Fable Legends is Free-to-Play

Thank you based Lionhead.

This is actually awesome, wasn't sure this was a buy or not since it MP only it seams but now we'll all get a chance to give it a whirl for free... well, unless MS pulls a Sony free 5club on us. :P

Any thoughts?

The Story.

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Fable Legends is Free-to-Play

Lionhead promises players will be able to experience the entire game for free; Business model inspired by League of Legends and DOTA 2.

Fable Legends, the upcoming 4v1 multiplayer action-RPG, is launching as a free-to-play game on Windows 10 and Xbox One.

Initially, players will have access to "Season One" content, consisting of a traditional linear RPG storyline and side quests, along with four heroes to play as. Those who choose to play as a villain will have a range of different creatures to command, which are tied into the game's narrative.

Lionhead is promising that players will be able to experience the entire game for free, with no gated areas, along with open access to all quests, and no energy bar to limit play time.

Available characters will be rotated, but users can outright buy the chance to use them indefinitely.

"The only thing that will stand in your way from playing quest seven, is that you haven't finished quest six", Game director David Eckelberry told GameSpot.

"Just like your traditional RPG storyline, it's mostly linear with some side quests, so all of you have open access to all the quests in all of the seasons that we ever do."

Eckelberry also detailed some of the long-term plans for the game, promising a regular stream of updates that will include new quests, heroes, creatures, and items, all of which will be free for both Xbox One and Windows 10 users.

Notably, Eckelberry stressed that any items directly affecting gameplay "can be earned" organically via the game's chest and loot system. He also stressed that XP and resources like potions cannot be bought.

Money Maker

Fable Legends will incentivise players to make purchases, even if those items can also be earned through gameplay. Most notably, the four heroes you can play as will rotate on a fortnightly basis, and a new set of public-facing characters will be introduced. Any XP and loot earned with those characters will be saved until they next appear in the public rotation. However, users will also be able to purchase that character for use indefinitely, either by using silver coins collected during gameplay, or by forking over real-world cash.

Similarly, Villains will be able to permanently unlock creatures using silver coins or real-world cash. Players will then be able to use those creatures non-canonically, bringing them into earlier story quests to change things up. Cosmetic and vanity items will also be available for purchase.

Lionhead has not yet disclosed the pricing structure of Fable Legends. Also up in the air is how long players will need to play the game in order to earn enough coins to unlock a character.

"We haven't really arrived at what [that time] is," Product Manager Ian Griffiths told GameSpot.

"The best we can say is that if you're playing the game a decent amount, as we expect a gamer to, it would be reasonable to assume that you'd unlock a character. Beyond that, I don't have the numbers, it's very much up in the air still. And we're still going to be looking at how people play the beta and what works for them."

According to Griffiths, while Fable Legends didn't start out as a free-to-play game, the ideas the team wanted to implement (ongoing updates and cross-platform play) were deemed an ideal fit for that business model.

"[We] touched on a number of games that we looked to as awesome of examples of doing free-to-play right, stuff like League of Legends, DOTA 2, Team Fortress 2," said Griffiths.

"That's the direction that we want to go. They're very commercially successful, they're well-loved by their players, and we wanna be in that kind of area...when you fall in love with a game and it's just such a great experience, you get to that point where you want to invest in it.

"Like I say, I've played DOTA 2 for 800 hours, and [Valve] has just brought out a Crystal Maiden outfit, and I was like 'I have to have it!'. I don't feel compelled to have it, I want it. That's where we want to be, and that's where I think we're going to find success. And that success is reliant on creating a fun and valuable experience for players, and that's where we're going--or at least that's where we hope we're going."

Gallery

The Windows 10 Connection

While Fable Legends isn't the first free-to-play game to come from Microsoft, it will be the first designed exclusively for Windows 10 and DirectX 12, and the first to feature cross-platform play.

"Every time you make a launch game on a platform that is still forming there are bound to be challenges," Engineering Lead Raymond Arifianto told GameSpot.

"Like, we may say we need a feature, when we don't know when the feature is going to be delivered from the platform. What do we do in the meantime? Is it going to align with our timeline? But this challenge occurs with all launch games, and we're treating this like it's a new platform--essentially Windows 10 is a new platform.

"Everything that you can do on Xbox One you can do in Windows 10, and not only that, but everything just works. You can play on Xbox One, and then if you switch over to your PC you can pick up where you left off with all your character XP, loot, and inventory and stuff, and it just carries over without having to think about it."

