'Fable Legends' Goes Free-To-Play
Fans of the Fable series are hoping Fable Legends will give them their much-needed gaming fix for the series, but developer Lionhead Studios is hoping to attract more players outside of the Fable fandom with an announcement earlier today that the game is entirely free to play.
The game centers on four heroes pitted in a battle against a villain. Each hero has a different set of powers and must fight their way through traps and minions before finally fighting the opposing villain. The four-on-one concept was used recently in the game Evolve, but the Fable Legends' vast list of characters opens up the game to various combinations of heroes and villains, just like in multiplayer online battle arena titles such as League of Legends and Dota 2.
So how does Lionhead make money from the game? The cast of heroes rotates every two weeks. Any loot or experience on a certain character will stay with that particular character until they are available again in future rotations. You can choose to wait until that character comes back or use in-game currency or real-world cash to buy the character outright and use them for every game. The same goes for the villain characters, as well as cosmetic in-game items.
The move to free-to-play also serves as a jumping-off point for those buying Windows 10. As we saw at Microsoft's Windows 10 press event a few weeks ago, the game allows cross-platform play between the Xbox One and PC. Fable Legends will also feature DirectX 12, which we recently discovered has a lot of new tricks up its sleeve, such as Split Frame Rendering and the ability to work with both Nvidia's GeForce and AMD's Radeon GPUs at the same time.
The Microsoft exclusive has a lot riding on its back with DirectX 12 and the first game on Windows 10 to support cross-platform play. But even with all these features, it's up to the consumer if the game is worth their time. More importantly, Windows 10 has to attract enough Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 users to make the switch to the latest operating system. In the end, there are a lot of variables that need to work in Lionhead's favor to make Fable Legends a success for the new API and operating system.
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Rexly Peñaflorida is a freelance writer for Tom's Hardware covering topics such as computer hardware, video games, and general technology news.
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Gracodana If they get the revolving like leagues then this will be great hope it's alright as the game looks promising.Reply -
whiteodian After getting stuck in a tree in Fable 3, I'll pass. I literally spent an hour trying to unglitch myself. I lost all of my progress and just gave up on the game. I'll devout my time and money elsewhere.Reply -
Haravikk I still would rather they'd spent their time on an actual Fable game, and really free-to-play is what this should have been from the start as it's just not compelling enough for fans of the series.Reply
The thing I really don't get is that the Fable setting is actually pretty unremarkable, the big appeal of the series is that it's a single-player game with quirky characters in which your choices shape the world around you. So where the idea to make a multiplayer-only game with no story, no real characters and no ability to shape the world came from I don't know, as it's pretty much the very opposite of what the franchise offers, and why it was popular to begin with.