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The PC version was supposed to show the potential of DirectX 12, too. Fable Legends was a graphical showcase, but should it have been? "They constantly wanted to use Legends as a demo for something new," one source says.
"Legends should have been dirt cheap to produce, that's the whole point of a free-to-play game. If people don't like the game, you take a small cut. If they do, you build more of what the people want. Legends cost a large amount of money, and was delayed countless times so we could show off some other piece of Microsoft tech."
How much money? One high-ranking Lionhead source says $75m was spent on Fable Legends - a gargantuan amount for a free-to-play game.
"The aim with free-to-play games it to get something out early and iterate on that and build up the community and build up your userbase," said a source.
"But because this was being set up as a flagship title, there was a strive to make it bigger and more polished before it came out. So the scale of the game was way beyond what it should have been to be a success as a free-to-play title."
Sources say Lionhead's work on Fable Legends was in part an attempt to tick the boxes Microsoft kept drawing. And if it kept ticking those boxes, the studio would keep on making games.
"We always tried to drive ourselves and do great stuff, but fundamentally when you're owned by a company that has strategic directions like Kinect, or wanting to move into games as a service, if you can tick the boxes of whatever the latest thing the wider organisation thinks is super important, like we ticked the Windows 10 box and the DirectX 12 box with Fable Legends - there was a belief that it reinforced your security because you were giving the organisation exactly what they asked for," one person said.
"Games as a service was something Microsoft was very keen on. The supporting of Windows 10 was something Microsoft was very keen on. And the prettiest ever online game using DirectX 12 was very much something Microsoft was keen on. So we just supported all of those things because we wanted to keep in their good books."
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