Is Fable like Gothic?

[JemyM]

I was overwhelmed with games earlier this year and had to be selective. One game that I skipped in hope it would not haunt me later was Fable.

Now I am almost completely drained of games to play and I checked back to see if there was something that I had missed, and then I read a review on Fable. What I read reminded me alot about the "free roaming" aspect of Gothic.

I wanted to ask if there are similarities between the two and ofcourse if Fable is a decent game. I am more for the storyline/exploration than I am for fighting and statbuilding.

[Jaz]

Fable is a decent game by any means (that is, in my opinion :) ). But it's not like Gothic at all... apart from the perspective. There is no freedom of roaming. Well, there actually is, but it's just good for XP ; basically, there are no substantial - or even remotely interesting - quests to be found when roaming. The story in itself is linear; the game is fun, but don't expect a long or difficult game. What I liked best was the fact that looks were defined by attributes and behavior.

[Cormac]

Fable is nothing like the Gothic games. There is no roleplaying at all, aside from choosing your hairstyle and whether you want to be nice or naughty; it's an action game you'll finish in about 15 hours. Very linear, like Jaz said, and with practically no replay value.

[JemyM]

Eww. Ok, I guess I save it for later then. :(

[Acleacius]

Not at all, Gothic is Gritty Realism and Fable is Fairy Taleish, none the less its worth playing especially since you are just now considering playing it and if you didn't buy into all the hype and expect the greatest RPG evar! ;)

Falbe is a good enough game to play, especially if you have nothing to play atm.
I thought there were some inovative quest and new features in gameplay.
Slight spoiler your actions of good and evil define your looks and how others treat you which range from Holy to Evil.
Your age is also shown through out the game as an effect, as with your nature.

You can buy and upgrade a house in every town, think there are 5 or 6 towns, been awhile.

Some fall down funny quests, look out for a guy in the first town (not in the tutorial) whom wants a Hero to meet his daughter. :p

Art style is very unique ( at least to me it was), though most of the game is console centric.
So you might have to find these 50 of these special chest throughout the game, special coins or solve riddles at 20 different doors to access special items.

Another very funny aspect is the Hero Titles you can buy which like most everything else is commented on by Townfolk.

Think of it as a comedy RPG if there is a such thing and its much easier to enjoy, if your not taking it too seriously. :)

[Jaz]

The sex 'scenes' were also very funny :lol:. And the fact that you could fart and belch (the ladies and/or gents were not amused). And the book 'The Trigamist'... heaps of fun, but not for the weak-hearted!

[Kawika]

Acleacius has it right. The Gothic series is gritty realism (realism being subjective, ofcourse lol), while Fable has very much a fairytale feel to it.
Fable was cute in a WoW sort of way, but it gets old imo. I haven't played Gothic 3 yet, but Gothic 1 and 2 felt much deeper and open-ended than Fable. I would liken the feel of the Gothic series as similar to Call of Cthulu (A great gothic horror-themed CRPG. Grab it if you see it floating around in the bargain bin.).

[Acleacius]

Yeah Fable TLC should be very reasonably priced at this point and worth playing if you enjoy humor, if its $30 or under and your not playing anything else it would be woth it to pickup it up for some good laughs, JemyM. ;)

[txa1265]

Fable took me ~15 hours for everything including TLC - and by playing evil I finished *everything* the game had to offer in ~25 hours total. It is a fun game, not very deep, and very, very short. Crap, I think I spent more time being lost in the midlands of Gothic 3 than I spent in my first run of Fable ;)

[JDR13]

Comparing Fable to Gothic would be like comparing Disney to Stephen King.

[Lethal Weapon]

I would liken the feel of the Gothic series as similar to Call of Cthulu (A great gothic horror-themed CRPG. Grab it if you see it floating around in the bargain bin.).

Call of Cthulu is a linear action adventure with first person perspective. I wouldn't compare it with any of the Gothics which are involving nonlinear CRPGs best played from a third person view.

[Maylander]

It's a decent game to play through a couple of times, there are some interesting ideas there, for instance how people react to you if you're good or evil. If you have the time to play it, I'd give it a go. I would definetly take TQ over Fable though, if those are your options at the moment (considering your two recent threads here).

[Bronzebeard]

I personally enjoyed Fable a lot. I remember trying to get as evil as possible, but after most people just kept running away and guards were always giving me a hard time I had this urge to start again and become a respectable citizen :)
Definitly a very fun game in a comic kinda way, but don't expect it to keep you motivated for more than a few days.

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Gothic is a men's world. There are very few women.

I haven't played Fable, but I guess you could at least play as a female char, right ?

