Fable Legends Will Be Free To Play And Have a “Really Long Beta”

Fable Legends will employ the Free-to-Play (F2P) model, Lionhead announced today with a blog post. It’s certainly a bold move with all the controversy surrounding F2P, however it also opens the game for everyone to try, which may well be critical as this new installment is a major departure from previous games in the franchise.

 

In fact, Fable Legends will be heavily focused on multiplayer, featuring a 4-vs-1 mode where a group of heroes bands against a player controlled villain (though it’s possible to play solo with the remaining roles filled by AI). The studio clarified that there will be no paywall; instead, four heroes will be available at any time but these heroes will rotate every two weeks. Those interested in playing a specific character all the time will have to buy it, either with real money (through microtransaction) or in-game money, and of course cosmetic items will be also available for purchase.

Speaking with Kotaku, Lionhead explained that the game will have a really long beta in order to make sure that everything works as it should. This is understandable, as the game will also release on PC (for Windows 10) with full cross-play features. Creative Director David Eckleberry said:

The honest answer is a really long beta. There’s a lot of new stuff for us both in game design and technologically: cross-platform, Windows 10, all of the networking we have to do is mostly new to us. We run into game-crashing bugs frequently in our beta. But we want to find them NOW, so we have time to fix them… a bad launch week sticks with you forever. Nobody ever forgets – and they shouldn’t, I think fans are right not to forget it. They might forgive it… but I don’t blame fans for saying “dude, you screwed this up”. I don’t want to be in that place.

Among other things, Fable Legends is also the first game running on the DirectX 12 version of Unreal Engine 4. Stay tuned for more on this extremely interesting project!