Fable 2 - Hands On Preview

The last time we saw Fable 2 was at Microsoft's Spring Showcase earlier this year when Peter Molyneux took us through the opening section of the game where you play as a child in the slums of Bowerstone. For a more detailed take on this fiery birth checkout our First Look, but here's a brief summary to get you up to speed:

At the start of the game Bowerstone is a slum full of orphans, drunks, and dodgy dealings with a distinctly Dickensian feel. It's a far cry from the idyllic setting of Fable 1's basic tutorial with a seedier Victorian styling rather than the Hobbiton-esque surroundings of the first game. That said, Fable's particular brand of fantasy still underpins the mood. You play as one of these orphans alongside your sister Rose and the main quest is to buy a magic box by following a trail of five arrest permits lost by the town guard. A few side quests arise as you do so, opening up the first basic moral choices that will lead you down varying paths in the game. Lionhead has purposefully made the morality of these choices stand out at this early stage, but don't expect the same spoon-feeding as the game progresses.

Once you and Rose purchase and use the magic box, you're then led to the Castle overlooking Bowerstone. Lord Lucien has requested your presence, although you soon find out the lord of the manor's motives are not as pure as a small child might assume. We won't spill any plot spoilers at this point because they're simply too good to ruin, but suffice to say that a mysterious woman called Theresa (who seems to act as a kind of narrative for the game) has to nurse you back to health and, after a long recoup, the main section of the game opens up.

The Old Tomb

When we next meet Little Sparrow, Fable 2's protagonist, he's a young adult. Having recovered in a gypsy camp under the watchful eye of Theresa, Little Sparrow now has to take the journey to becoming a warrior. After a short trot over to a nearby chest where the first items to fill your inventory are made available (a basic sword, crossbow, and various potions/elixirs), Theresa then leads you to Bower Lake (along with a dog who's followed you since Bowerstone) and the mystical Old Tomb where you'll become a hero.

Situated in the middle of Bower Lake, the Old Tomb is as much a rite of passage as it is your introduction to Fable 2's combat. The one button combat system certainly starts off simplistically with a lock-on system that's pretty fluid and intuitive, while mastering the X and Y buttons for melee and ranged attacks takes all of two seconds. As you pass through the Old Tomb the majority of attacks come from super-sized beetles, which are pretty easy to dispense with, while picking up the orbs they leave behind by holding the trigger button harvests XP automatically.

The first rungs of the XP ladder increased the effectiveness of our weapons, adding both power and accuracy to arrows and sword swipes. We didn't get a chance to get further down the XP tree with the weapons, but it'll certainly have to open up the basic combat system a bit more in order to stop things becoming repetitive. Will is the next area where you can acquire and increase magic skills using XP. You'll have to master one of these skills to exit the Old Tomb and earn your hero stripes. We chose Vortex, which instigates a fireball attack on any enemies within a certain diameter of your character.

You can increase the circumference of your attack circle with further upgrades to the Vortex skill and there are also a wide range of other Will abilities to master. Force Push, Time Control, Chaos (which confuses enemies), Raise Dead, and Shock (a lightning attack) caught our eye during the hands on and there were a few more on offer as well, so there will certainly be a lot of depth to your magic options in the final game. We're just hoping that the same can be said for combat, although the list of upgrades for sword and marksmanship were just as long as that for Will, so there's every reason why the combat system will become less static as the game progresses.

After exiting the Old Tomb as a new man, Fable 2's breadcrumb trail (which leads you along a path to the next main campaign quest and has allowed Lionhead to do away with a cluttered HUD) took us back to the town gates of Bowerstone. Here we were told that nobody was being allowed in and out of the town because a band of highwaymen had been robbing people along the trail over the last few nights. This naturally leads to the next main quest in the game: banishing a highwayman called Thag and his harem of followers. Once again, the breadcrumb trail led us to Thag's location and, after dispensing with his minions, the troll of a man burst out of his shack. 'Fee, Fi, Fo Thumb', would've been a pretty appropriate line of dialogue for this guy, who had a deer's antlers as a hat and formed the most challenging enemy we'd faced in the game up to that point. Not to be outdone by a Neanderthal, we came out on top and were prompted with our next major moral decision in the game.

