Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled

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ITSMILNER
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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by ITSMILNER » Tue Mar 08, 2016 6:05 am

They should have scrapped the Fable Legends idea ages ago and looked to create an actual Fable sequel. They could have done a good job with the power of the XBone behind it

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by BID0 » Tue Mar 08, 2016 8:12 am

Tineash wrote:
Somebody Else's Problem wrote:What's the betting a few of them end up at Playtonic? Although that place seems more like a refugee camp for Rare employees.


I'm picturing dozens of sad men queued up outside the Playtonic offices, their only skill in life: making video game farting animations, while all the googly-eye specialists look out the windows at them with pity.

I shouldn't laugh because of the situation but :slol:

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Herdanos » Tue Mar 08, 2016 8:18 am

magicmilner wrote:They should have scrapped the Fable Legends idea ages ago and looked to create an actual Fable sequel. They could have done a good job with the power of the XBone behind it

But were they allowed to do this?

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Venom » Tue Mar 08, 2016 8:23 am

magicmilner wrote:They should have scrapped the Fable Legends idea ages ago and looked to create an actual Fable sequel. They could have done a good job with the power of the XBone behind it


Games radar asked Phil Spencer about it last week at the Xbox/Windows 10 Spring Showcase.

Gamesradar wrote:We asked how Fable Legends was going, and if we'd ever see another numbered Fable?

His answer didn't suggest a dead game walking: "I think we could do many things with Fable. I think the world of Albion and the hero-based nature of that game could show up in many different spaces," was his reply. Although, yes, that is an oddly deflective answer as he talks about 'showing up in different spaces' and dodges saying how it's actually going.

He continues to say, "it's been in beta for a while, and we're watching the engagement numbers. The thing around Legends that I'm committed to is I want to make sure its release matches the expectations in terms of quality that our customers deserve. So it's not about releasing something because it's on a poster, because there was a date posted somewhere." Or, as it turns out, releasing it all.

For the studio itself, Lionhead, Phil stated that "the team's really committed to what they're doing with Fable right now," and referenced a "healthy turnover at the studio" as a reason why they couldn't do "a big single player RPG-driven thing like the Fable of old," because "that studio isn't that same studio," adding, "they've really crafted themselves around Fable Legends."

The idea that the team were so tightly interwoven with its product might go some of the way to explain why both the studio and game seem to have been shut down together.

http://www.gamesradar.com/heres-what-phil-spencer-had-say-about-fable-legends-lionhead-last-week/

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Lagamorph » Tue Mar 08, 2016 9:22 am

magicmilner wrote:They should have scrapped the Fable Legends idea ages ago and looked to create an actual Fable sequel. They could have done a good job with the power of the XBone behind it

Gotta chase that MOBA and F2P cash. Microsoft have seen how insane it's been for League of Legends and Dota2 and they want some of that pie.

Personally I've never found the genre appealing, so would've skipped Fable.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Photek » Tue Mar 08, 2016 12:07 pm

magicmilner wrote:They should have scrapped the Fable Legends idea ages ago and looked to create an actual Fable sequel. They could have done a good job with the power of the XBone behind it

I'd be massively surprised if they haven't handed a proper sequel to another studio.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Venom » Tue Mar 08, 2016 1:37 pm

Photek wrote:
magicmilner wrote:They should have scrapped the Fable Legends idea ages ago and looked to create an actual Fable sequel. They could have done a good job with the power of the XBone behind it

I'd be massively surprised if they haven't handed a proper sequel to another studio.


Have you got an internal studio in mind or are you thinking external? Creating a full RPG game is very ambitious if you intend to do it from the ground up and Phil Spencer explained to Gamesradar why Lionhead couldn't do it themselves, he made the contradictory comment that the studio had 'a healthy turnover.' i.e., many staff had left. I don't know if in gaming it is different but in every other field having a high turnover is a bad sign that a company is not able to retain their talent.

Gamesradar wrote:[Phil Spencer] referenced a "healthy turnover at the studio" as a reason why they couldn't do "a big single player RPG-driven thing like the Fable of old," because "that studio isn't that same studio,"


It seems that he is saying that the people who made Fable no longer work at Lionhead.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Herdanos » Tue Mar 08, 2016 1:41 pm

What was Fable's financial performance like? Maybe we're a bit blinkered given we're mostly UK and we're all gamers, so Fable might seem like a bigger deal to us than it actually is - if it didn't sell as well as it reviewed perhaps MS won't have the inclination to pass it on to another dev.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Christopher » Wed Mar 09, 2016 8:18 am

Photek wrote:
magicmilner wrote:They should have scrapped the Fable Legends idea ages ago and looked to create an actual Fable sequel. They could have done a good job with the power of the XBone behind it

I'd be massively surprised if they haven't handed a proper sequel to another studio.


