In its general structure, yeah, it’s close. It definitely scratches the same itch for me.
On a more basic gameplay level, it’s a bit peculiar because it’s almost not a platform game in the traditional sense. There is very little jumping and a lot of climbing, digging and throwing stuff. But it’s fun, and there are cool moves to pull off in this one too.
Well, if I get what they’re doing this time, it’s different.
Heroes in Fable are driven by narrative forces, they are supposed to be literally heroes of a fable. Morality in these games is not reputation, it’s not supposed to be realistic, it’s like a natural law of the world. And, along with a few other character development traits, morality changes your character physically.
You can even “boost” your evilness with stuff like eating live chicks. Nobody witnesses you doing that.
There’s a whole shtick in Fable that sets it apart from most RPGs, in that, Fable never even pretends you’re a character among others. You’re one of 5 or so heroes destined to shape the story, and the rules applying to you are just different from everyone else.
It sounds like this time, they’re going for something a lot more classic, i.e. scoring how people feel about your choices.
Microtransactions, and gacha in particular, are a plague. I don’t expect this terrible mess will have any significant negative impact for the game publisher, but if it does, good.
That’s the one, the thing that let you go to random deserted islands, usually for materials. It was just never meant to be printed en masse and hoarded like capital.
I think the idea of needing an economy between players in AC is a bit ridiculous too anyway. My only “trades” with other players, if you could call them that, were stuff like “you can go pick some of my extra blue roses, and please get me that cool red godzilla variant from your town”.
NH tends to be “softer” in general, and I do regret some choices too, including that one a bit, but I think it would have been a lot harder to maintain to go back to all those little choices and put toggles on them. Especially with all the complaints around everything that was “wrong” back around NH’s debut (with people arguing a lot about how wrong it was).
There has been a lot of QoL added to updates, which makes me think they did hear some of the most common annoyances people had, but if you weren’t there around the first months, you can’t imagine the level of drama going on.
Including stuff that were only problems because of people making up their own rules and getting upset when it was not streamlined enough.
I don’t hear a lot about that anymore, but there was a lot of people trying for a better online player economy (…yeah, not sure why). Their problem was the most common currency, bells, was too easy to cheese/get through cheating. So they turned to another “currency”, the Nook Miles Ticket. Since you get it from miles, and miles are rewarded for actually imteracting with the game a lot, it felt more “valuable” to them (hell, they put proof of work into freaking Animal Crossing).
Since normally tickets have only one purpose on-game and that’s visiting a singular mystery island, the miles redeeming machine only gives one ticket at a time with a fairly long interaction. For normal use, it’s completely fine. But of course people wanting to use them as money complained s lot about how long it is to spit out a hundred “NMTs”.
One of the things that don’t exist anymore in NH but was still a thing in NL is villagers can move in and most importantly out without you noticing, because you can only convince them to stay if you catch them the day they decide to move.
In NH they’re basically stuck with you forever until they tell you they consider moving, and then you can tell them not too. And you can also try to choose a new villager by meeting random ones on desert islands (though you can still just leave it completely to chance too). Depending on who you ask, some prefer the bit of simulated independence, others can’t stand the idea of their “dream villager” leaving if they missed the day.
By the way the same masked rabbit is living in my NH town right now! She’s called Grisette in French.
It is exactly that. I never truly did that for Civ, but had fun with hotseat sessions of Heroes of Might and Magic 3. IIRC the game literally calls it that, must have been the first I encountered the term.
I guess it would depend on the game, but I rarely play games where those are necessary.
I mean, we’ve reached a state where controllers have more or less been standardized as 2 sticks, 4 face buttons, 2 shoulder buttons, 2 triggers, usually 2 small buttons used for menus/map. Plus 4 directions on the D-Pad, if it’s not used for movement. That’s a lot already.
That said, every once in a while I do get a game in which they go absolutely crazy on stick press commands. No man’s sky use them all the time, including a baffling right stick press to sprint.
Personally I don’t like having anything on stick press (at least for game controls, I can tolerate occasional use to open a menu or something). I think it feels terrible and I have no idea why this progressively became a thing on controllers since mid-00s.
Worst use of that I’ve ever found was Fable (at least the 360 version). The game wants you to push the left stick while also using it to move to sneak.
I have a big switch library, and my OG switch is not in the best of shapes. Also, I honestly expected better from Mario Kart.
So yeah, as I said, I’m not exactly advising anyone to get one right now. I’m just saying, it’s more comfortable than the switch, it has one good exclusive game, and it runs some switch 1 games significantly better.
I have one, I like it as a slightly better switch, but, yeah. There’s not a lot of reasons to get one for now.
Mario Kart World and Age of Imprisonment are disappointing, most of the other first party games are just upgrades of Switch games, including Prime 4 that’s… Meh.
Bananza was a lot of fun, but it’s not selling a whole console.
I had an original DS, the big gray brick that’s been nicknamed “panzer” compared to DS Lite and DSi… Amusing when you see how 3DS XL and then the Switches turned out.
After years of service the upper screen broke into a pretty LCD rainbow. At the time it was long into DSi life and 3DS was almost coming, but I still got a new white DS Lite because I wanted the GBA port. I still have that one.
It was a bit awkward because New Horizons (Switch) is not very different from NL except it started very rough and unfinished. It removed a lot of things from NL (especially furniture customization options, which is still a shame), and at launch there was very little to do.
Nowadays though, following several updates, it’s great. There’s still a bit of nostalgia for great stuff in NL (better Isabelle, funnier dialogues, more furniture sets and customization, and a few special villagers and cool mini-games).
But the missing NPCs/events were progressively added, exterior furniture is a huge pro, and especially the big update along the Happy Home Paradise DLC added a ton of new items. And there’s a new update coming soon (probably the last one, and after a very long time wothout anything, but it was a bit unexpected).