[Acleacius]

Lol, no you only play as guy, though if your into it I heard you can marry a guy <eeeuu>. :)

I hear in F2 you are a play as a girl and sure hope thare is more freedom with the Hair Cuts as that was some funny stuff but I guess the Beads and Mustaches are out for F2. :p

[Jaz]

Yep, you can! I married a man here, a woman there, and so on, until I had a spouse in every town on the map. And you can marry even more often if you have the guts to marry the Mayoress of Bowerstone (in which case you can have two spouses in this town). And filing for divorce is the quickest way to become evil: you need to beat up your spouse to succeed. And quite often at that. I wore a halo of flies pretty quickly in my evil game... but I hated what the horns did to my hair.

[Maylander]

I always marry her! How can I refuse? Wealth and power, yes indeed, wealth and power.

[Acleacius]

Suckers! :p

[NFLed]

Fable was not enjoyable to me. It felt very much geared towards a younger audience (for example, being taunted with "chicken chaser" for much of the early game brought me back to junior high school memories...but I digress!") and that hurt the immersion/fun for me.

Much worse than that was the missions where you couldn't save your progress and with some missions taking 30-45+ minutes that meant a lot of stress for me (not knowing if I actually had that time to set aside) plus if I died in the mission (especially in the boss at the end) I had to replay the whole mission and that was extremely not fun.

All that said it wasn't terrible at all but it just wasn't my cup of tea.

Gothic II (I didn't play I and haven't yet purchased III) was enjoyable, it had its negatives but the positives outweighed the negatives for me. I don't compare it to Fable in any real way other than being rpg's.

[JemyM]

Ewww... Fable have no quicksave. :(

Well, that does it. No Fable for me.

[Acleacius]

God I loved being called Chicken Chaser!
"Hey whats a Chicken Chaser"
"What does a Chicken Chaser do?"
"Here comes Chicken Chaser!"
:lol:
What a great irony, hey if you can't laugh at yourself you missing half the fun.
If you didn't like it all you had to do was spend 50 gold or so to get a new name. :)

[NFLed]

"What a great irony, hey if you can't laugh at yourself you missing half the fun."

It helped ruin the immersion to me since other than in school when I was 13 years old (which is another issue altogether lol) I can't indentify with being called silly names by passers-by. Irony and self-deprecating humor are all good and present in many crpg's, PST is probably the best at that (and at many other things) but being called silly names by passers-by doesn't qualify into that for me. In Fable when I did purchase another name I was called that other name by passersby and again same problem.

[Acleacius]

I actually meant being made fun of and being the hero at the same time, as in the quest I suggested he look for the guy whom wanted his daughter to meet a hero, of course I could just be a gulleton for punishment. ;)

I know what you mean, though if your not in the right frame of mind Fable could suck. :)
Since I play on the PC I knew there had been alot of hype, so basicly I went for the laughs.
Seems it would be sort of like the movie Last Action Hero, if you didn't know it was intended as satire, but then again some may not like it for their own reasons.

[Sorcha Ravenlock]

As far as I'm concerned the whole 'chicken chaser' and 'farting' 'features' show exactly who Fable was aimed at: juvinile male teenagers. I don't find anything remotely funny about it, to be honest, it just makes me cringe inside (just as much as similar movies, like Dumb and Dumber do)

To me Fable felt like the devs had great ideas, and then the further they got into the development of the game, the more they realised they could not actually implement these ideas. Theh in the end they just threw in the towel, gave up, added farting as a feature, and hoped that at least the under-20-male-audience might get a laugh out of it.
Playing Fable, all I could see is what the game should have been, what it was supposed to be, and what it wasn't. And I didn't follow the hype about the game at all, that was the saddest thing, I only read about all the promised features afterwards.
Makes me wonder how many broken promises we'll find in Fable2, for which Moulinoux seems to be blowing the same PR trumpet as he did for 1....

[Dez]

Peter molyneux surely is good hyping games. Only if those games would fullfill even tiny portion of those visions... I say no more.

All of his games are fun for the start, but quite soon you get bored to them. Fable for example is a nice game, but very short and lacks depth.

[Acleacius]

I think only evil could fart and such, if you played good you could do things like dance and air guitar.
I guess some of its juvinile but isn't all culture humor considered juvinile?
I mean certianly Austin Powers isn't serious yet its culture humor is making fun of things many at the time took serious spy thrillers.

Sounds like you expected much more serious RPG.

[Cormac]

I played good and I could fart with the best of them.

[JemyM]

I tried it but I gave up after the first town. It felt very childish, I felt that the control system was annoying, the focus on good/evil had reduced the amount of real content for someone who just wanted to play good anyway, finally the no save function was a killer for someone who actually have a real life with responsibilities.

[JDR13]

Fable might seem better if you hadn't played Gothic first :)