Fable Legends

Fable Legends was based around four Heroes and a Villain. Each role may be filled by a player via online multiplayer or by an CPU. The same game experience was possible regardless of multiplayer or single player (with four CPU). All of the game's story and quests could have been played single player, using AI heroes as sidekicks or enemies. It was possible to play through the game's content as either a Hero or as a Villain.

During each quest, the four Hero characters must use teamwork to succeed in their objectives, while the Villain player opposes them with an army of creatures.

Fable Legends takes place several hundred years before the events of the original trilogy. This is a period of magic, folklore, and mythology, and humanity has yet to discover meaningful technology. Most people huddle in small villages, too witless and scared to venture out into the scary world about. Heroes are more common, but there is no Heroes' Guild yet, and the Heroes must rely on each other to succeed.

The story of one quest revealed at gamescom told of an ancient artifact called "The Moon on the Stick", which the children of Albion once made wishes to. The heroes in Fable Legends are on a quest to locate this artifact.

In 2012, Lionhead Studios parent company Microsoft Studios mandated that the next Fable game needed to be in the games as a service model. According to Lionhead developers, Microsoft felt the popularity of the Fable series was waning, and a service model game would reinvigorate interest. At the time, service model games such as League of Legends were immensely popular, and Microsoft believed single-player games were on the decline. One developer went as far as to claim Microsoft effectively told Lionhead "You make a service game or you get closed down". As a result, a Fable 4 pitch that would have featured a traditional single-player campaign with a heavy emphasis on English folklore and Victorian era historical elements was rejected, and Fable Legends was instead greenlit sometime between July and August 2012.

In a Eurogamer article about the history of Lionhead Studios, author Wesley Yin-Poole notes that the exact origins of the game are unclear, as many of the developers interviewed gave conflicting answers. Some developers claim Fable Legends began as an offshoot of the unreleased Project Opal, an ambitious game that would have utilized cloud computing to connect three different components of the game that were each exclusive to computers, console, and mobile devices respectively. One developer stated, "They were looking to put the Fable name on Opal somehow, because they were unsure it would work by itself as a standalone. It was a project that wasn't gaining any ground.