There will be some differences between platforms, but Arifianto stressed that those will not give players an advantage or disadvantage (although, it should be noted that PC players will be able to make use of keyboard and mouse controls).

"The game may get prettier if you're running on a really beast machine, we will scale up," said Arifianto.

"On the other hand, we do want to make it fun and fair: just because you're playing on a powerful machine doesn't mean that you will have the advantage...a lot of those decisions affect how we build our multiplayer. We use Xbox Cloud Compute to run host processing, so you don't have a host advantage, for example. All the rendering happens on the client, but for the most part all the simulation, all the physics, all the achievements calculations, all the loot rewards, all the things like that happen on the cloud. We want to make sure that things like that are fair for everyone."

Unortunately, Arifianto wouldn't let slip the minimum spec for Fable Legends, although users can look to other Unreal Engine 4-based games for a rough indication of specs.

"So there will be work to scale [Fable Legends] down. We haven't announced our minimum spec yet, but it's coming. There's definitely going to be some scaling down, things like turning off the particles, things like that, to make sure that more people are enjoying our game...from the architecture perspective, the it looks more like an Xbox One game under the hood compared to a Win32 native game. That's why it can use all the live features. The goal is, from a platform perspective, is to make it easy for people to do what we're doing. Hopefully we're just the tip of the spear, and then people will think that it is doable, and maybe think about it in their next game."

@SecretPolice: Officially back on my radar!

Considering the last fables and now this model i will avoid this like a plague unless it turns out to be really great (which i am 99% sure it won't)

Microsoft! Stop it!!! You aaaare tooooo generous!

First free stuff with bundles, yesterday free Forza and now this?!?!?!

Gonna be a great year! A very green year..

Was never really on my radar, and this sure as shit doesn't help.

@Krelian-co:

Dude, it's free, why would you avoid it without even giving it a try for yourself?

"[We] touched on a number of games that we looked to as awesome of examples of doing free-to-play right, stuff like League of Legends, DOTA 2, Team Fortress 2," said Griffiths.

Good, that particular style of F2P is fine. I hear Killer Instinct is good aswell.

F2P with rotating heroes with the option to buy them for money and some cosmetic packs.

Now i might actually give the game a run to atleast try it, because i sure has hell wasn't buying it for more than 15 euros.

Also, better be on Steam. probably not

This game was a must buy for me.. now its free?? Sign me the **** up I'm so pumped for this. Take my money now! or don't I guess.

good point being free and all but still, i have the feeling it will be a huge waste of time, i am always up for a game proving me wrong and turning out to be great, but i highly doubt it.

Would be the only way to get PC gamers to play it. Could you imagine GFWL 2.0?

Avoids a so-called "AAA exclusive" being sent to die as well.

I'll definitely try this. Fable 3 was a bad... bad game, so I don't know if what they're doing here will whet my appetite for another great Fable game, but I'm looking forward to at least trying it. If anything, their structure of changing out characters so you can't play your character may be enough to either get me to spend the cash on the character so I have him/her all the time, or it will get me to stop playing and delete it. We'll have ot see.

I would try it for free, but I'm guessing it wouldnt hold my interest long. Most MP only games dont,

Still $20 too expensive.

Cool, will actually try this out now.

Ok, i was going to come in here and make a "pay-to-win" reply bash.

but then i read this:

"Lionhead is promising that players will be able to experience the entire game for free, with no gated areas, along with open access to all quests, and no energy bar to limit play time."\

and i'll be honest, that shut me up real quick and now im interested myself.

Which will be a really dumb move by MS. Putting it on Steam will give some exposure to users but locking it behind the windows store is setting the game to die, mainly because it's not a large enough game like Halo, Gears or Forza to push people into it.

Thankfully, MS has been putting some older titles on steam and Ori and the Blind Forest in there aswell. So i have some confidence that Fable, and the tumored Killer Instinct, might show up on Steam

Yup, that's my biggest concern as well but eh, for free, I'll give it a go.

Yes while they milk your bones dry with microtransactions!

LOL Fable Legends will incentivise players to make purchases,

You can play with AI bots and there's suppose to an episodic "campaign" though i don't expect that be worth shit.

@sts106mat: well it's more like MP focused not MP only. You can play the entire game solo with bots as there is a linear campaign/story just like past fable games.

Good for Xbox One/pc owners. Here's a video run down on it...they discuss a lot of game details at length. For those that don't feel like reading.

