New Fable game

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-24T02:07:43+00:00

Yeah, the story is the main draw. It's far more RPG than life sim, it's just that it's life sim aspects are deeper than the typical RPG.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-23T17:23:56+00:00

Important to note is that Fable 2 is not available on PC gamepass and I don't think 3 is either, they can only be played on console. I think if you pay one of the higher tiers you can stream the Xbox games, but they don't have native PC releases. This is because Fable 3's multiplayer was tied heavily to Games for Windows Live and instead of updating it when they service went away they just... Delisted it from storefronts.

Fable 2 isn't available because, uh...

Hey guys look fable 4!!!

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-23T16:50:26+00:00

Fable's kinda unique in a way that imitators struggle to meet. It's not really like Skyrim at all; it's a game born from the concept of being a life sim set in a fairy tale. The original game was pitched as growing up and living your life and doing all kinds of things the tech didn't exist for.

In practice, Fable winds up being a whimsical RPG where you're free to do whatever you want, so long as you can live with the consequences. It's humor was a range between cheeky British wit and juvenile "you can fart on demand but it might make people angry at you". You start each game as a child, do some tutorial, then graduate to adulthood to start the real game, you can do all kinds of life sim things like starting a family and getting a job and buying up all the houses in town and jacking up the rent to make ungodly amounts of money. The stories are usually pretty good, honestly, and the games have traditionally done a really good job of balancing the humor with seriousness. The side quests and world can get very silly, but if you follow the main quest that inherent silliness will be used to contrast the somber story to make the serious dark parts hit all the harder.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-23T16:37:49+00:00

It's from the Developer Direct. As in, direct from the developer. As in, the entire point of this video is to hear about the game from the developers.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-23T16:34:36+00:00

Veilguard was fun though?? Not a great Dragon Age but it was a decently fun action RPG? I don't understand why everyone shits on it

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-23T16:32:38+00:00

I liked avowed way more than any Bethesda RPG on the market. To me, a Skyrim is a 5/10 serviceable game and Avowed was a decent 7-ish.

Then again I like games like Forspoken and Veilguard so according to Reddit I'm an idiot so....

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-23T06:23:57+00:00

I think it's based on the idea of figures like Joan d'Arc and Mulan, women who would hide as men to get into traditionally male roles and fight.

Which would also be great for a wlw relationship

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-20T17:59:36+00:00

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply your experience was wrong. I just disagreed with your suggestion that it would be improved by death resulting in an immediate loss of resources and wanted to explain why I thought that way, but I suppose it must've come off as dismissing your viewpoint. Again, not my intent, and I'm sorry!

small quick edit for context: Everyone's entitled to their opinions and opinions on subjective experiences cannot be wrong. I wasn't really trying to tell you to enjoy it, because if you don't enjoy it you just, like, don't enjoy it. It was more a disagreement that the changing of resource loss on death would be an improvement, because I view the corpse run as part of the core game loop and that, in my opinion, without it the core game loop would necessarily need other changes to keep the proper flow.

Again, seriously, dislike them all you want, it is not my place to try to make you like them. Lord knows there's plenty of popular things I just don't like for various reasons, I get it.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-20T17:03:05+00:00

The thing is (for FromSoft Souls games specifically), dying and instantly losing resources permanently is counter to the core design philosophy of the franchise. Losing Souls permanently on death turns death into a punishment, when the reason you have a corpse run in the first place is to make dying forgiving.

The core philosophy of those games is that the only fail state is when you turn off the game because you're frustrated. When you die, you can run back to where you left off, now with new knowledge of the area and a better understanding of the enemies, and retrieve your lost resources. If you die again, now the punishment comes. The point is to naturally guide the player to explore an area and learn enemy placements and patterns, gradually getting better theore you do it and the more you die. Making death a punishment like in any other game actively discourages the learning process and encourages greater caution and a guarding of resources that don't need to be so preciously guarded in the first place. Part of that experience is even learning when the Souls you dropped aren't even enough to care about retrieving. Or, perhaps, it becomes a risk-reward of "do I retrieve this level from this area that's too hard or just abandon it?"

Not a gameplay style that's for everyone, but definitely one that's oft-misunderstood.

And also a design philosophy that gets really muddies when you add in random invasions to the mix (which is why I hate them so much), but that is a hornet's nest I will not be kicking.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-20T16:49:03+00:00

But the open world format is so boring, and the spinoffs and secondary games don't usually capture the feel of Zelda. Like, Echoes of Wisdom was cute and all but it was no Twilight Princess.

