Fable 4-fremgang er angiveligt sløv på grund af manglende erfaring

Vi har set en enkelt lille teaser fra det kommende Fable, udviklet af studiet bag Forza Horizon-serien Playground Games, men siden da har vi intet konkret hørt til udviklingen eller spillet. Og hvad kan det skyldes? Ja, det kan jo være at de bare tager sig god tid, og får lidt lang snor af Microsoft også.

Men det skyldes angiveligt også, at det har været svært for studiet at få etableret en solid rytme. Spildesigner Juan Fernandez arbejdede nemlig i noget tid på spillet, og i et interview med Vandal (igennem WCCFTech) fortæller han, at studiet har haft svært ved at overgå fra Forza Horizon-serien til et åbent og systematisk forankret RPG, selvom at der er hyret særligt talent ind til det.

"Playground is [...] very organized and production-driven. Every two years they put out a Forza Horizon, which has more than 90 on Metacritic, with incredible quality. They have taken racing games and they've dominated them these last few years. They're very smart and they know what they're doing. They wanted to branch out with something different and they thought that what they do well is open world racing games, [but] 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."

Desuden slår han også fast, at Playground tidligere gerne har ville holde deres produktionshold så små som muligt. De kalder det en "do more with less"-attitude, og det har tjent dem godt, men det er svært når et projekt som Fable er så krævende:

"Action RPG open worlds are incredibly complicated to do, they take a lot of time. A lot of people and in Playground they have the mentality of doing more with less, that if Assassin's Creed is done by 5000 people they will have 150 or 200, and if they do [Assassin's Creed] in 7 years, they'd do Fable in 5. It is good to be ambitious but you also have to be realistic and what I saw is that [development] was getting longer and longer."