Music to mah ears, thanks a bunch. :D

NOOOOOOOOOOOO. I'm dead serious when I say this just charge me the X amount of FCUKING dollars for the full game with all the content. AS soon as I read pay money to permantly own a character it annoyed me. DAM console having the ability to go online. I'll probably still end up getting the game. Seriously these companies are really trying to hard to sweet talk all the cheap gamers but in the famous words of Kermit "That aint none of my business"

you make purchases with in game coins they're saying. You can use either the coins or actual money.

@tymeservesfate:

That vid isn't working for me? Says try again later, dunno.

And I just lost all interest in the game. **** F2P bullshit.

A noble effort really. Cherry'o good chap!

Why sell a £50 game when you can sell £50 items?

I honestly have only tried a couple of f2p games and didn't put much time in at all but if you want, can you not just purchase everything up front? If so, then it sounds like you can if you choose essentially pay for the whole game like it was retail, I dunno?

Purchase everything in a F2P game? What and spend 10 grand?

hahahaha, seriously, yikes, I never knew.

@SecretPolice: Day one for me. I was going to get it anyways. Now that it's FREE, it's a sure thing. I'm very interested and seeing what variety of content it will have. They are already saying the quests are linear so this seems like we might be repeating the same quests over and over again to level up and go to the next quest. There should be some kind of single player mode as well with it's own set of quests. We'll see how it turns out.

I think you missed the point. Have you ever played a F2P game where you get plenty of coins to buy all of what you want without putting in tons of hours?

Also look at the words theyre using.... "Incentive" They wanna encourage you to to make purchases. What happens when your character who is out of rotation for Possibly ( dont know how many/ time frame of rotations) is out for 3 weeks to a month? It's gonna push you to spend money. All F2P games do it. It's just the amount of how much lionhead will push you to spend that money.

Warframe is an excellent F2P game. BUT it's impossible to make any grounds without playing it almost every day of the week to make their in-game currency.

The only F2P game that got it right was Path Of Exile. EVERYTHING was cosmetic that was purchasable and didn't effect anything in the game. As does dota, I dont know enough about LoL to comment on it.

No F2P isn't a bad thing. I'll absolutely check this out but using the word incentive and having rotating things almost giving players a slight pressure to purchase things with real money.

I mean we really don't know, will characters be only purchasable with real money? Silver? How much silver will you truly get in a day? Will they cap it? Will the price of things outweigh the amount of silver you can get in a play session? These are all questions that have to be considered.

I was looking forward to this, but not sure how I feel about the multiplayer only setup...

Was looking forward to this game and now that its free to play and cross platform, it's going to be even better cause more people will be playing. Very smart of MS and I know i'm going to be getting all the characters from launch. Good Job MS.

This is how I feel.

Where was the full fledged fable game they were talking about years ago? Last I heard it turned into an MMO. I wonder if this is the end-product of that concept.

Cool. And according to tiger it's coming out next month to counter bloodborne! Looking forward to it!

Pretty cool, yesterday Neverwinter and the Forza Horizon stand alone fast and furious was announced and now this. A lot of free goodness is coming.

Poor Bloodborne, hasn't a chance against this Monster. :o

You know I kid. :P

Not free to play if you need a gold subscription.

And free to play is hardly an exciting feature these days.

Sounds fair, they went into detail with the pricing model and it appears you can experience most of the game without paying a dime, which is great because it gives it great exposure. People who love it and want to keep a character out of rotation can just pay, otherwise you keep playing with a different character. Looking forward to trying it and seeing how it compares to Evolve.

Console depreciation

i understand what you're saying. but watch the video i posted from Eurogamer for more info if you want. the guy went to Lionhead's studio and played the game. had a Q&A about it and the practices they plan to implement. he even addressed what you just pointed out directly. again, he addressed most of what you said in the video.

yes, F2P games usually put you into positions where you have to decide whether to spend your money or grind it out and earn the coins to make the purchase. but there's an option and a choice there for the person. you can't even buy overpowered weapons and use them instantly. you have to level up to use them. it all sounds, solid and fair. i don't have a major problem with it. it all remains to be seen though. it all sounds positive. i'm hoping what he stated turns out to be true...you are taking the more skeptical approach. it what it is.

i posted it from my phone before. hopefully this one will work.

well it is a F2P game you do have to take it with a minor grain of salt.

Nonetheless i'll definitely check it out

.

@tymeservesfate: Yup, I'm definitely trying this out. Looks fun. I haven't played a fable game since fable 2 (which was awesome btw).