So, if any of you follow Anthony on Twitter or saw the Facebook status update I made literally five seconds ago, you’ll know that I was working my way through Fable II. I say “was” because now I’m done and feeling quite emotionally drained. I don’t want to give anything away, so if you’ve completed Fable II then feel free to hit the jump to answer the question posed by the title of this post. You really shouldn’t spoil it for yourself if you haven’t played it, though!
I assume by “what did you choose,” those of you that have played Fable II will know what I’m referring to. I also realize this is probably a conversation everyone had when the game came out, but I was late to jump on the bandwagon and I’m curious how people outside the Burch household felt about the ending and the choice that they eventually ended up making.
My choice: when I was told my family was murdered, I covered my hand in shock and when my dog died I screamed (quite literally) “NO,” so when the option was given at the end I was pretty conflicted. I didn’t really give two shits about money, so it came down to saving the people that were killed in the Spire or saving my own family. To Anthony’s momentous surprise, I chose to save my family, which I ended up immediately feeling guilty for, even before Hammer chastised me. I had a bittersweet reunion with my dog, but when I went back to my family I couldn’t really feel happy about it at all so I shut the game off.
Shooting Lucien point blank in the face was quite nice, though.
Heheh. I chose to save the people.
I don’t really get all that emotionally involved in anything at all, so basically I was playing the good route.. and hey, I did the good thing…
Besides, if you didn’t start the family then that only resurrects your sister who you wont see in the game again anyway (which is cheap) and your dog which you can get back anyway without choosing that path.
The DLC, the free demo of Knothole (or the full one, but the point is you don’t need to pay for it to do this, I think), has a way to get your dog back. It requires one human sacrifice, but you don’t get negative karma from it.
I got really sad after my dog died, it was a really lonely experience to no have him by my side. But I never made a family in the game, It felt a little weird, even though I’ve had “relationships” in other games that let you like mass effect 2 (Garrus is too cute to turn down!).
So this meant I never had the other heart breaking scene, and so ended up choosing the “greater good”. However, after the big story finish I wanted to do some of the side quests, and also bought the DLC, but it was not the same without my dog, empty and lonely.
In the Knothole Island DLC, you can sacrifice any peasant to get your dog back in an evil ritual, but I was too much of a good guy, but the building was always there, mocking me, as I did my side quests
I chose the needs of the many, letting my family die (honestly they had gotten annoying and I didn’t appreciate paying off the blackmailers when I went to other towns to get my bone on.). I stopped playing after the ending, not continuing with anything else. I decided that my hero had done what had to be done, and from there he’d be sailing “into the west” to go all Tolkienesque.
Also its interesting to note that if you don’t shoot Lucien, Stephen Fry will get impatient and pop him in the head when he’s not looking, then turn and apologize, asking if you wanted to kill him instead. Quite funny.
It doesn’t seem like you were too emotionally attached to your family, though. In that situation, I’d probably feel the same way I did when a similar choice occurred in Infamous*.
Side note, when I saw the title for the thread, I thought of the potion that permanently alters your character.
* Spoilah-ish: “Why should I help person who I am told I give two shits about, again? They haven’t exactly been supportive. In fact, they have been the polar opposite of supportive.”
That’s a good question too. I just kept the dark seal. Anthony said when he was on his evil run, he gave it to the girl, but she started crying and getting really confused and he felt too guilty, so he took it back from her. It’s a little different with that choice, because I feel like no matter what, your character is going to look badass all old and scarred, so it isn’t that significant of a sacrifice.
I have been trying to think of other examples, but the best I can manage is Freespace 2. There is a sub plot where you go undercover with the terrorist group that make up the antagonists for the first half of the game, and after you sabotage their missions a few time they throw a nasty one at you.
Seperated from your contact, you lead a small group of the baddies on a patrol when a ship full of civilians turn up. Your wingmen inform you this one is all yours, and you get to choose if you defend the transport or blow it up to keep your cover.
