So what does free to play mean for Fable Legends? To help explain our approach to free to play, we’ve laid out three clear commitments:
OPEN
You’ll be able to play Fable Legends from beginning-to-end without spending a penny. That means you’ll have access to the entirety of Fable Legends’ storyline and all of the quests we release this year and forever.
FAIR
Everything in Fable Legends that affects gameplay can be earned by simply playing the game.
GENEROUS
Our goal is to have a happy community of players. We’ll be updating the game with exciting new quests to play through, Heroes to play as, Villain creatures to control, and lots more.
OPEN
You’ll be able to play Fable Legends from beginning-to-end without spending a penny. That means you’ll have access to the entirety of Fable Legends’ storyline and all of the quests we release this year and forever.
FAIR
Everything in Fable Legends that affects gameplay can be earned by simply playing the game.
GENEROUS
Our goal is to have a happy community of players. We’ll be updating the game with exciting new quests to play through, Heroes to play as, Villain creatures to control, and lots more.
Lionhead continues on to explain how the game will work as a F2P title. They note that while playing, you will earn Silver. Silver is the in-game currency that is used to buy pretty much anything. If you want a shortcut, you can purchase Gold for real world money, which can then be used to purchase in-game items that are also available for Silver.
Unless they change or add how things are handled in the game, that really doesn't sound all that bad as far as F2P is concerned. They have a full FAQ up for what to expect on the F2P aspect.
Performance is hard to see because they added Aero and Metro which both require CPU cycles and memory (minor, unless you love apps), i'm sure current games run roughly the same on 7 as on 8, otherwise we'd have all flocked to it for the performance gain.
DirectX 12 aims to bring vast improvements, could they have built it for use on 7 as well? Probably.
All of this is missing the point though, i love video games, PC's are massively important in the history of video games, every game ever made should continue to work if only for historical purposes, in 30 years time if you want to make a video to educate people about Skyrim i hope you can.
Now, this performance advantage is small on the R9 290X at around 3%. It is larger on the GTX 780 at around 6%. We found this more interesting. It seems the GeForce GTX 780 was more advantageous in performance under Windows 8.1 than the R9 290X was. We did not expect that. With all the work AMD has put into BF4 and DX11.1, we figured the R9 290X would show the highest performance advantages. However, the reverse is true. It is the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780 that is benefiting the most from Windows 8.1.
Etc.
It's not sweeping performance gains across all games and all hardware configurations, but they are there. Even more, the performance increases aren't just for games, but for normal OS and app usage as well.
And yes, they probably could have built DirectX 12 for Win7 and maybe for even older OS's. But it doesn't make sense for them to do that. They want as many people as they can on the new operating systems so that they can stop supporting older OS's like they did with XP. It would speed up updates significantly if they don't have to allocate resources to older software support. And the fact that people make malicious releases for new OS's is kind of a moot point. They're going to do that for all OS's regardless and are actually more going to target older and unsupported OS's like XP because they know security holes won't be officially patched like they will be on newer ones.
But yes... PC gaming is awesome. Console gaming is just as awesome.
It's free nature has me slightly worried, what other business strategies will MS use for earning money through Windows 10? But in any case, here's hoping MS can build a chair we can all sit in comfortably.