It has now been more than 5 years since the Playground Games studio has been developing the next Fable, a title eagerly awaited by Xbox gamers. Very little information has been shared by the British studio so far except for a few major recruitments, such as that ofa former developer at Rare and D’a game designer from CD Projekt. Nevertheless, it seems that the studio is encountering some difficulties with the development of this new Fable.
A lack of experience and a difficult adaptation for the original creators of Forza Horizon
This is indeed what emerges from the developer. Playground Games is a studio created in 2010 by industry veterans specializing in car games and open-world games. This is how the saga Forza Horizon has been entrusted to them and that it has been their one and only major production for 12 years. Taking on the Fable project would have changed many things within the studio and the adaptation would be more difficult than expected.
It is clear that the creation of an open world racing game and a fantasy universe in the RPG format do not have much in common and this would explain the slow progress of development according to the designer Juan Fernandez who worked a little moment on Fable within Playground Games.
“Playground Games is a very organized and production-oriented studio. Every two years they release a Forza Horizon that has over 90 on Metacritic, with amazing quality. They’ve taken the racing games and dominated them for the past few years. They are very smart and know what they are doing. They wanted to get into something different and they thought what they were good at was open-world racing games, but they lacked people with the knowledge of how gameplay is done. In an open world, the way to control a character and the actions are very different from what you find in a racing game. At the technological level, you have to develop animations, scripts, a quest system. Traveling in a car at 300 km/ha is very different from driving in the countryside. »
Fernandez also talks about Playground Games’ particular work ethic: “doing more with less”. Logical and proven operation on a formula as mastered as Forza Horizon, but which shows its limits when it comes to developing a new game of a completely different genre.
“Action RPG open worlds are incredibly complicated to make, they take a lot of time. A lot of people and Playground have the mentality of doing more with less, that if Assassin’s Creed is made by 5,000 people, they’ll get 150 or 200, and that if they make [Assassin’s Creed] in 7 years they will do Fable in 5. It’s good to be ambitious, but you also have to be realistic and what I’ve seen is that [le développement] was getting longer and longer. »
This enriching testimony provides many answers to the questions asked by players waiting for new information about the Fable project. Juan Fernandez remains optimistic all the same, because according to him, the latest recruitments made by Playground Games can only be positive for the progress of development.