First time doing it, I naturally defend the civilians against some nasty odds, but I decide I want to know what happens if you try it the other way. A quick reload and blowing up the transport makes your wingmen tell you they know you are a spy and turn on you anyway. Somewhat disapointed I complete the mission and head home to debriefing, only for the usually chipper debriefing officer to have changed his tune to:
“What the fuck were you thinking? Your court martial is in the morning, your execution is the day after.”
I’m pretty sure I saved everyone who built the Spire (I can’t really remember, it was bloody ages ago), since there were a lot of lives lost during its construction. I also immediately regretted the decision afterward, as the game felt pretty different with the dog not around (even if I didn’t particularly like the dog, it was definitely no SOTC Agro situation). I can’t remember why I didn’t choose the family, but I had so much goddamn gold that if I chose the money it wouldn’t have made a difference.
I have always chosen to save the family, just for the dog. I haven’t been one to care much for the families because the wife would always break and become bipolar, making her want to leave me, which makes me want to shoot her. It’s a vicious cycle.
I think if we actually saw more people die in the spire, then that choice may out weigh the dog. As the game stands, those people are just well, the word “people”. Only a small amount was ever seen to die, most of which you could kill yourself.
Also what I’ve heard is that you can bring your pooch back with the Knothole Island expansion, which pretty much ruins the consequence of the choice, but you need him for that DLC anyway.
I was devastated when my dog died and no amount of faceless dead humanity could have changed my mind.
I did find it odd that you could only wish the people who constructed the tower back to life OR your dog and family. If you are going to mass raising the dead wouldn’t it be just as easy to do both?
It’s kind of a no-win scenario they present. Frankly the money option is silly; everybody who plays the game is rich as a king by the end anyway. So the choice is really between the family and the untold thousands who died making the Spire. But the simulation of “family life” in Fable II is extremely limited. You come home, you make faces, your kids coo, and that’s about all there is to it.
Sure, it’s cute enough to inspire some emotional investment (from most), but the behavioral bugs bleed that out over the course of the game. My daughter got stuck standing in the street at one point and there was no interacting with her from then on. She’d just stand there, unresponsive, and although I could slide her around she’d always be back in the same spot if I left and returned.. Even when your family members don’t fall into bad scripting comas, they don’t grow. There’s no progress to be made, no evolution there; your kids reach “kid” age and stay there forever; your spouse can be happy or not happy but that’s about it.
By the time I got to the end of the game, I picked my family not out of love but duty. The game had sapped all my (the player’s) affection for those characters with bugs and shallow programming; I only followed through on the basis that my character would want them back. But upon returning home, I felt empty — not because I felt bad for letting all the faceless Spire workers stay dead, but because in returning to my boring family members (including the statue daughter) I realized that I didn’t have anything to show for that decision. I didn’t care that I had them back.
But in reloading my game and trying it the other way (sacrifice), I discovered that the game after the end is practically unplayable because of the absence of the dog. I hadn’t been especially broken up about the loss of the dog (I’m not really an animal person), but I was pretty upset about it now. Much of the game’s interface is built around that dog; he finds you treasure, points the way, warns of danger, etc. Molyneux made a big deal during development of how revolutionary it was to replace UI with a dog. That’s fine until you take the dog away too.
Ultimately I left the game feeling like neither choice was worthwhile.
I chose to save the people in the Spire. I didn’t really care about my family (sorry kids) but I really wanted to save my dog. Instead, I chose the most heroic option because I felt that’s what my hero would have done. Also, part of me was sure the game would reward my selflessness in some way. It turns out I was wrong.
The game felt empty without my dog or family and, although the greater good was served, I felt no further desire to play. I think that’s pretty close to how my hero would have felt if the situation were real. He’d saved the world, but at the cost of all those close to him. If I were him, that decision would make me a hermit.
