Fable Legends To Use Dedicated Servers Powered By Xbox Cloud Compute

In a GDC 2015 session titled Fable Legends: Cross-device Gameplay with Xbox Live (which you can watch in its entirety here), Lionhead‘s Engineering Lead Raymond Arifianto revealed more information on Fable Legends’ server structure.

The development team initially tried P2P (in this context, Peer-To-Peer) networking, but ultimately decided to go with dedicated servers in order to provide the best possible gameplay experience for users, and it will use the Xbox cloud compute by Azure in order to do that, similarly to Titanfall or Forza Motorsport.

As you can read from the slide, there are multiple advantages to this approach. First of all, there’s extra security versus hacking: Arifianto explained that with cloud compute they’re running all the simulation, physics, damage calculations, loots, rewards, experience etc. on the server side, which makes it basically impossible to hack. Then of course there’s the fairness of no host advantage, which usually plagues games with P2P configurations, and the added bonus of solving potential NAT issues between different users, something that I’ve personally experienced way too many times recently.

Another interesting tidbit is that their matchmaking formula (using Xbox Live SmartMatch) will take into account which heroes are being joined in a session. Since Fable Legends has predefined heroes to select from, it’s nice to know that you won’t see a clone of your selected hero in the same party.

Finally, Arifianto said that a platform wide solution for cross-device voice chat between Windows 10 and Xbox One will be available later this year, so Lionhead is currently using its own internal solution until then.

 

Fable Legends will be completely platform agnostic, meaning that gamers won’t even be able to see the platform being used by folks in the friends list; everything will carry over from Windows 10 to Xbox One and back: progress, achievements and purchases.

That alone would make it interesting, but it’s also the first DirectX 12 game in production and it will mark a huge departure from previous titles in the franchise, being multiplayer focused and Free to Play.

Stay tuned on Worlds Factory as we’ll have more to share soon!