Game News Fable: a more complicated development than expected?
While the Xbox brand speaks at the GDC and prepares a partnership with the FFF (the French Football Federation), an ex-developer from Playground Games explains why the development of Fable takes its time.
From Forza Horizon to Fable
After the cancellation of Fable Legends, a promising multiplayer project, players had little hope of seeing the saga reborn from its ashes… However, without really expecting it, on July 23, 2020, Microsoft, during a conference , reveals that a new opus will see the light of day. Unfortunately, the surprise of this announcement was only brief, since since then, even if the development of the reboot of Fable moving forward, the open-world RPG is particularly discreet. But according to designer Juan Fernandez, who had worked on the long-awaited game alongside Playground Games, this is completely normal, since the development of the game is more complicated than expected.
Still according to Juan Fernandez, the reason for this complication is very simple: the developers at Playground Games essentially worked on the saga Forza Horizon. And Going from the development of a car game to an RPG that takes place in a fantasy universe is not the most obvious.
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. Juan Fernandez, ex-developer at Playground Games
Too small a studio for such a big project?
But in the end, what causes the most problems according to Juan Fernandez is maybe the studio is too small for the project. He clarifies that Playground Games likes to “do more with less”. By this, he means to do more than compete with a much smaller team. If this mentality works with the world of the racing game, according to Juan Fernandez, this method quickly finds its limits when one attacks gigantic RPG in open world.
He specifies: “Assassin’s Creed is made by 5000 people”, and Playground Games would like to obtain the same result with “150 or 200” developers. He then adds that the development of an Assassin’s Creed takes seven long years and that the team thought to deliver Fable in only five years.
It’s good to be ambitious, but you also have to be realistic, and what I saw was that (game development) was getting longer and longer. John Fernandez
Finally, he said despite everything that the development of the game is progressing well. As a reminder, Fable still does not have a release date, but is expected on PC and Xbox Series X | S and should integrate the Game Pass as soon as it is launched.
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By JeromeJoffardWriting jeuxvideo.com
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