In a recent video discussing how different developers under the Xbox Game Studios banner are working together on various projects, Microsoft Gaming’s chief content officer Matt Booty has revealed that the cinematics team at Blizzard helped out Playground Games with Fable. He also revealed other, similar examples of synergy, like the Montreal-based Compulsion Games making use of Activision’s MoCap studio, and Rare helping out Double Fine with the multiplayer aspects of Kiln.
When asked about whether the various studios under Xbox were all siloed off and insulated from each other, Booty explained that this was not the case. He noted that his own job was to provide connections between these teams so that they could work together more effectively.
“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.”
Booty went on to describe a more complicated form of this kind of partnership with State of Decay developer Undead Labs and Obsidian Entertainment. During the development of survival crafting game Grounded, Obsidian was able to make use of complex tools and technology that were already created by Undead Labs for State of Decay 2 in order to create its multiplayer experience. Now that Obsidian has added its own improvements to the technology, Undead Labs is able to benefit from this for the development of State of Decay 3.
“That’s kind of a cool example of how, once we build these pathways, there’s a lot going on in between the different teams,” he said.
The cinematics team from Blizzard helping out Playground Games shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Since at least the release of Diablo 2 back in 2000, Blizzard has been praised for its high-quality pre-rendered cinematics across its various games. While 2002’s Warcraft 3: Reign of Chaos also saw major improvements in this regard, fans of the studio’s work have been able to see its cinematics team’s capabilities evolve throughout the life of World of Warcraft.
In the meantime, Playground Games has recently reaffirmed that Fable will be coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X/S this Fall, despite rumors floating around of potential delay so that the studio can avoid coming out against Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto 6, which is coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S on November 19th.