Fable: Legends will be a free to play but the decision wasn’t influenced by Microsoft. Rather, it came about as a natural evolution for the game’s direction and director David Eckelberry says regardless of its cost, it’s still the biggest Fable game the team has created.
Speaking to Games Industry International, Eckelberry said that with regards to the free to play models, “It’s a model that is a weapon, in some sense. So a weapon can be used for good and a weapon can be used for evil. We wanted to be sure that the world knew that we weren’t doing this for the reasons of a business model. Nobody came to Lionhead Studios and said, ‘We want you to make a free-to-play game.’ They said, ‘Make a new Fable game.’ And we said, ‘OK, let’s experiment, let’s be innovative.’
“Microsoft is much more interested in making a happy community of players and making the Xbox and Windows 10 a fun place to play – it doesn’t need us to be evil.
“It’s the biggest and most expensive Fable game that we’ve ever made in terms of the amount of time we’re investing in it and the size of the team. It’s a major project for Lionhead, as big as we’ve ever done.
“We really wanted the world to get a sense of that; we wanted everyone to know we wanted to do this innovative thing,” he added. “Look, whether we had charged $60 for it or brought it to market as we are, we wanted people to be excited about playing it, instead of worrying about how they were going to buy it.”
Fable: Legends is out on PC and Xbox One later this year.