Celebrating the recent launch of Forza Horizon 6 from earlier this week, developer Playground Games has now turned its attention towards wrapping up the development of Fable. The studio has taken to LinkedIn to announce that it has several job openings that it wants to fill to help finish the game, reaffirming its release later this year.
“After the incredible launch of Forza Horizon 6 this week, the excitement across the studio is sky-high,” wrote Playground Games. “But we’re not done yet. With Fable coming later this year, we’re continuing to recruit across multiple disciplines to bring more exceptional talent into the team.”
The openings include engineering, design, community, cinematics, and production. Among other roles, the studio is looking for a principal gameplay engineer, a senior UI engineer, a senior producer, a senior game designer, a media lead, and an experienced cinematic artist.
Interestingly, Playground Games has been using talent from other development teams under the Xbox Game Studios banner as well. Just last month, XBOX chief content officer Matt Booty revealed that the studio was assisted by the cinematics team from Blizzard for Fable. He also brought up other examples of cross-studio synergy.
“It is the case that we have got a lot of different kinds of studios, and they’ve all got their own cultures, so we think of it as a culture of cultures,” he explained. “I see a big part of my job is to provide just enough connection and just enough structure across those that they can communicate with each other, they can share things back and forth, but never to the point that we’re coming in over the top trying to change who they are.”
“We’ve got the Blizzard cinematics team helping out on Fable,” Booty continued. “We’ve got our studio in Montreal, Compulsion Games, using the Activision Mo Cap studio. We’ve got the team at Rare with a lot of multiplayer experience working on Sea of Thieves, helping out Double Fine on Kiln, the pottery game.”
Fable is slated for release on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S in Autumn. While there had been reports that the title may have been “internally delayed”, and it could see its release window pushed back to December to avoid Grand Theft Auto 6, the studio later reaffirmed its plans to release the RPG this Fall.
Playground Games had been working on Fable for quite some time, and while the studio had released a CG trailer to showcase the tone it was going for, few details about it had been revealed until the title got a deep dive in January.
The deep dive showcased several of Fable‘s tenets, from its high-fidelity visuals to its unique take on the franchise’s iconic morality system, which will instead focus more on NPC personalities and how they react to players’ actions. Combat in the RPG will seemingly make use of a posture system, rewarding players for knocking enemies off balance. Much like the previous games in the franchise, it offers a mix of combat styles, allowing players to switch in and out of melee combat while bolstering their offensive capabilities with ranged weapons and magic spells.
Speaking on the new take on the morality system, studio founder Ralph Fulton spoke about how discussions surrounding the concept had gotten more sophisticated, which led the studio to look at more sophisticated ways of depicting it in the game. He also noted the fact that Fable will feature “a much more shades of grey approach to morality,” which will revolve around the protagonist getting a reputation due to their actions in the world.
