Fable Legends is an upcoming free to play coop-focused ARPG where four players play the role of the heros while the villain (read dungeon master) sets up encounters and controls how the story progresses, a pretty neat concept if you ask me.
The initial idea was to release the open beta during this year's holiday season but according to Lionhead Studios the scope of the game increased so much they simply had to delay it until Spring 2016. If you wish to try the game sooner you can sign up for the closed beta which is going to be sending out new invites soon, details are below.
They are accepting about 100,000 PC and Xbox players in to the closed multiplayer beta and with numbers that high I wonder who exactly are they trying to fool with the "closed" prefix. So if you apply over at the Fable Legends Website you are more or less guaranteed to get in.
As for the delay, here's what Lionhead had to say about it:
"Fable Legends is coming together well and it’s a lot of fun. But we think that we can make it even better. So we’ve decided to extend our closed beta to continue to listen to feedback from our players and add features and polish that will make a real difference. This means Fable Legends won’t release into open beta this holiday as previously announced. We realise this may be disappointing for those of you not currently playing, so we wanted to tell you why.
To be honest, we didn’t anticipate just how big Fable Legends is becoming. It’s simply the most ambitious game we’ve ever created at Lionhead. We’ve built a unique and innovative multiplayer experience combining RPG and RTS gameplay which allows you to play, and use your gear seamlessly, across Xbox One and Windows 10. On top of this, we’ve built a beautiful new world full of grand stories and adventures. And it’s taking more time than we thought.
The team is working exceptionally hard and we’re proud of how far the game has come. We’re operating our closed beta 24/7 and have added lots more features, quests, creatures, and heroes to play. Hundreds of thousands of fans have participated in the beta so far, and we can’t wait to open it up for all of you to play. To achieve our aspirations for Fable Legends, we’ve moved our open beta release to spring of 2016. So to all of you who have been playing in our closed beta, and to all of you who have been waiting patiently for the game to release into open beta, we want to thank you on behalf of everyone at Lionhead."
I've said this before and I'll say it again, seeing a game get delayed is not something one should be disappointed with, rather you should be glad because it means that the development team behind is fully committed towards making it as good as possible and not just dumping it the moment its even half-finished.
And I really do hope this ends up being good, the DnD style multiplayer is something I was itching for over a decade and so far it was never really done well so maybe, just maybe, Fable Legends manages to pull it off.