Two months ago, in a stunning and surprising move, Microsoft shut down the renowned British studio Lionhead. Now, details have emerged about how it happened: in short, Fable Legends cost too much money, and nobody really wanted to make it.
Tagged With fable legends
Microsoft has cancelled the latest Fable game and has announced plans to close Lionhead, the legendary studio behind the Fable franchise.
Video: This may shock you, but Fable Legends isn't coming out in 2015 -- the free-to-play online game has been delayed and the open beta will now start in autumn next year.
To be honest, the first time I ever saw Fable Legends -- Lionhead's 4v1 multiplayer remix of Fable, due out later this year -- I could have made a confident educated guess that it would be free to play.
At today's Windows 10 event, Microsoft and Lionhead Studios showed off the ability for Xbox One and PC users to play with (or against) one another across platforms in Fable Legends. The company didn't mention whether this feature would be coming for any other games.
Fable Legends is one of those games that doesn't quite make sense until you get your hands on it. Fable is such an intrinsically single-player experience for a lot of us that imagining it as a co-op action game requires some mental gymnastics. Once I had a controller in my hands and four other people around me, though, I was pleasantly surprised by how well it works. A four-player arena combat game might not sound much like Fable, but its fairytale artistic direction, humour and good-natured sense of fun scream Fable with every breath. It's Fable meets Dungeon Keeper, essentially.
