Recently there seems to have been a lot of release date delays owing to the need for further polish. You know I’m all for it though if it results in a game that’s not full of game-breaking bugs, and so my reaction to hearing that Fable Legends is the latest to fall prey to schedule slippage my first thought is “Okay good.”

Fable Legends is going to take the franchise’s RPG format and attempt to fit it into a RTS hybrid for five players, where four of them compete against one by working together through the waves of monsters, and that one player overlords it over the other four and has tremendous fun being the bad guy. Obviously it’s a big idea and despite having originally been set to come out sometime this year, the Open Beta has now been pushed back to Spring of 2016 to let it mature.

Although the game is in Closed Beta and will soon be letting in another 100,000 players, the post on the official blog says that they aren’t ready to go to Open yet because there is an understanding that Open Beta means “mostly finished” and right now the team at Lionhead feel there is a still a lot more feature-wise to be added before they can consider the game to be at that stage.

Of course, Spring 2016 is also seeing the stage set for many other games, with Mirror’s Edge’s sequel, XCOM 2 and Far Cry all having release dates set in the same time period. Looks as if we’re in for a busy Spring 2016…