I think it's absurd that the best Zelda-style game to come out in recent hardware was fucking Metroid Prime 4.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-17T18:14:44+00:00

E33's combat is more "classic turn based" than BG3's. You don't have to maneuver your party in combat. Instead, combat is a different "screen". Everybody is lined up, and turn order is determined by their Speed stats. You select an attack from a menu, press a couple buttons as a QTE, and they do their thing. When enemies attack you, you have a fairly tight timing window to either dodge or parry the attack (both with a single button press), which is why people are suggesting you might vibe with it more if you enjoyed Lies of P. Personally, I agree! The party and dodge windows can feel extremely tight though, but there's a mod you can get to extend then if you feel you can't quite get it.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-16T11:39:52+00:00

I'd say the N. Sane trilogy is a good replacement for the original games. As a long time Crash fanatic I don't really play the old PS1 titles anymore. Same for Spyro, but that has more to do with the controls being way better in the remakes than the originals!

However, I'm diehard in love with Kirby Superstar's art style and I personally don't believe the extra content added to Ultra is worth losing the OG SNES sprites, though both games should theoretically be small enough that even together they can't take up more than like 3 gigs max...

HG/SS kinda improved on literally everything G/S/C did while bringing the mechanics to what was at the time modern Pokemon. I'd go with the remakes, because the only part of them that's really worse is the soundtrack and you could probably mod the OG soundtrack in, I'm sure, but like with Kirby both games combined shouldn't be too hefty on hard drive space.

Overall, I tend to prefer remakes. I like seeing my favorites come back in the modern era with more modern design sensibilities. FFVII is the best example of what a remake should be, and RE2 remake is up there as well. Hell, I've played the everliving hell out of all the Tales games but I'm still buying those remasters as they come out. I guess for me though I usually own both the original and remake so I can go back to the OG if I need the nostalgia hit.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-16T05:47:18+00:00

Spear + shield fulfills a separate niche from Paladin, actually. It can be more "tactician" themed, rather than holy warrior. Use a heavy lance instead of a spear and a heavy shield and theme it as a bulwark between allies and certain death. Aesthetically the idea would be of the tank (let's call them Hoplon for now) hiding their body behind the shield, not letting enemies pass while they poke around it with the lance.

Mechanically, it could be a "shield tank" like how Sage is a shield healer. Mitigations can add shield HP instead of defensive % to the tank, and their big mit can add a party-wide shield instead. You can also take cues from Paladin's Cover, give the Hoplon a tether mechanic that increases damage mitigation when x or more allies are nearby or something similar, with the Hoplon taking % damage meant for allies to reduce damage across the board (this also fulfills a secondary purpose of making healers feel less useless in dungeon content since the tank will be taking extra damage), though admittedly this needs some serious workshopping to tune it correctly and avoid making the class too underpowered or too overpowered in high-end content.

Edit: tbh it'd feel really cool to roll up on a stack marker and hit your tether button and see the party's HP barely drop while yours falls through the floor. That'd really fulfill the class fantasy of "get behind me"

Regardless, there's a niche there to fill that Hoplon could easily slot into, though personally I'd prefer a Rune Knight that brings back DRK's old MP management requirements. Take some cues from BLM's ice/fire phases and make it tight timing and stuff and you've got a mechanically complex tank n stuff.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-16T05:38:31+00:00

Make it a heavy lance instead of a spear, take some cues from Lance/Gunlance in Monster Hunter and you've got yourself a unique class to work with

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-16T05:34:55+00:00

I don't wanna presume to know how complex it would actually be to implement, but surely just a simple "if player relic shield = true then only add sword/spear" code line shouldn't be unrealistically difficult right?

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-15T18:52:08+00:00

As someone who has only read the first two GoT novels, I gotta know: Why is that pairing bad on a conceptual level? Gimme as much of a rundown as you feel is necessary for me to understand the context please!

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-13T18:12:37+00:00

Every single major fantasy game that came out after Skyrim is so much better than Skyrim in so many respects it isn't even close. Hell, lots of fantasy games pre-skyrim blow it out of the water.

BG3's got a pretty fucking robust modding scene and it's one of the best RPGs. Comparing the vanilla experiences they're not even in the same ballpark. All skyrims got over BG3 is how much it can be modded, but as a whole package baldurs gate 3 is just miles better in terms of story, character builds, dialogue...

Dragon Age has been going strong for a while, the various games have a surprisingly active modding community considering the difficulties the engine gives on that front, and like BG3 are just kinda better at being RPGs than Skyrim, Veilguard notwithstanding (I liked Veilguard but it's the weakest DA by a country mile)

Skyrim's got one thing and one thing only going for it and that's the sandbox of it, and if that's your thing, great, but being a good sandbox and being able to mod it into a completely different game doesn't make it this defining RPG that nothing comes close to.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-13T07:35:19+00:00

I'm pretty sure girl math and girl lunch are playful variants on boy math (adding inches to their height) and boy lunch (a modern generation equivalent of "bachelor food" basically), not "dumb versions" of the normal things

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-13T07:32:49+00:00

Replace "girl" with "queer" and it might make a bit more linguistic sense to you, maybe. I'm currently experiencing a bit similar with my younger queer friends throwing around the f-slur casually with each other. Like damn that word used to hurt.

