Fable Could be in Trouble; Ex-dev on Behind-the-scenes
The work on new Fable may be plagued by problems. According to the latest reports, Playground Games lacks employees with proper knowledge.
- According to a former Playground Games employee, the development of Fable is plagued with problems;
- The studio is supposed to be short of specialists;
- The style of work is also supposed to be a problem.
New installment of Fable has been under development for quite a long time. The game was announced two years ago, but work on it may have lasted even for over four years.
Despite this, it is still not entirely clear what the game is supposed to be. When looking for a solution to this mystery, we can only rely on leaks, which are not always optimistic.
As a result, we can suspect that at Playground Games, the studio working on Fable, not everything goes according to plan. This scenario was confirmed by one of the former employees of the company.
Wrong assumptions and staff shortages
Juan Fernandez worked on Fable for over 3 years. He shared his experiences with Vandal (via Wccftech).
According to the developer, the problems are due, among other things, to the reasoning of the studio's management at the time of the decision to get involved in the project.
The decision makers at Playground Games were said to have concluded that the experience gained from working on open-world racing games would be easy to translate to an open-world RPG.
Creating open maps for the games from the Forza Horizon series was to turn out to be a diametrically different task than designing a world fitting into the action RPG formula.
According to Fernandez, Playground Games is full of talented people, but unfortunately their skills don't match the game they're making.
"(...) they lacked people with the knowledge of how gameplay is done. In an open world, how you control a character and the actions are very different from what you have in a racing game. At the technology level, you have to develop animation, scripting, a quest system. Moving in a car at 300 kmh has very different requirements than walking through the countryside."
Too much ambition
The way the studio operates is also supposed to be a problem. The developers are reportedly convinced that they can work much more efficiently than other companies.
What others need thousands of employees to accomplish, Playground Games wants to achieve with a team of a few hundred. A similar approach is to be applied to the pace of work.
While these principles worked in the case of Forza Horizon they are no longer so effective with Fable. Nevertheless, it is difficult for developers to give up their old habits.
However, it should be remembered that Fernandez left the studio in early 2021. He also admitted that since then, the team working on the game has grown to include many talented developers. Playground Games could have therefore dealt with the described problems.
