Being a big fan of the original Fable game for Xbox (as well as embittered by how short the entire game was), seeing an article at gamespot about the upcoming Fable 2 piqued my interest.

Though information on the game is sparse at this point, according to the Gamespot article, there are 2 very interesting things that they seem to be developing:

In the finished game combat will controlled using three buttons: one for melee weapons, one for ranged weapons, and one for magic. For the purposes of the E3 demo there were no guns or magic attacks, though, so all combat was controlled with just one button. […] Tapping the button does a melee attack, holding down the button blocks, and releasing the button after a block performs a special attack. How hard you push buttons and how long you hold them for will have an effect on the attacks that you perform, as will your weapon choice, and your proximity to other enemies or environmental objects.

I wonder how the pressure sensitivity will work out. It seems to me that most games in the last 5 years touting “pressure sensitive” controls usually end up sucking at it, not because the intention is bad, but because in the heat of the moment all I want to do is press that damn button. Hard.

When you “die” in Fable 2 you won’t actually die, and you certainly won’t have to return to a previous save or a checkpoint. Rather, you’ll collapse on the ground, where enemies will continue to attack you. When you eventually get up you’ll be scarred for life, and those scars will affect the way that some other characters treat you.

This is actually pretty sweet, but I thought I remember Molyneaux saying before the first Fable came out that there would be scars that your character would wear forever, and by which other characters would “judge” him. Maybe they left it for the second game to work out the bugs.

Does this mean that when you kill bandits, they just lie on the ground for a while, too?

One other thing I hope they add is the ability to woo women more easily. Spamming one button to make sexy noises like “ungh”, and “heeey” got pretty old, especially since I do that pretty much all day in real life.

Source

Funcom, the creater of the renowned Anarchy Online, is at the helm of one of the most anticipated games of the year (if not the most anticipated in the realm of massively-multiplayer online games). However, there is a veil of mist surrounding exactly what it is that Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures actually consists of. Is it an MMORPG? What makes it different from the big players in the field right now? Is it going to be full of little kids, or can we expect a more mature audience given the subject matter?

We won’t know about the playerbase until the game actually hits, but we can at least try to tackle those first two questions.

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