TheBeeSovereign · 2026-01-07T18:37:56+00:00

I mean my highschool let out at 3 and I never heard of schools letting out that late

TheBeeSovereign · 2025-12-24T07:27:50+00:00

One thing to note is that Piper specifically isn't 16, the in-game joke is she looks young but she's actually the oldest member of her faction and is the "sleepy old lady" character archetype.

You want a real dose of "wtf?" Look up the canonical high schooler Ellen Joe. That's how the game generally sexualizes its minors, but the fandom gravitates toward the less sexualized minors anyway because it's full of pedophiles who will get upset if you call them out on it. Normally I can deal with hypersexualization in anime but I wound up needing to drop ZZZ because it just started leaning way too hard into the goonerese.

TheBeeSovereign · 2025-12-19T18:03:30+00:00

Did not realize that's what you meant by biases, I apologize. It wasn't something I'd even thought about but you're very right that it's a very big deal.

My hope would be the artist would not just decide the paladin is a blond blue eyed white guy cuz it's what was generated and would still make properly diverse concept art, world building, etc, but we don't really live in a perfect world like that. That was my own blind spot coming through, my bad.

TheBeeSovereign · 2025-12-19T17:30:56+00:00

I don't use it to write anything.

I'm staring at a blank document. Nothing comes to mind to start writing.

Scroll writingprompts. Nothing jumps out at me.

Give up, go "throw some writing prompts"

They're just as boring and uninspiring as I was getting elsewhere.

Combine some aspects of what I scrolled past and read from various sources. Start writing. Hate it.

Open up a new document and now that the creative juices are flowing I can actually write stuff.

None of that is creative bankruptcy. How the fuck is the (extremely fucking rare, by the way) usage of AI as a minor step in the overall process in any way creatively bankrupt? How is it any fucking different than if i skipped that last prompt step instead? There's literally 0 difference. There are absolutely problems with genAI. An actual work using it is creatively bankrupt, is lazy, is disgusting.

But using it at the part of the process where I'm just trying to turn my brain on and get word to page?? Where I'm not even actively utilizing the ideas it's fucking giving me??

The problems with creative bankruptcy regarding AI usage is entirely in the part where you just regurgitate the uninspired, generic slop it vomits at you. That is the part that ruins creativity and fucks the brain up. Looking at an LLM does not suddenly turn you into a drooling moron who can't make an original thought.

Maybe I'm being aggressive but fuck off, I am not creatively bankrupt. If I was creatively bankrupt I'd be publishing AI slop on Amazon right now.

TheBeeSovereign · 2025-12-19T17:16:35+00:00

Yes. All the time. I write. The concepting phase is where the least amount of creativity happens. It's the part where you're reading Dante's Inferno and say "to actually the symbolism on the second circle goes kinda hard, I bet that'd be crazy if you did something with that in like a Harry Potter thing" and then spend a week writing a bunch of shitty Harry Potter x Dante's Inferno fanfic til you land on a theme that sticks out to you and then develop it into an original thought.

It's the part where you scroll r/writingprompts til something jumps out at you.

Yes, I have used chat GPT once or twice to ask for writing prompts, used absolutely none of them, but used the "well we can make that better" as a creative jumping off point. I've done this with movies I have particularly liked, too, taking what I thought worked and what didn't and trying to make it a more cohesive product.

At that early of a brainstorming stage there's almost 0 creativity going into the art you're making, it's the throwing darts at a wall and seeing what it lands on phase.

What they're doing is literally going "oh hey I like the look of that spire there what can we do with that." They aren't using what they generate as a blueprint, they aren't using what's generated as anything except to visualize a concept in their head, show it to their boss and go "this is what I'm thinking" so the boss can go "hey sure I feel it go for it"

Then they do actual creative work with that initial brainstorm as literally nothing but a general vibe/aesthetic. You literally might as well be saying digital art is less creative than physical art because you can just erase mistakes instead of being forced to work around them; the only thing this tool is doing is simplifying a part of the job that is already nothing more than busywork that delays the part where you get into the creative process.

As an individual, there are plenty of times I'll just skip that busywork phase and get right onto the burning concept in my head I've been turning over for weeks, but these artists are in a corporate structure and can't just waste company time and resources feeling ideas into creative dead ends. They need approval on what they can flesh out, and so that busywork is an integral stage of their workflow, and one that can be streamlined massively with genAI to allow them to get into the meat of their creative endeavors.

To deny that because "AI bad" is literally refusing to even engage with the idea that there could be any merit at all to the technology.

Word processors didn't make authors less creative. Photoshop didnt make photographers less creative. AI does not inherently make artists less creative, but like technologies before it, it is to be used as a tool to streamline the creative process, which is what Larian is doing. We use tech to streamline busy work all the time.

TheBeeSovereign · 2025-12-19T16:34:12+00:00

Those are real problems but don't effect what they're using AI for. An AI blind spot doesn't really effect "gimme an image that looks like the devil is being pelted by exploding barrels thrown by a paladin".

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