I made pretty much the exact same choice as you. I screamed at my television when my dog died, and money is really easy to get, so I chose to bring back my dog. I didn’t even have a family before I finished the story mode, so I made the decision based entirely on my dog. However, in the Knothole Island DLC, they give you the ability to bring your dead dog back to life, which kind of lessens the impact of the decision.
I can’t imagine why anyone would choose to save all the people killed in the Spire. The game gives you no incentive to do that, beyond that it’s the ‘right’ thing to do. The other two choices are motivated either by greed and laziness towards getting money, or the emotional connection you’ve established with your dog and family over the game. I found ‘good’ ending sort of empty.
I arbitrarily chose to save the people, and then cried like a bitch for days about my dog dying.
I chose the dog. The dog is literally worth all the money in Albion. Plus, the dog is just plain awesome.
I chose the many, because i didnt have a family — and then i went to knothole and brought my dog back :S tho i felt really guilty about that too.
I chose the dog, too. I didn’t make a family, so I didn’t know that they get murdered. Rather, I made a family but my vidjeo gaem wife left me after in-game months of neglect. Anyway, I couldn’t make the choice immediately because I was too busy bawling my eyes out. I always knew I was going to save my doggy, though. The other options did not exist in my mind.
Also, the Hero of Skill (I forget that asshole’s name) fucking shot Lucien for me. I was listening to the villainous monologue when Douchey McDouchefuck interrupted it with a bullet. NOT COOL, LIONHEAD. NOT COOL.
I now envision a world where each time you try to listen to an in game monologue, a character voiced by Stephen Fry will shoot them.
“But did a man come to kill me, or a slave” BLAM.
“Look at you hacker, a pathetic ” *BLAM*
“Dear Mario, I baked you a cake!” *BLAM*
As we were fleeing i kept shooting the hero of skill. I hated that dude. He didnt get to shoot baddies during the escape due to his being on his knees, as a riddled him with bullets.
I chose to save the people.
I wanted my character to be super god-mode nice so i did it no matter how much i loved my dog.
But then Knothole Island came out and i got my dog back, so everything worked out in a very unfufilling way.
I chose family. I didn’t have a wife since early in the game I had accidentally led her into a bunch of bandits because I didn’t know how to keep the bitch from following me, so she died. I really just wanted my dog to be alive, because he was awesome and gave me phat l00tz
With me, I always attempt to be as good as I can possibly be in a game, or at least as good as I will allow myself to be, after all some Renegade options for Mass Effect 2 were too good to pass up.
However the final choice of this game was, for me, surprisingly serious considering how light hearted it was up until that point; it was like someone beating you up with Santa’s decapitated head. You might have caught a glimpse of seriousness when you were just starting out but that soon dissapeared behind a string of cat-calling Bandits and shooting Hollow Men in the nuts; it’s then brought back full force when you’re told your wife and kid were slaughtered and your dog is shot in front of you.
Since I’ve already covered that I am “saint of saints” in all the games I was surprised at myself when I first picked “The Needs of Few”, to get my family back, but mostly it was for my dog I have to admit. I got the achievement, listened for five seconds as Hammer opened her mouth to talk, then switched it immediatley off and picked “The Needs of Many”.
I just couldn’t bring myself to think that I had let thousands die because I wanted to dig stuff up still, and this was before the Knothole Island DLC was available. Yes, I had a family as well, and while I did have a slight emotional attatchment due to the quest where you rescue your kid from Hobbs, I suffered like most people from the lack of continuity and clone like aspects found in the family.
Immediatley after “The Needs of the Many” I felt a loss when I got back to playing the game normally, because the streets of Bowerstone seem strangely empty without a “woof” every now and then, or the sound of someone saying “good boy” to the dog. I thought I’d never see that dog again, and I did what most people who would have made that choice would have done at that point. I stopped playing. And depressingly, I could see my character doing the same thing. To be good the entire way, then basically be told that the good ending needs another personal sacrifice, it’s rather a destroying thought.
