloaded episode 2. I'm probably going to buy this now anyway in the shops, so it worked. More developers (especially RPG's) should do this IMO. My perception of the game before I played it was very negative, I didn't have any interest in at all. After completing the childhood section, I was ready to buy the full game. This works better than a demo.

@ Tachometer:

Actually, Fallout 3 should have been more like Fable 2. What was the point of even creating a character in Fallout 3? Your choices didn't have any real impact, neither visually nor gameplay-wise as the 3rd person viewpoint was everything but workable. Never have I felt so distanced from the hero I'm supposed to be playing. Both great games, mind you, only with different strengths and weaknesses.

I finished it 2 days ago, and I didn't think it was that great TBH. It suffers from the same problem a lot of action RPGs do, i.e about 3 hours in you are massivly overpowered and can destroy pretty much any opponent with ease.

All of the other stuff, whilst nice, boiled down to basically just fluff, inconsequencial and pointless. By the time you could get the good weapons and equipment there was no point having it. The ability to give NPCs nicknames, why? the dog got on my tits too.

But maybe it's just me being a miserable old git and not playing along with the developers 'vision'.

@vibrating donkey:

"Microsoft might want to offer their users an affordable hard drive upgrade so people can actually give them money for things like this."

It does seem a bit counter-intuitive. We will drip content to the consumer so they don't mind ultimatrely paying more over time by comfortably and constantly leaking a steady stream of micro-charges, and we will charge them a insultingly painful upfront cost to do it! BRILLIANT!!

"Where can we hide this ice cube to protect it from the fire?"
"Let's put it in the refridgerator!"
"Great idea! Now where do we put the refrigerator?"
" . . . How about the volcano?"
"Yes! The fire will never make it through all that magma!!"

Great idea! I never played Fable I might try that....

.....Oh, sorry Lionhead my HDD is full so I can't use the Marketplace even for free stuff. You may of enticed me me to buy your game but MS are intent on ripping me off on a HDD so I am not gonna upgrade. Sorry about that....

If you whack the same thing out on PC and I'll take a look though.

I don't see the relevance of being able to pull faces at a bunch of npc's

"I don't see the relevance of being able to pull faces at a bunch of npc's "

Then you obviously don't have a soul, and I suspect you are a very unhappy person in real life.

If everything in games was strictly functional then games would be really fucking boring.

nice idea - though I really don't know how something that can be played in a non-linear fashion'll work when cut up, but I'd guess that big story cues will be absent meaning the paths and areas that they open up and the ascosiated better gear will require the next cucnk of game to play.

it's just a shame the childhood section of the game is the weakest part and features the most hand-holding. But it's not as if the game could just give you a portion in the middle..

Does anyone know how the non-story parts work in this downloadable version?

For example can you shoot the gargoyles and buy all properties from the initial free version? What about the side quests?

If these are blocked out until certain episodes then it surely will destroy some of the open nature of the game.

I don't care so much my self as I've already played through it and loved every minute of it, but I might recommend this to others.

Fable 2 was great not because of it's easyness or it's length or its combat. It was great because it was fucking CHARMING. Like a cross between the Labyrinth and Blackadder. What might have been a generic main storyline was polished by adding some nice features that you don't often see in games such as deciding between making a young girl ugly or taking that upon your own character, or being tortured and having it represented as skill drain. In fact the whole going away for 10 years thing was fantastic!

@SpaceMidget75

Didn't you get the memo? Games are no longer about enjoyment. Side-quests, pointless but fun activities and collectables do not put extra pixels on the screen, so they are actually negative qualities.

It makes no odds that there is enough to do and see in Albion to last 30 or even 40 hours or more, because you can barrel through the campaign in about 6 hours and that means the game, and by extension anyone who has even smelled it, is rubbish.

I guess we were just born in a different era to the current crop of emo, A.D.D. gamers.

I really enjoyed fable 2 until it ground to a sudden halt and finished when it had barely begun. As such I havent gone back to it since and refuse to pay money for DLC to expand it to the length of a normal game.... but if the game is free, I can't relaly complain....

Wait how much will the other episodes be??

A big ol' lol @ farticusmaximus, well said.

No doubt this will be a failure as it was about where this first "episode" ends that I started regretting buying Fable 2 and buying a bigger HDD to install it onto. And no doubt I'll get huge negative feedback because the fact it was made by Molyneux/features the world's most pointless dog/has appalling sub-Python humour counterbalances the hateful characters, broken controls, rubbish combat, mindnumbing minigames, gibberish story, terrible menus and all the other massive problems that ensure it fails as any sort of game be it epic adventure, RPG, "just some light fun" or whatever else you try to justify its failings to yourself as. So go on, the big red minus button is right there, push it in your righteous fury at my slagging off your precious shit game. because I am really that sort of sad cunt who still has to whinge about how bad it was, which incidentally is entirely different from the sort of sad cunt who still has to cheer it on a year later.

@metalangel

I am marking you down.

Not because you don't like the game, but because you can't express your opinions (and that's all they are, opinions not facts) without sounding like a petulant teenager.

Good idea of chopping the game up into pieces, now you can skip the incredibly formulaic and ho-hum first three-quarters, and go right to the somewhat new and interesting bits.

Saves you a lot of time so that you can play RPGs that are not a dime a dozen, such as Fallout 3 and Mass Effect.

@Ashen-sugar: Marking someone down because they express a valid point in a way you don't care for, AND making a point of telling them this too... Well, I leave it to you to decide what I think that makes you ;)

Don't get me wrong I didn't barrel through the main quest, I took time to go off the beaten track, but ultimately the side quests boiled down to 'goto area on map, kill everything' or 'goto area on map, follow dog, dig' with few exceptions (and I completed a fair few of the side quests). I may give it a spin being bad, but if I do, I don't anticipate finishing it a second time.

@mattigan

The treasure hunt quests required you to work out which area to go to before your dog would pick up the trail.

The demon doors required you to work out a riddle then perform an action for a reward.

The statue quests, the shooting range, the ghost statue, etc, etc, etc...

Just a few quests/quest types that do not just involve 'go here, kill this' or 'go here, dig this up' from memory. I'm sure there are more.

It's amazing how generalisations break down when you analyse them isnt it?

@Ashen-Shugar:

To be fair, all of those quests involve you being somewhere on the map, so there is some form of "going" involved. And once you get somewhere, you usually have to do "something".

So really, they are completely 100% identical.

Oh! and all the sidequests involve the controller in some way. Totally identical.

if you want to boil all games down to such simplicity then every game in the world is a repetitive jab of buttons.

My only real problems with Fable 2 were the length (huge problem) and travelling through the linear world. I get fed up of passing the exact same spots and the exact same group of bandits "surprise " attacking me. How lame.