Fable Legends Interview

Lionhead Studios director Stuart Whyte talks at length about Fable Legends, its place in the long-running series, the possibility of player-created content, why they focused on DirectX 12 support, what their long-term design goals are, and more in a new interview on Bidness Etc. A few technical details:

Fable Legends will use DirectX 12 (DX12) and we wondered why. Whyte said that by using DX12, the team was able to achieve (a significant amount of horsepower resulting in increased visual fidelity, higher frame rates, and improved shadows and effects.) Whyte further said that, depending on the graphics card, the team saw (up to 40% faster performance) on DX12 as compared to DX11. He believes anything that helps improve the graphical quality in games will definitely be loved by gamers and developers alike, and we couldn’t agree more.

The Xbox was based on Direct X technology, and that’s where the X comes from. Since Fable Legends is also being released on the Xbox One and allows cross-play, we were curious to know how Microsoft’s latest machine would benefit from DX12. And from the looks of it, apparently quite a bit.

(Fable Legends is using a number of features on Xbox One,) said Whyte, (including asynchronous compute and efficient multi-threaded rendering.) This has led to improvements in rendering efficiency, which means that the developer can (push the visual bar higher than would otherwise be possible.) This also means that the Xbox One now has better graphical and computing capabilities without actually increasing the hardware, all thanks to DirectX 12.