With my general apathy to world of Warcraft recently, I’ve been playing Fable pretty heavily. My escapades into evil adventuring went surprisingly well, and I finished the game this weekend just gone. Deciding to be as evil as possible turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. It was awesome being powerful, having people obeying me out of terror, killing whoever I felt like (including people on my side) and generally pushing the boundaries of the game as far as possible. However I think I also missed out on a few aspects of the game; definitely some quests (because I killed the quest givers), speaking to people from town (they were either dead or ran away) and a few other minor things.

Overall I enjoyed the game, it was a little shorter than I expected, but then at the same time I don’t like games that go on too long.

Notable evil deeds:

- Hiring a prostitute, smashing down the door to some guys house, taking said prostitute upstairs and having unprotected sex with her, with the guys wife and kid in the house. Deciding I liked the look of the house and to buy it, but then finding out it was more expensive than I was anticipating. Killing owner of house to reduce its sale price, then renting it out at an unfairly high rate.

- Joining the evil temple guys, and going on a quest for them to slaughter an entire village of innocents. Cackling manically as I chased villagers through corn fields before murderising them. Later returning to the evil temple guys, collecting my reward, and then murdering them too.

Just a couple of unsavoury examples there. The best part (I think) about fable is that your character appearance changes over the course of the game, in line with both your good/evil rating and your pure/corrupt rating. I intend to at some point play through again being “good” (meh) so that I have a third picture for comparison, but below you can see how I started out, and how I ended up.

Yes, I was pretty hideous by the time I finished the game. That’s pretty much max on both evil and corruptness. The blue lines on my skin show the amount I used magic (a lot) and the scars are from dying and such I think. Tattoos are store purchased and the horns I think are from being corrupt. Not sure what changed my eyes from brown to green.

So yeah, almost 3 months without a blog post, and I was doing so well too. This is mainly due to epic levels of cba, along with a fair bit going on in my real life. So anyway, I just renewed the domain so I figure I should at least try and post something, maybe this will motivate me to start up again.

As far as WoW goes, thing’s have died off a little. Since my last update I have done 2 main things; leveled characters using the refer a friend thingy, and leveled and raided a bit on my Shaman.

I decided to use refer a friend to level a couple of characters purely by boosting them in instances, mainly so I could get Mage back up into the 60s. I’d enjoyed playing my Draeni Mage, but after leveling that 1-72 I didn’t much fancy doing it all again Horde side. So I made a Blood Elf Mage, and a Tauren Warrior and off I went. I borrowed Dan’s Paladin to do the boosting (see Dans boosting guide if interested) though he did a lot of the actual boosting himself while I just followed him round. The idea behind this was to then consequently get my Mage to 80 and start playing that, as I was bored of Death Knight. Of course, with me nothing ever turns out how I plan, because I can’t be bothered to see these things through. The Mage made it to like 66 before I got bored and realised I couldn’t be bothered.

My next decision was to try a healing class, as I’d raided as a healing Priest pre-TBC and enjoyed it. I was also actually ok at it, which is surprising. I had Shaman at 66, priest at 62 and Paladin at 70 at this point. I decided on Shaman, as I tried Paladin healing and it was horribly boring, and I’d played priest before. Also Chain Heal looks pretty.

So Shaman got leveled, both as Enhancement and Elemental. Mainly Elemental, as I duoed the majority of the time with Dan’s Feral Druid. Set my off-spec as Resto and we did all the instances whilst leveling etc. I actually managed to stick with Shaman to 80, which I am more than a little surprised about. Stayed Resto a good month or so, did all the heroics (well most of) and cleared Nax a few times. At this point I went away on holiday, which basically spelled the demise for my Shaman. A week away in the sun without WoW basically evaporated all of my motivation. Now after being back for 2 weeks I’ve probably only logged in 3 times, so I guess Shaman is out of the window now too.

At the moment I currently have 2 gaming related activities going on in my spare time:

Fable 2

Just getting back into this. I’d bought it on my Xbox when it first came out, but not played it more than a few hours so never really got into it. I bought Fallout 3 at the same time and spent more time playing that. Buying 2 console games at the same time is always a bad idea for me. So I’ve started this up again, and decided to be as evil as possible. I’m pleased with the options you have within game to do this, though most of the time you can kind of see where the game is allowing you to make the choice, and funneling you in the direction it wants you too. I’ve managed to “beat” the game a few times by being evil in ways I don’t think it expected, but this doesn’t usually alter the story in any way. Its just personal satisfaction at having deviated from the expected paths. This is what I’m spending most of my time playing at the moment, I may even knock together a blog post or two about it.

FFXI

Ugh, I can’t believe I just typed those words. Yes, the game I spent like 2 years playing and hated by the time I stopped, I am currently in the process (or about to be) of trying it again. Me and Dan both seemed a bit bored with WoW, and as per usual have been looking at other MMOs to flake to for a while. With the announcement of FFXIV coming out next year, I think our interest in all things Final Fantasy have been piqued. So Dan found a copy with all the addons on the net for under 20 squid, we ordered it, and away we go I suppose. Apparently the soloability (if that’s even a word) of the game is greatly increased these days. One of my major problems with it back in the day (like 5+ years ago now) was that you couldn’t do shag all without a group of 6 people, as anyone who’s played it could attest to. It seems they’ve done a number of things these days to improve that; increased exp from mobs that can be killed solo, created exp rate increase rings, added collection/kill quests in zones and I think added a few more zones where there’s level appropriate stuff to kill solo or in small groups. So the plan currently is for me and Dan to get ourselves to 30, mainly duoing with a little bit of group work if we feel like it, grab some advanced jobs, and get back on the FFXI train. Choo Choo!

Should keep me busy for a month or two anyway. With Aion and FFXIV on the horizon at least there’s a few things to look forward to trying.

Over and out.