For me it wasn’t just that the good ending left everything that you held dear dead, it was that I had been good the entire way. Unlike most games who reward you with “You are a saint, you get the best ending”, this game rewards you with a kick in the teeth and a note saying “That’s life, good guys sacrifice everything and don’t get to be happy.”
Renegade in Mass Effect is not evil. What makes you think that?
I chose to save my dog because my character was EVIL. I didn’t care about saving anyone and I was already filthy rich so…
I chose to save my family and dog. To be honest, I wasn’t very attached to the family personally, but I like to be realistic in my role-playing and my character was really in love with his peasant husband. My character was good, but he’s only human. Also, I didn’t want to lose all the benefits of the dog, and not be able to play the game any more.
heh, i chose to save the people dead in the game. i have this weird habit to where i think i am literally the character if it has moral choices. i eventually sucker down and give up most of my junk for the greater good. course, never started a family, just left a lot of ladies in all the towns to “visit”. heh
…still miss my dog though
Your family was just a randomly generated block with a smiley face drawn on it. They are no different from everyone else in the world–they have no personality, no words to say to you, just a big “IM HAPPY FOR WAT U DO”. They are exactly the same as the people who died in the spire as well. Emotionally non-existent pawns. The money? 1,000,000 right? You can earn that much in real estate in five minutes. Then theres the dog.
Everyone picks the dog for one reason–it means more than those stupid civilians or useless ‘what the fuck do i do with this’ money. And all it does is dig for things.
When it comes down to meaningfulness and connectivity, fable 2 is at the bottom of the list. There are only 2 people you can even care about, your sister and hammer. Thats it. Everyone else is a blank slate. Even the enemy of the game, whats his face, has no real purpose for doing the things he does. The same goes for Kreia, the lady from KotoR 2 who decided to cast herself a role in this game for some reason. So what is Moleneux going to do about this problem? Hes going to allow you to ‘touch’ these retarded townsfolk. Yeah, thats going to help with their awful boredom and missing personality problems. WOO I CAN POKE THEM NOW HURRAY.
fable 2 gets 6/10 by me. Lame story, stupid gameplay (HURR DURR MAGIC) and lionhaed basically lied about all the shit in this game anyway. Theres like 5 different actually enemies to fight, terrible menu, jobs are fucking stupid, characters are meaningless and shooting guns make you taller. And everyone has the same voice.
I really wish you could kill children in this game.
I chose the dog. My character was neutral-evil at that point, so I guess it was fitting for that character to choose “The needs of the few”. But I was so attached to the dog, to the point where when he took a bullet for my character I broke down and sobbed. I just couldn’t imagine playing the game without the dog. I don’t even really like dogs, but I became so emotionally attached to this artificial dog I didn’t even hesitate to choose that option.
Thinking about this question makes me teary, even though it’s been a while since I’ve played the game, because I had to put my cat to sleep a week ago and I kind of wish I could do what I did in the game and bring my cat back. :/
Oh no I’m so sorry to hear about your cat
losing a pet is the absolute worst
I have chosen to revive my dog. I cared about it (or him), really and I needed its help fiding things around the world. The money choise? Just for the record, soon after seeing my dog alive and jumping and chasing its tail and farting… I bought the castle. So as most people stated more money at the end of the game is pointless.
Family? My wife had abandonned me saying that her mother had been right about me. Really. Just prior to the events of the Spire. We had no children because leasbians can’t get pregnant…
WHAT?! Leave me alone!
Yes I’m a boy and I’m straight.
The thing is: I really enjoy playing as true good characters. Always doing the right thing. In real life I actually behave like this. Except, and only when it’s about family. My family, my girlfriend and my close friends come in first place. That’s exactly what I did in Fable 2.
The first time I beat the game, which was my “real” playthrough so to speak, I chose to save everyone. Saving my own family felt selfish. There are some sacrifices you have to make for the betterment of the world, whether it’s giving your three-course meal to a starving family or sacrificing your own family for a thousand families. Sometimes it’s painful, but in the end the most moralistic choice is the better choice. Imagine if choosing to save everyone meant the world would be beautiful and peaceful like it was meant to be. Choosing your family, however, would keep all of the corruption and evil in the world so that horrible catastrophes would happen again. Why would you bring your family into a world like that? Why not bring a billion families into a world filled with peace and happiness? Or some shit?
