Bid On A Role in Fable 2 For Child's Play

Via Joystiq, a post on the Lionhead website offers up a once-in-a-lifetime offer ... for charity! At this year's Child's Play Fundraiser, an annual black tie event scheduled for December 11th, the studio will auction off roles in their in-development title Fable 2 to help raise money for kid gamers. Roles include 'a Fable 2 Shopkeeper, a Farmer, an important Villager, a Monk, or a Quest character.' Other loot they're offering includes "Signed underwear by Peter Molyneux! The only known surviving Fable T-SHIRT signed by the Development Team in 2004. Limited edition, official Fable 2 team T-SHIRT. Limited edition, official Fable 2 sweater / hoodie. Exclusive Fable 2 printed and framed artwork. Limited edition, framed Black & White 2 poster, signed by the Development Team and Peter Molyneux. Framed copy of Fable, presented in recognition of your contribution to the making of Fable."

Re:

[Holmwood]

Fable was clever; a good storyline with decent graphics. True, not everyone's cup of tea is an RPG, but it was well-crafted, with an interesting approach to morality and decision-making.

Not sure why the hate.

-Holmwood

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[Anonymous Coward]

Indeed, and while Fable didn't live up to everything it was saying it'd be, it lived up to a fair bit. The game is an excellent title, one worthy of a sequel. Perhaps this time there will be more than just two endings, that was the biggest flaw in the first Fable, it was a binary ending, rather than a spectral one. You need the shades of grey if you're going to have a game that deals in morals, Bioshock has the same flaw.

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[kat_skan]

BioShock spoilers ahead.

You need the shades of grey if you're going to have a game that deals in morals, Bioshock has the same flaw.

Isn't that kind of an odd criticism for BioShock, considering the whole point of the story was that not once did you actually make your own decisions, but were instead just obeying somebody else's orders? Even when you were freed of the mind control you just plowed right on, this time doing whatever Dr. Tenenbaum told you. How many shades of grey are there in being a single-m

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[Kamineko]

By 'interesting approach to morality', I'm assuming you're talking about the 'scripted choices giving you good points / bad points' that can be observed in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic that came before it, and a zillion other games featuring 'alignment points'.

It looked and played good though. It wasn't what he said it was. At least, he thinks so. [slashdot.org]

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[FinchWorld]

I don't know, seemed to me you could be near as evil as you wanted, but then choose not to kill your sister and get the good ending, if I recall you could do the same in KOTOR which came before, so being good or evil didn't change alot. Infact the only game I can think of were it mattered was abes odessy/exodus (I forget which one, though more likely exodus), were if you didn't save enough/killed too many murdokons (sp?) they would vapourize you in the final cutscene, so the only way to get the "good" endin

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[Voltageaav]

First off, I loved Fable and can't wait for Fable 2. But the game was a bit unfinished when they released it. Also, many of the features they had said would be included were not, even in "The Lost Chapters". It is a great game, but was over hyped to the point that it came as a disappointment to many.

Populous

[ThirdPrize]

I remember that. That was fun. Why can't then do that for XBLA instead of all those lame arcade rewrites.

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[Targon]

Just because you dislike any game that isn't an action game doesn't make many of the Molyneux games bad. Black and White was a good game, and a lot of fun. Black and White 2 was better as a technical demo though.

Dungeon Keeper, Populous, and others are very memorable games, and unlike all the games that were straight clones of Warcraft, Populous: The Beginning was a RTS game that wasn't a clone, but had different mechanics for population growth.

Now, it has been a while since he came out with a new game

Re:Bid On A Role In A Sucky Game? No Thanks...

[RogueyWon]

That's... a little harsh. Not necessarily untrue, per se, but it's not quite giving the full picture.

My own impression of Molyneux's output over the last decade is that it's been very strong on the ideas, but dreadful on the implementation. While this means that many of his games leave the user frustrated and infuriated, it doesn't mean he's a bad thing for the industry.

Take Black & White as a case in point. There are few games that have inspired such utter, blind rage in me as the original Black & White. I remember one of my friends hammering the eject button on his CD drive, yanking the disk out so hard he damaged the drive, then smashing the disk into tiny pieces with a hammer, sticking it in an envelope and mailing it to Lionhead with an obscenity-filled tirade. The concept was very strong; a god-game that you play not, primarily, through exercising a direct influence, but rather by training your own independently intelligent avatar. Unfortunately, the game was crippled by terrible mission design, one of the worst camera systems in the history of gaming and bizarre quirks in the AI that could cause your creature to snap and behave completely and irreversibly out of character for no discernable reason.

