Lionhead has an 8-person team focusing on creating the studio's next big franchise.

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Studio head John Needham told Eurogamer Germany that while the vast majority of the developer's workforce is hard at work prepping for the release of Fable Legends next year, a smaller division has been created to plan what's next for the company."It's a team of about eight guys we have in the studio who are trying to build the next big IP for us," Needham said. "They're working on a couple of new prototypes for completely different games - not Fable related. They'll also be working on new games we can put within Fable Legends as well."The primary purpose of the group is to come up with new game IP, and we'll hopefully this next year have something exciting to talk about."Though Fable has been Lionhead's primary focus for some years now, the studio has a number of other fan-favourite franchises it's elected not to revisit, including Black & White. Sadly it seems we shouldn't expect to see anything new on this front for the time being as B&W was published by EA, while the studio is now owned by Microsoft.Lionhead has previously hinted it's got non-Fable franchises in the works . As soon as we know more, we'll let you know. In the meantime, check out what we thought when we got to go hands-on with Fable Legends at last week's E3.

Luke Karmali is IGN's UK News Editor. You too can revel in mediocrity by following him on Twitter