Just three years after opening, Fable Fortune's servers are closing next month

Bad news Fable fans - Fable Fortune's servers are being shut down on March 4th, bringing an end to the short life of the Fable card game spin-off. The game launched back in 2018, following half a year of early access, and now it's leaving us wondering what on earth is next for the much-loved series.

Fable Fortune was your standard Hearthstone or Magic competitor, letting you build a deck of cards to send out strange creatures to fight other, stranger creatures. There was also a twist that let players be good or evil, which would change cards' abilities depending on which you chose.

"After over two years, spanning 30 seasons with 6 Heroes, we sadly announce that our adventures are coming to an end," the developers wrote on Wednesday.

"We'd like to thank everyone who has joined us for the journey and extend our gratitude to the entire Fable Fortune community."

The game's store has already been closed now, so players can't buy any new card packs - but if you already have some unused ones you can still open and use them throughout February until the server closure.

It's a shame to see the game go, but after looking at the game on player statistics, to be honest, it's not a total surprise it's being shut down. It currently has no online players, down from its January peak of, uh, 6.

Fable has fallen a long way since its days as a flagship Xbox series. Microsoft shut down Lionhead Studios in 2016 and cancelled Fable Legends, though the Fable Fortune team managed to escape. They found new funding elsewhere to continue the spin-off and launched it into early access in July 2017.

So, what about the future of Fable? Well, at the beginning of 2018, rumours started circulating that a new Fable might be in development. At the time, Eurogamer reported that "a story and character-focussed open-world action RPG" was in the works at Playground Games, the studio behind Forza Horizon. We've not really heard anything substantial on it since.

But what would you want from a new Fable game, dear reader? Richard Cobbett would quite like it to go much deeper into everything the series stands for:

"Fable is never going to be a hardcore RPG franchise, and that's fine. There’s nothing wrong with hack and slash. But there's a definite space in the market for a hack and slash with more depth and breadth than your average dungeon or monster infested field, and it's shaped exactly like a plucky hero with a big sword, big ambition, and bowels full of poo-gas ready for anyone who might deserve it."