However, the core concept of a game in which you train up an avatar through "tactile" interaction, reinforcement of behaviours and more advanced training has lived on and now sits at the heart of the modern "virtual pets" genre, which has become such a cash-cow on the Nintendo DS.

Slashdot posters often complain about a supposed lack of innovation in the games industry (although this isn't a line that I personally subscribe to). But if you want to encourage innovation, then tolerating and supporting the eccentrics who produce terrible games containing great ideas (that others with more of a knack for polish can develop further) can't be a bad thing.

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[Itchyeyes]

Few things in gaming frustrate me as much as the shear, unabashed, hatred that people seem to have for this game. There are some really bad games out there, Fable is not one of them. In fact, it's a rather good, and original (something you don't see too much of these days) title. Fable was over hyped, over promised, and under delivered, but it wasn't bad. And gamers have as much themselves to blame for their inflated expectations for that game as they do Molyneux.

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[Tuidjy]

Having had very high expectations for Fable is not a prerequisite for hating it :-)

I did get excited at all about Fable. I did not bother buying it on the X-box, and I picked it up when it came out on the PC, in a time where there wasn't anything much to play. I had to push myself to finish the introduction, and lost interest after playing for ten minutes in the castle(?) that came afterwards.

The graphics/models were pathetic, the environment simplistic, the story failed to interest me, and the combat I d

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[Itchyeyes]

Do you really feel qualified to just a 15-20 hour game after playing it for only 10 minutes? I'm not surprised that you didn't find the graphics good. It was an Xbox 1 game at the end of the systems life cycle ported to the PC 12 months later. Not to mention that the art style skews more cartoonish than realistic. For the time and platform it was released on, Fable has pretty decent graphics, and there are some pretty impressive lighting and texture effects later on in the game.

The story was indeed shal

Populous, PowerMonger, Syndicate, Dungeon Keeper,

[Rog7]

... Magic Carpet, Black & White, Fable. All of his games are AAA titles as far as I can see.

While I'd agree his earlier games were his best (the 4 in my subject title would all easily make my list of top 50 games, probably top 20), Peter Molyneux gets attention because he makes groundbreaking games. His biggest issue is having eyes bigger than his stomach, he overhypes and overdesigns and all of what he bites off he doesn't chew and much of it never actually makes it into the games... but still, there a

we'll see

[deathtopaulw]

how can we be sure this isn't yet ANOTHER promise they can't keep?

Good game, let's hope sequel is better though

[Healyhatman]

Fable was in fact pretty good... A little too cutesy and simple, but good mind-numbing gameplay. Point is it WORKED.

As to this... Great idea for a good cause

signed guitar hero controller

[arbitraryaardvark]

http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2007/11/autographed-gui.html [typepad.com]
Guitar hero controller signed by clever nick name, gabe, tycho, a buncha people,
proceeds to child's play.

I'd be more likely to bid...

[JK_the_Slacker]

... on making them hurry up and finish the darned thing.

Just what I always wanted...

[beef623]

• Have a Fable 2 Shopkeeper named after you! (1)
• Have a Fable 2 Farmer named after you! (1)
• Have an important Fable 2 Villager named after you! (1)
• Have a Fable 2 Monk named after you! (1)
• Have a Fable 2 Quest character named after you! (1)
• Signed underwear by Peter Molyneux! (1)
• The only known surviving Fable T-SHIRT signed by the Development Team in 2004 (1)
• Limited edition, official Fable 2 team T-SHIRT (1)
• Limited edition, official Fable 2 sweater / hoodie (1)
• Exclusive Fable 2 printed and framed artwork (1)
• Limited edition, framed Black & White 2 poster, signed by the Development Team and Peter Molyneux (1)
• Framed copy of Fable, presented in recognition of your contribution to the making of Fable (1)

I don't know what to say about this...

How much is the bid for the Wii version

[WillAffleckUW]

I'm shaking my nunchuk in anticipation of the Wii port of Fable II!

Do you think they'll sign that?

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[twistedsymphony]

MS bought LionHead last year... no Wii port for you (or for anyone at that)

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[WillAffleckUW]

Ah, but as Mac becomes 20 percent of the market and the Wii dominates, most games release for Wii within 6 months ...

Microsoft is even having to try to trick laptop refurbishers not to wipe WinVista and install Ubuntu Linux in their latest program, because so many people see no utility in having WinVista or even WinXP anymore.