Inspired by the business model of DOTA 2, Lionhead Studios recently announced that their upcoming 4×1 multiplayer action-RPG, Fable Legends, will be free-to-play.
Lionhead has promised 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.”
At first, players will have access to “Season One” content, which includes a traditional RPG storyline, side quests and access to four heroes. Players who choose to play as a villain will have access to command a multitude of creatures.
Though the game will be free-to-play, Lionhead also plans to incentivize players to make purchases.
“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.”
Fable Legends is the first game designed exclusively for Windows 10 and DirectX 12, and is also the first to feature cross platform-play. It appears there will be some slight differences between the two versions, but Lionhead has promised that there won’t be any advantages or disadvantages.
“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.”
Fable Legends does not have a release date, but is expected to be available later this year for Xbox One and Windows 10.
