Lionhead has announced that Fable Legends will be a free-to-play game.
That's not really hugely surprising if you look at the gameplay. The four vs. one multiplayer battle game looks a lot more like recent hits Dota 2 or League of Legends (hmmm, even the titles are similar) than a traditional narrative-drive Fable quest, so why not copy their business models, too?
Lionhead promises you can enjoy "every element of the game" for free and that all items that affect gameplay can be earned without paying. Sounds nice, but it's generally true in free-to-play games of all stripe. There's a big caveat that free-to-play games are almost always tuned to require an insane amount of grinding to get to that content and to encourage players to free up their wallets to skip the tedium.
Lionhead also promises that it will be "generous" with the content to ensure that people pay because they love the game, but that's a bit more intangible.
Fable Legends will be out on Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs later this year.