Monthly Archives: August

Community is one of the peculiar needs of settlers, which requires settlements to be build compact and tight-fitting to avoid urban sprawl. But a densely growing population ultimately also leads to a higher level of pollution and diseases among settlers. To counter this effect, you can build a healer as your settlement grows (you will first need to build a guild-workshop as a prerequisite though). To further raise the medical supply, a healer can be upgraded to a hospital (see image, to the right).

For their much anticipated Fable 2, Peter Molyneux and his developing team were pondering about a way to engage players even before Fable is going gold and eventually came up with the idea to let players earn in-game money by virtual gambling. A nice idea (maybe we should do something similar for Coobico, lol) which led to the offer of “Fable 2 Pub Games”. After the release of Pub Games though, a bug in one the mini-games called Tower of Fortunes was quickly discovered which can be exploited to earn gazillions of in-game gold (check out the YouTube-video above). This will probably escalate to a major problem for the Fable 2 developers; Gold can be used to buy equipment and personal features for your character in Fable 2, as well as to own city-buildings and castles if you are rich enough to afford them, as Molyneux mentioned in an early developer’s walkthrough.

The developing-team seemingly tried to patch the problem, albeit with no success, as the video indicates.

What will happen to the balance of the multiplayer-title, if thousands of players will start the game as trillionairs? Just deleting the yielded profits to get rid of this problem doesn’t seem to be the best solution: while some players got Pub Games as a free goodie after pre-ordering Fable 2 from participating retailers, other spend US$10/800 points for their XBLA download of the mini-games. Also, this would mean to piss off die-hard fans which might spell a PR-nightmare for the upcoming title. 

Sergeants can be found at guardtowers and garrisons and raise the public order of a village. 

Cities need public order to keep their settlers happy, especially when they grow larger or when a corrupting influence (like a den of thieves) is located close by. A settlement’s public order is increased by building a guardtower—the score can even be raised further by upgrading a guardtower to a garrison (see above, to the right).

A bandit chief is the head honcho of a den of thieves or thieves’ guild. He exerts the main corrupting influence on surrounding villages and oversees all shady activities of his lot: hiring players as temp-bandits, mini-games, contracting the building of additional hangouts and occasionally sending adventurers to the subterranean stashes beneath the den of thieves.

Another constant source of annoyance to settlers on Qubus’ Island are bandits, who occasionally ambush travelers and build their den of thieves widely spread over the whole island. A den of thieves (to the left) is another hazard-spot which may have a negative impact on any settlement close by, as it raises a village’s corruption-score. These hideouts also form entrances to subterranean tunnels and stashes. A den can be upgraded to a Thieves’ Guild (to the right).

Tomb-guards are nasty fellows who are often cold and cagey to travelers. They are met at the graveyards they watch over and keep in good (which here means spooky) condition. A tomb-guard’s everyday hustle and bustle is mostly unknown, yet it is rumored that they are the literal cats among the pigeons, since tomb-guards often send adventurers on dubious quests, like scrounging for ingredients of obscure magic spells.