Officially, Microsoft has not yet shut down Lionhead Studios, but they have canceled Fable Legends. They “are in discussions with employees about the proposed closure of Lionhead Studios in the UK.” Press Play, another developer at Microsoft Studios in Europe, will be shut down as a result of this same announcement, but that studio only developed Xbox One titles, and so I'll defer to other gaming outlets to cover that part of the story.
It's always unfortunate when jobs are cut, which seem certain given the closing paragraph of the Xbox announcement thanking them for their service. The weird part about this whole issue is how late plug was pulled in its development cycle. A closed beta has been operating for months, and a demo was shared with press as a DirectX 12 benchmark. The business model was supposed to be free-to-play, which means that it could potentially continue to bleed money after launch, but you would expect that concerns would have boiled over much earlier than now.
For our audience, this also means the cancellation of one of the expected, early implementations of DirectX 12. Lionhead Studios have also contributed to Unreal Engine 4 during the development of Fable Legends, particularly with shadow map optimization. I think their Global Illumination features, the main topic of the same article that was linked in this paragraph, were contributed upstream too, but I can't find an explicit source of that.
Another UWP app. Whatever
Another UWP app. Whatever
Is Microsoft trying to make
Is Microsoft trying to make people hate them?
Could it be some kind of new-age marketing ploy?
People have always hated M$,
People have always hated M$, it’s just that the folks in the past that wanted to avoid Apple’s/Google’s closed ecosystems usually had to get a PC with M$’s OS installed, as that was the only option with M$ and the OEMs force loading windows on new Third Party OEM PC/Laptop hardware.
The windows 7 ecosystem is the last of the M$ OS ecosystems that is any ways near to open for a proprietary OS! M$ is closing things UP with windows 10, and trying its best to turn users’ third party OEM PC/laptop hardware into an Apple style closed ecosystem. People have never liked M$, just like folks never liked MA Bell and the other Monopolies!
Strange, a LOT of people were
Strange, a LOT of people were looking forward to this game.
the beta wasn’t materialising
the beta wasn’t materialising into a coherent and fun game, so I understand why they cancelled it. Hopefully the assets can be used for a Fable 4 by Rare or some other studio.
Ah?
Ah?
Oh?
Oh?
Most of the beta feedback
Most of the beta feedback I’ve seen said the game wasn’t really a Fable game; however, the reviews have also generally rated it as being excellent fun with stunning graphics.
The graphics were stunning.
The graphics were stunning. It made the Xbox seem a lot more powerful than it is.
Don’t care for the fable
Don’t care for the fable franchise. I want to see them port Halo 3 & 4 and Gears of War 2 & 3 onto the pc with dx12 and much better graphics.
They could do that all right
They could do that all right now without DX12.