Thag had taken some Albion dwellers hostage and we had the choice of whether or not to free them. We went with the freeing option with no immediate knock-on effect, but this is in keeping with what Peter Molyneux told us during a Q&A afterwards. It seems the Lionhead team has tried to muddy the water of moral decisions and make the consequences unclear, but they'll gradually colour your game world and character as things progress. It's not just about good and evil; other personality factors such as greed, cruelty, and corruption, as well as the lightside traits of kindness, sacrifice, and purity will all play a part as well.

We didn't see many explicit examples of this during our hands on, but there was one obvious upshot of an earlier decision when we returned to Bowerstone. The town guard, who we'd collected arrest warrants for as kids, remembered our face and offered a discount on the goods and services in the town. Molyneux later told us that if we'd sided with Nicky the Nickname as a child instead of the guard, then we'd be given the option of a job on our return to Bowerstone. And not just any job - an assassin for crying out loud! We could've gone to assassin's school and taken our skills up to level 5. In hindsight, we kind of wish we had.

It's these types of features that will give Fable 2 so much replay value and, as Peter Molyneux points out in our Q&A, the multiplayer options in the game will quickly reveal how many possible variations there are in the game's story-arcs, atmosphere, main character, and NPCs across Albion. Players won't only be able to play co-operatively online, but they can also see ambient orbs in their single-player game worlds that show where their friends are in their relative Fable 2 games. From there you can simply jump in and out of each others' universes - there's no other word for it than revolutionary.

The Vagabond

Anyway, back to our single-player wanderings in Bowerstone. On our return to the town we realised that it was a lot more cheerful than when we'd left it (a direct result of our good morals it seems, as siding with Nicky the Nickname early on would have opened up a darker Bowerstone). There was a bustling market now with legitimate jobs on offer, jewellers to visit, and cheerful people to socialise with. In order to start earning some money we went for the Blacksmith's job, which takes the form of a mini-game with a swing meter and sweet-spot that gets smaller each time the dial moves from one side to the other. Your job is to stop the dial on the sweet-spot, which hammers at the metal in front of you and gradually crafts a sword in the process. Do the job for long enough and you'll get promoted, which means higher wages for your services.

The socialising in the game is worryingly like The Sims to be honest. We can't be sure how much of this is because we were playing a preview build with a lot of the limits turned off, but you seemed to be able to please people quite easily just by rinsing and repeating. We took a shine to a woman called Catherine the Housewife, as much for her anti-lonely hearts column character description as anything else: "Middle class, straight, materialistic, demanding." Anyway, we merely had to keep doing entertaining things (e.g. flexing our muscle's, doing a jig, giving her Thag's antler hat as a trophy, and farting to make her laugh) until she was so enamoured with us that marriage was a certainty on our relationship meter if only we could afford a ring.

The harlet followed us about after that like some deranged groupie and it was only after we came across some goblin type creatures that she had the good manners to die. Our dog was also injured, which troubled us more, although it was nothing that some dog elixir couldn't fix. At this point in the game we'd been sent on a quest to find somebody called the Abbott having received some fate cards from Theresa. These revealed three heroes called The Thief, The Mage, and The Pilgrim who we would come across during our travels in the game and this was as far as our hands on went, but these three mysterious characters certainly seem to be the next major chapter in Fable 2's main campaign. How they relate to Lord Lucien and why he now resides in the Tattered Spire as a result of reality altering magic promises to be a fascinating tail indeed.

Graphically, Fable 2 is faithful to its predecessor in many ways, but particularly where character models are concerned, from playing as a bobble-headed child at the beginning of the game to coming across cockney traders with bulbous chins along the way. The surroundings are sublime, capturing the same ye olde English fantasy style of towns and villages from the first game, but adding in all the trim of a next-gen triple A title where appropriate. But there's also magic in the visuals, particularly evident in how the mood changes between darkness and light during certain sections, areas, or plot-arcs of the game.

We also liked the soundtrack, with music in the game's opening section that reminded us of the theme from Home Alone. Add in some distinctive English dialects in the voiceovers, such as West Country farmers' wives to cockney crims, and you've got a mix that perfectly suits the style that Lionhead has developed the series around.