Fable Producer Responds As 'Downscaling' Rumour Gains Traction

Cutting scope is usually win-win. Game is more polished for us gamers, game devs get to have more sanity when the game ships. Not really bad to make a better 20-40 hour game than a buggier delayed game that's longer. 20-40 being purely hypothetical, I don't know how long it'll be. ForzaTech will probably run amazing but like many in house engines, it'll take work to adapt it to Fable. Unless we want anthropomorphized sword wielding cars like a steampunk Pixar Cars, but more live action CGI looking like Cats 2019.

If any series could have done with scoping down its aims/goals, it's Fable.

@themightyant It boggles my mind that people gave him kickstarter money and were shocked that the final products didn't live up to his hype.

@somnambulance yeah, its seems like the Starfield/ES6 announcements. The intent was less about confirming the games and more about proving a point.

With ES6/SF is was "76 isn't the future", with Fable it was more "look we have games coming that arent Halo/Gears/Forza"

It's still early in development? Wasn't it announced like 3 years ago?

@themightyant Indeed gaming needs the Molyneux's to push it forwards, but you need people around them who can make it happen, and to tell them to shush.

@somnambulance Microsoft does that all the time. A lot of publishers fo actually. It's so annoying.

@themightyant Very true

@somnambulance Feels like Halo Infinite, Everwild, Hellblade 2, Forza Motorsport, State of Decay 3, Avowed, Fable, Perfect Dark, Outer Worlds 2 and Redfall were announced way too early (Starfield and Elder Scrolls 6 also were but those were announced before the acquisition).

Talk to Cory Barlog and he'll tell you they had to cut quite a bit from God of War to make it a more cohesive and focussed project that they could deliver to the standard expected on the available hardware of the time.

Most, if not all, have things scaled down and/or cut out as the game develops to ensure the whole thing comes across as a cohesive, balanced, focussed and well paced game.

So she didn't deny those rumours, it sounds like this game is a long way off and hopefully doesn't cause them problems which in return may affect forza's development

Fable has been worked on since 2017, a developer at Playground Games tweeted this out himself last year, where he said he was working on Fable for 4 years.

@Royalblues as of late, everyone is having trouble with staffing, and game development is not exempt. These games are being announced extremely early in teaser form so they can incentivize developers to apply that otherwise would only apply blindly to a studio because they need a job.

Many developers are fans of x or y IP and do apply to a company with the hopes of being part of developing new entries on those games.

@Royalblues Out of all the games announced too early, based on when we started hearing rumors, and based on the short CGI trailer, I always figured that Fable would be out the LAST year of the XSXS's life. Much like FF7R for PS4 just launched the last year of the console and was announced in year 1. Playgrounds been cranking out FH and is really the only major studio releasing on time, so it makes sense.

@themightyant LOL, I was going to say it. Playground just ruined it. Their Fable game will be Fable in name only and fails to live up as a successor to the originals. Proper Fable games have no scope.

You guys, the Fable trailer isn't even 2 years old yet. Covid/quarantine has messed with everyone's sense of time. Granted, 2+ years was probably premature, but what isn't premature in gaming these days? So long as it eventually comes out, everything will be just fine. It's in really good hands.

I just hope when it comes out it has fable 1and 2's charm there was a lot to like about those games house ownership and jobs were fun. Fable 3 was terrible.

Great now I want to play them again even the terrible third one well there goes this weekend.

Q) What do you make of this?

A) From what I do know of game development, it is true that a lot of games start off more ambitious and then get scaled down into a more reasonable level either due to difficulties working things, not enough time or simply how the initial planned element turned out not to work as expected. Often, from what I've heard, games tend to start a bit too ambitious.

I have concerns about the "may be further away than you think" line but no concerns about the game being scaled down. Games tend to be a bit too big these days with an absurd amount to do and an overemphasis on graphics, so a downgrade to these elements so long as the gameplay is kept quality rich is fine.

I imagine the Fable devs were going about their work as normal when suddenly a giant bleep-storm erupts on social media because someone without game dev knowledge leaks some very normal process to the equally uninformed public who also freak out because they think it’s a problem, when in reality it’s just part of the process.

Social media is like the village gossip that spreads around the world before the game devs can get their pants on and correct the situation (which won’t be corrected because most won’t see this updated news).

Further away than we think… they showed a cg trailers last year…when did people expect it to come out exactly? This game is 2024 earliest. Same with perfect dark. I don’t get how people still don’t understand the ‘carrot on a string’ trick Xbox uses every year yet.
If it ain’t gameplay it ain’t coming out for years.

@swedetrap To be fair, rumors of "Playground working on a new Fable" were circulating back in 2018 or so. We were all talking about it on the NL XB thread forever even before PXB came back. So "something" started some moving gears about all this quite a while before the announcement. Which is also probably why they announced it when they did, to stay ahead of the leaks.

Maybe the bigger issue is that MS has the leakiest ship in the world. If they're still "scoping" then those 2018 leaks must have been coming from what was barely planning meetings by probably only high-up brass. How does that get leaked unless the brass is leaking or the building is tapped?

@Royalblues Yeah, The leakiness at MS is I think unique, and fuels so many of these reports. Most Nintendo "rumors" are fiction. You hear nothing about anything from them, then one day, boom, there's a 2DS and a Splatoon 3 and nobody saw it coming. Sony's monthly games leak like clockwork, but little else from them really leaks out, or when it does, it's minor leaks. Jim Ryan didn't even seem to know about PSVR2 2 days before the company announced it, lol.

Meanwhile Microsoft sends out peripherals in boxes with the unannounced Series S on it. They don't even need loose lips to sink ships, they just point the canons down and fire way!

Re: Hiring, we should only assume that it's still "early development" iff (if and only if) we know what sort of positions they're hiring to fill. So it is not a factor of whether they're just hiring at all (just what they're hiring for).

@NEStalgia Well said. Additionally, the vast majority of all those leaks - whether they're ***** or not, whistleblowing or not, from an actual inside source or a rumour-mongering attention grubber - are intentional. Very few accidental ones, if at all. Just thought I'd throw that additional consideration, as a tangent.