…I might be going a bit too deep here…
Anyway. I chose the other endings just to see how things looked from either perspective (My horrible, fat, evil, shadow worshiper went for the money ending while my heroic goody-two-shoes went for the family), but the first one (my heroic but disgruntled character) was my own true ending, I guess.
Also, I love the shit out of the Fable series and anyone who gives me poop for it can go…have very uncomfortable things happen to them that might ruin their day possibly.
That’s honestly the best choice for the player to make. If you are a all about the good of the world and don’t mind sacrificing your best friend for a bunch of people who don’t appreciate what you did, then you save everyone else. If you are going pure evil (which is fun once) then you get some money. I’ve done all three obviously, actually chose money the first time cause I felt like being the biggest, ugliest, richest ass hole that world had ever seen. And that was fun for a while. But even though you own everything and people flee from you, it’s not worth it without your dog. So I went back and went neutral and saved my puppy cause god I love that dog. Third time chose to save the world and was bored to death. But here’s the funny thing, as good as saving the world over your family sounds I could not find one reason to save the world other then it was the final option. And then it hit me, this game did not give me a reason to care for the other people in the world except for my dog (and family). Maybe that was just me. I enjoyed the world very much (seeing as how I played through 3 times), but the people in it were sooo…fake. I hated most of them, and the ones that did have personality died or changed back into a emotionless brick. Maybe if I go back and play it again since I haven’t played it in a long while I might see things different.
I didn’t have a family, but I still saved my dog. I didn’t regret it at all and neither should you, Ash!
There was never a choice, Ash. I had to save as many as I could.
I chose the fam. I already ruined a guys life in order to get with lady gray so it was a no brainer.
screw money
I chose to bring back my dog. I didn’t even have a family, so that wasn’t even an impact on my choice. Screw the rest of those people–I WANTED MY DOG
I chose the dog and my family. Why? Because in my mind the people who died in the making of the spire were lumped together with every other super-generic, emotionally devoid drone that made up the majority of that world. I think Hammer, the dog, and Barnum (that goofy dude with the weird vocabulary) were the only characters I had any real emotional connection with when playing that game.
Also, as a gay male who so rarely gets the chance to have an actual homosexual romance in a console role-playing game, it made the choice of saving my husband a bit easier. Sorry drones, even though he was just as generic as the rest of you, our ‘relationship’ anchored me into the world just enough to make him worth saving over the rest of you.
So yeah, I think the biggest flaw with the choice at the end, is that people like me have no emotional connection with the average npc, let alone nameless ones that you never really interact with. I mean, if the game limited itself to a smaller cast of more emotionally deep npcs (with actual backgrounds) then it may have made the choice harder. But as far as I could see, it was like asking me to feel guilty about demolishing some homes in a residential zone in SimCity.
In the end all I saw presented before me was a number, some characters I cared about, and another number. It felt like such a shallow decision that it kinda ruined the ending for me. Like it didn’t matter how I had built up my character from the start of the game til then. All that mattered in the end was “Do you want to be a generic hero, a good but flawed human, or a generic bastard?” It felt tacked on, and after all that adventuring, it detached me from the world in a very bland way.
I chose my family, but for reasons that made me irritated that I couldn’t just explain to Hammer before she stormed off.
Money was tempting, because well.. it’s money. It could’ve been a LOT of money, but since I could always earn more money I turned off of it after a lot of thought. That thought consisted of me very rarely actually buying things in Fable II.
Which means I chose a still rather selfish option of bringing back my dog and sister, but this was mostly to cause the least effect of a miracle as I could. The dog died very close to the end, so I figured bringing him back was fine, and the sister was killed so early in life and in such a tragic way that I figured she deserved another shot. She was a possible hero too, and I get the feeling if everyone in the spire was brought back, the same thing might just happen again. Fun choice though.