You'd hope it was a British studio, I don't think anywhere else in the world would be able to give the same humour as Lionhead has done to the world of Albion.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Saint of Killers » Wed Mar 09, 2016 9:09 am

:P Hopefully a Brit dev with a better sense of British humour gets to develop the game.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by BID0 » Wed Mar 09, 2016 9:24 am

Rare :dread:

I don't think we will see Fable again now. It's over. It looks like Microsoft are consolidating things both with hardware and the software, so E3 will be interesting. I'm going to spend the credit left on my Xbox account and that will be it until I get an idea of where they're going. The only game that I play on X1 has the highest level DRM so if Microsoft decide to shut down the servers then I won't be able to play any of my DLC.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Lagamorph » Wed Mar 09, 2016 9:31 am

Nah, we'll see Fable again. Give it 5-10 years and it'll be on Kickstarter.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Herdanos » Wed Mar 09, 2016 11:00 am

Lagamorph wrote:Nah, we'll see Fable again. Give it 5-10 years and it'll be on Kickstarter.

Stretch goal: plant acorns that grow into trees as you play through the game ($1,000,000,000)

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Photek » Wed Mar 09, 2016 12:39 pm

suzzopher wrote:
Photek wrote:
magicmilner wrote:They should have scrapped the Fable Legends idea ages ago and looked to create an actual Fable sequel. They could have done a good job with the power of the XBone behind it

I'd be massively surprised if they haven't handed a proper sequel to another studio.


You'd hope it was a British studio, I don't think anywhere else in the world would be able to give the same humour as Lionhead has done to the world of Albion.

Agreed, hopefully some fable heads will join Rare and take it forward.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by BID0 » Wed Mar 09, 2016 1:15 pm

I noticed that the Project Spark team is also missing from the refreshed list. The servers for that game went down just before the news of Lionhead Studios broke and all of the DLC for that game has been removed from the store.

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And here's how it looks today:

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http://www.videogamer.com/news/microsof ... udios.html

twitter.com/proj_spark/status/705933116502704128



They say they're looking in to it so it could just be a lot of coincidences.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Photek » Wed Mar 09, 2016 2:59 pm

Undead Labs have a multi game exclusivity Deal with MS, not quite first party but close enough.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Saint of Killers » Thu Mar 10, 2016 11:24 am

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2016-03-10-a-celebration-of-lionhead wrote:(More at the link. The following is merely last few paragraphs.)

Lionhead's best game may be a sequel, but it never felt like the type of developer that suited the role of Fable factory. Molyneux got Lionhead into financial troubles in the past and, one would wager, there is some untold story about just what the investment in its famous Kinect experiment Milo & Kate was, and whether it ended because Microsoft lost faith in the hardware, the software, or the studio.

But what we know of Milo & Kate does say something. Milo is one manifestation of a game Molyneux has wanted to make for decades, built around the concept of a boy growing up. There is no telling how much of the incredible E3 demo was smoke-and-mirrors, but I have colleagues who subsequently 'played' it at the studio and attest to it being a functional experience that - with hiccups - seemed reasonably responsive.

From the outside, it seems Lionhead went really big on Milo, but Microsoft didn't see it as a viable commercial product. In September 2010, the news broke that work on Milo had been halted and, despite the odd tidbit, that has been that.

Who knows whether Microsoft was right or wrong, but it seems that many had invested much in Milo - not least Molyneux, who would see Fable: The Journey to completion before leaving in early 2012. And Microsoft also deserves its due: however things ended, without Redmond's involvement, there may never have been anything after Black & White 2.

Lionhead was a studio that tried for moon shots, and sometimes didn't make them. But in this it supported many great artists, some of whom have gone on to establish themselves independently. For a while, Lionhead had the reputation of a 'nearly' studio - one that always threatened to make a great game without ever doing so. Well that, at least, can be forgotten about. If Lionhead is to go, it's a sad day for British development, and we owe it at least the dignity of a headstone at 1 Occam Court, Guildford. "Here was Lionhead, 1996-2016. A dreamer that followed through."


The whole thing is worth a worth a read, but that penultimate paragraph suggests MS deserves at least some credit.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Photek » Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:17 pm

This screenshot I took from playing Fable 2 on my X1 shows how magical a game it really is, especially the start:

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Saint of Killers » Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:24 pm

Photek wrote:This screenshot I took from playing Fable 2 on my X1 shows how magical a game it really is, especially the start:

Image


That opening was amazing. I knew the game was for me the instant I played it.

Such a shame the sister character got killed off.

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PostRe: Lionhead Studios to close. Fable legends cancelled
by Photek » Thu Mar 10, 2016 12:25 pm

Saint of Killers wrote:
Photek wrote:This screenshot I took from playing Fable 2 on my X1 shows how magical a game it really is, especially the start:

Image


That opening was amazing. I knew the game was for me the instant I played it.

Such a shame the sister character got killed off.

I was surprised how upsetting it was even though I knew what was coming. :cry:

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