What the f*ck is wrong with Fable 2? « Blog

What the f*ck is wrong with Fable 2? « Blog » Video Games

· posted by: Lev [ view all "Blog" items by Lev ]

» posted on 19:45 - 02 November 2009 | posted by Lev

» last modified on 20:08 - 02 November 2009 | last modified by Lev

I am so frigging sick of this game by now.

It's been close to a year since I last touched the thing, actually. I played it for a week after it's release last Autumn, and it was quickly beaten. Since there wasn't a whole lot to do, and since I encountered several annoying bugs (one in particular with moving your family to a new house), and - more importantly - since Fallout 3 quickly came out, I haven't touched Fable 2 for about a year.

I know I know, that's kinda blasphemy when I've been preaching about how awesome the sequel to one of my favorite games would be, but well - I hadn't really anticipated many of the disappointing factors associated with the game (particularly its unpolished nature).

In any event I had been going through Fallout 3 again. I've been playing through the various expansion packs, and since I basically have completed them all now, I thought I could give Fable 2 another try.

I'm quickly regretting that I did.

When I first fired the game up, I got a sigh of relief seeing there was an update available for the game. I thought "wow, maybe they finally fixed up some of these bugs". Sadly, things have only gotten worse for me now, and I'm quickly wanting to smash the disc in, and write a big rant telling Peter Molyneux what I really think of this broken and half-assed "masterpiece" of his.

Okay, maybe that was a bit much, but here's the thing.

I've been TRYING to play a new game of Fable 2, but about 50% of the stuff I play doesn't get saved.

I tell it "save and quit" every f*cking time, and about 50% of the time it will save, and 50% of the time it won't save.

It never gives me an error when it "saves", but I have recently discovered that if I don't shut the system down right away and go back into the title screen of the game I get this nice big error (as seen in the screen shot).

After clicking the error away, I will no longer have the "Continue" option (acting as if all my saved games are gone), but if I exit the game and go to the dashboard, and then go back into the game, the "Continue" option is there again, though any progress I had been making in my game is NOT saved.

I am quickly regretting downloading this "patch" because from my experience so far, it's made the playing experience all that much worse (hard to imagine with the already considerable number of bugs present).

For the record, I don't even touch my damn system, which has a 120 GB hard disc (with over 85GB free). The system is not being bumped, moved or touched and I've never had a single issue with saving video, pictures, game saves or anything else EVER.

I even went into the dash board and removed about 20-25 game saves from Fallout 3, probably 5 demos, and all my videos.

Still, it happens about 50% of the time.

Needless to I've been playing less and less, and I'm about to stop playing it altogether now. After all, I mean, what the f*ck is the point of pumping a bunch of time into becoming wealthy or buying lots of property, or even completing missions, when the odds are that the next time you play you'll have just as good a chance having nothing saved as you will having your game saved.

Seriously. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr...

The fact that Fable 2 already has a number of glaring performance and design issues really suggests to me that this is NOT a hardware problem but a software problem with Fable 2. Further, the fact that the "Continue" option always disappears when seeing this error, and always re-appears when coming back into the game (without even shutting off the system) really seems to support the fact that something (else) is up with the game.

Normally I'd be willing to forgive the fact that the actual gameplay experience of Fable 2 was a lot more disappointing than I imagined it could have been, but with the compounding presence of so many darn performance issues, I'm finding myself being a lot less willing to forgive this game.

After seeing someone else created a thread for this on Lionhead's forums for Fable 2 technical issues, I thought I made my own to show them - "look, it's not just one person". Here is that thread I made:

http://community.lionhead.com/forums/thread/3416246.aspx