That is to say, I didn’t want soften the horror of the Spire. I needed it embedded in the history of every family of the world that nothing good could come from that event. Outside of the heroes, no one would know I’d used a miracle to bring back a dog and a girl, and I’d rather people in that world believed that they simply didn’t exist, which I would say perfectly happily knowing what the cost of just one miracle was.
Hammer can just bugger off.
I went with saving my family and the Dog. Even though i barely spent ANY time with my wife in the game. I chose to bring back my good ol pal! He had been with me the whole time, and i wasn’t gonna let him die like that!
Year, the crap that went down in the Spire was horrid. But what’s done is done. And i figured for once, i’d deal with my own happiness for a change :p
Damn Hammer for giving me such attitude!!! Can’t wait for Fable 3!!!! n_n
I just beat it 2 days ago myself. Go figure.
Anyway, I chose family for the following reason:
My character was a corrupt bastard who’s actions constantly wore on his own sanity. He chose whatever option would get him the most money for the least effort and, if somebody got hurt in the process, that was the cherry on top. He didn’t actively hurt innocent villagers for the sheer joy of it but he did take pleasure any assassination contracts that happened by. This pattern slowly but surly wore down his mind and as the game progressed and his appearance soon began to reflect that.
He had a gypsy wife who watched his battle with the demons. She watched it for years and tried to keep their child in the dark about it. But when he came up drunk, covered in blood, and reeking of whores… she divorced him.
His wife was his last grip on reality and now there was nothing holding him back. He sacrificed villagers to the Temple of Shadows, Killed merchants on the road for fun, wooed a second wife just so he could have he killed by cultists, and kept the safety off on his rifle much more than on. He was running towards the edge at full speed and ready to jump off the point of no return without abandon.
But it was when he was taking a job from a mad scientist that he met… her….
A zombie that came from a life as dark and disturbed as him. An undead woman that would love him unconditionally. A woman who was just twisted enough so that he could stay close enough to the edge so he could see the bottom, but also the only thing that could keep him from falling off. Lady Gray may have been magically enchanted to fall in love with him on sight, but the hero didn’t need any magic.
Of course he was going to save her.
Like most decisions I make in life I look to the sage-like wisdom of Spock. In the Wrath of Khan he sacrificed himself to save the crew of the Enterprise. His final words were “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…” I took this to heart and chose to sacrifice my own happiness and bring back the people that had been killed in the Spire. I was bummed out, but was pleasantly surprised when an achievement popped up. I looked at what I did to get it and saw that it said I had chosen ‘the needs of the many’.
If I’m forced to make a decision between the lives of untold numbers of exploited innocents on one hand, and my faithful hound and hot lesbian gypsy wife on the other, I’m picking the dog and the lesbian.
I couldn’t give a rats ass about the money and frankly the villagers were mindless peons that are impressed when you fart on them. I didn’t have a wife, but I wanted my dog back and more importantly I wanted my Sister back…then of course Lionhead did a cocktease ending so all you get is a vague letter saying that your Sister is alive and that you might see her one day if you wish really hard.
I saved all the people who built the Spire, really… I didn’t need money at that point (I played through evil, so I slaughtered entire towns, bought their houses, and rented them out), and I couldn’t justify saving family over the other people… That, and by that point I was pretty pissed off at my dog. Maybe it was just me, but he kept running off to chests I had already opened, and barking that there was treasure in places where nothing was.
I was a little disappointed in myself during the confrontation with Lucien tho… I was expecting this huge, epic, grand battle at the end (like Fable 1), and instead… I tapped the ranged attack button while he was mid-speech, and watched that single bullet kill him. And now I’ll never know what he was going to say.
I did like the change from the choice in Fable 1… More options than just “Do you wish to kill X?”. I’m curious what they’ll do for the end of Fable 3