Lionhead are working very hard on making Fable Legends look great (and succeeding, mostly because of a gorgeous artstyle), in spite of the game’s status as a free to play title. And at the upcoming GDC, they will be hosting panel where they discuss their graphical techniques that they used to make the game look aesthetically appealing
“To continue to push the boundaries of visual fidelity for Fable Legends, we have worked to increase the richness of ground surface cover and accelerate artist authoring workflow. The talk will describe the various procedural tools and techniques, in-editor and at run-time, that have been employed to provide a fully dynamic mesh instancing system, non-destructive surface editing capabilities, and the power that such tools bring. There will be many examples of what has been achieved and learned from adopting these approaches and how they have behaved alongside the more traditional approaches also used.”
The takeaway from this panel should be developers gaining “an insight into the tooling and technology brought in to extend and supplement Unreal Engine 4. [Developers can] see how procedural techniques can be used alongside traditional content authoring approaches, and the benefits (and problems) they can bring to a large game project.”
Fable Legends is out later this year on Windows 10 PCs and Xbox One, with a beta test coming up first. It’s the latest installment in Lionhead’s long running Fable series.