Very likely mismanagement. We can look at recent releases like Avowed, 6y in development and extremely simple mechanically and with a very narrow breadth. The world is incredibly static. I truly hope that’s not the case for FABLE.
Comment on Fable delayed to 2026
Aielman15@lemmy.world 1 week ago
How many years of development has this game had? I wonder if it’s another case of Microsoft Mismanagement™ or if it’s actually so huge and detailed that it’s actually worth all of this time spent in the works.
Viri4thus@feddit.org 1 week ago
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
They pivoted after two unsuccessful prototypes, and they’re a multi project studio. In that time frame, they put out Grounded and Pentiment while assisting on State of Decay 3. That’s about as good as management gets.
TheLowestStone@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Grounded is a masterpiece. One of my favorite games of the last decade. Pentiment is also fantastic but it’s not really a technical marvel.
I haven’t played Avowed yet because the somewhat mixed reviews and $70 price tag plus my backlog of games encouraged me to wait for a sale.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I’d be willing to give Grounded a try, but last I checked, you can’t host your own server offline, which is my line in the sand. I haven’t gotten around to Pentiment yet, but I just rolled credits on Avowed this afternoon, and it was awesome.
Viri4thus@feddit.org 1 week ago
It’s a 300 strong studio, Pentiment and Grounded are simple side projects (pentiment was great, grounded too) that have a minute scope and could well be developed by a handful of people (see Valheim, Stardew, etc) that leaves an entire studio to develop their overpromised and underdelivered AAA shovelware to boost the ranks of Gamepass while charging 70€ on steam to milk the fans of PoE. In 6y a 300 people strong studio backed by one of the richest companies on earth and charging AAA sales price, is manifestly little and woeful mismanagement. Luckily, most people didn’t fall for the culture war BS from the US and the game hasn’t sold (or was returned) for shit, which means they will likely do a better job with outer worlds 2, hopefully…
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
It’s a 300 person studio that is basically never all allocated to a single project. That’s extremely efficient with the resources they have. And remember that Outer Worlds 2 has also been in ongoing development for the better part of that same 6 years.
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The writing was kind of on the wall for Avowed when they announced they were dumping it after the holidays.
I was like “Oh, like Forspoken? Good luck!”
Viri4thus@feddit.org 1 week ago
100%, had they spent the money on the game that they wasted on marketing they may have released something good.
Instead they prefer to feed a bunch of sock puppets on reddit and here to show up every time one of the MS studios games are mentioned. The cope is real. I can’t believe that Avowed cost as much as BG3 to make, it’s insane the mammoth gap between the quality of both games in every aspect. And BG3 was sold on PC for 10€ less than Avowed on launch…
jordanlund@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Plus $95 for a “physical edition” with no disc. :(
I was willing to buy the game… for $60. But not a digital code. I get that they want to push people to Gamepass, but $60 is 3 months and at the end I actually own nothing?
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
The studio is pivoting from making Forza, to making Fable, this feels like a perfectly normal development timeline.
lustyargonian@lemm.ee 1 week ago
Actually there are two studios within Playground Games, I’m sure there’s cross pollination but the other studio is still making Forza supposedly.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Fair point, but in that case it means they’re not just pivoting, but building a whole new studio from the ground up for this game.
lustyargonian@lemm.ee 6 days ago
Yeah you’re right. It is quite a lot, especially with this kind of an IP and expectations to deal with
halcyoncmdr@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Mumblings originally in 2017, job openings at the studio in 2018, officially announced in 2020. October 2022 Andrew Walsh, a senior writer from the Horizon Forbidden West team joined the Fable team. June of 2023 had an in-game trailer.
To be honest, that seems to be a reasonable timeframe, especially given the pandemic in the middle, if you aren’t following the “rush it out the door ASAP, fix it after release, if you ever do” approach.
Aielman15@lemmy.world 1 week ago
To be fair, I don’t think any of the MS releases ever suffered from bugs at launch - at least from my experience, they always worked pretty consistently on release, aside from maybe a few exceptions - I remember ReCore having excruciatingly ling respawn times, Redfall suffering from stuttering and inconsistent framerate, and Ori 2 not being as fluid as the predecessor on console when it released, but all these were still perfectly playable at launch.
I feel like their problem is always the quality and quantity of the content. I wonder if the middling reception of Avowed convinced them that the game requires a bit more work to compete in the crowded and very competitive landscape of open world RPGs.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 1 week ago
The Master Chief Collection launch was infamous.
TwinTitans@lemmy.world 5 days ago
Oh man…don’t remind me.
lustyargonian@lemm.ee 1 week ago
I would say Forza Motorsport reboot had its issues, Flight Simulator 2024 had issues with cloud infra and Red Fall had various bugs and T poses.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
The Master Chief Collection is the single reason that I will never ever preorder another game no matter what bonuses it comes with or how confident I am with the developer.
In general though, Microsoft Games is pretty good about not pushing bugs out the door.
I honestly don’t understand the middle reception to Avowed, it’s been truly fantastic so far, and completely rock solid.