Very likely will be a launch game for MS’s new handheld console.
Hopefully it will launch on Steam ex aequo.
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You see the screenshot.
Now assume your Angry Internet Gamer position…
Get in the comments, and FIGHT!
I look forward to all of the Fable ‘fans’ coming out of the woodwork to complain that the female characters and designs don’t look like porcelain anime supermodels. It’s going to be X-Men '97 all over again with a bunch of people that clearly weren’t ever fans of the original complaining about their “childhoods being ruined.”
I suggest that any and all one handed Gamers™ first take a look at the original character designs before opening their stupid mouths and complaining about the wOkE agENdA making characters uglier.
BEAT THAT PETAR MOLINEXU!
spoiler
Explanation: it’s an ancient SomethingAweful meme.
Fable already came out, and it was a pretty mid game. Why are we doing this again?
This is the 4th game… Not the OG. It’s a reboot with apparently a diff story.
Fable is cool, I welcome this game.
The first game was cool. Vastly over-promised, but still cool. Fable 2 was mid, at best. Then Fable 3 was just pure dogwater.
I don’t have high hopes for a reboot. If it’s actually done properly, it’ll be a nice surprise. But I refuse to get my hopes up.
I never actually played Fable 2 (it never came to PC) but 1 was decent for its time, and yeah, 3 kind of fell apart. (You get to what seems like the halfway point, then the rest of the game plays out in a few minutes, entirely through menus, and is super boring.)
But mostly I’m finding it hard to imagine how a new take on this would stand out in today’s market. It’s, let’s see, a third-person action game with RPG elements tacked on. The setting is…generic western fairytale fantasy. I’m not saying the game couldn’t be good, but what would be distinctive about it? Having people call you “chicken chaser”? What is the contribution of the “Fable” pedigree here, apart from Molyneux baggage?
I preferred fable 2 over 1 because it had guns.
Fable 2 has guns? Damn I need to play this series. I thought it was just some fantasy wizard bullshit. (LotR is the only fantasy wizard bullshit that I enjoy, everything else can die in a fire.)
Pistols and rifles. There’s even this thing:
Which goes along great with:
This may be my favorite part of fable 2, and im not the biggest halo fan but this was nice to see and the rifle is pretty amazing ingame.
Microsofts too lazy to make new IP so they’re trying to reboot any game that wasn’t a complete flop.
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.
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.
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 long 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.
The Master Chief Collection launch was infamous.
Oh man…don’t remind me.
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.
They were playable so I agree with you on that, except FS24
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.
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!”
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…
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?
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.
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.
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…
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.
Can we please stop pretending Obsidian post acquisition is a dinghy independent studio rather that the real cog in the metastatic tumor that is the Microsoft machine? The game credits ~1.2k people, that’s 4x the studio size. There’s 0 excuses for how mediocre Avowed is, especially when they charge 70€ for it! BG3 in contrast has a bigger professional credit while costing the consumer less 10€ and being an excellent game. Good management is not churning out mediocre shovelware while charging AAA prices.
I’m not excusing Avowed for anything, because it’s excellent. BG3 is a better game, true, but it’s a better game than almost every other game ever made too, and it was built reusing a ton of work that the studio had already done over the decade that came before it. There’s a very, very good chance that lots of work on Avowed was done knowing that it would be used in Outer Worlds 2 also, reducing the risk of spending money on both projects. Making great games isn’t a function of how much money was spent on them, or Balatro wouldn’t have been nominated for game of the year. I’m not saying they’re some scrappy indie studio, but it sure seems like they know the answer to the question, “How much money can we spend making this relative to how much money it needs to make?” Spending more money on Avowed wouldn’t have made it more financially successful. It’s why there was that headline about wanting to make a Pillars tactics game and evaluating how big that game could feasibly be for that market. I got more value out of Baldur’s Gate 3, but that doesn’t make Avowed not worth $70 to me.
Good management is getting a working product out the door and keeping your people happy and employed. This game reviewed well; not phenomenally, but well. And Obsidian is spoken of in high regard when it comes to employee satisfaction. All that while getting several other projects moving along too. It’s impressive. And I’m sorry Avowed wasn’t what you wanted to play.
As for Fable, this is a genre that its developer hasn’t built before. Even in a best case scenario, it’s going to take a lot more time for them to build it than it is another racing game. If you want to claim potential mismanagement, it might be the possibility that Microsoft assigned this project to the wrong developer, but we don’t know how this Fable came to be, and maybe they do have the experience to make it work.
Avowed is a success in which planet? Grounded, which is a pretty good game for what it costs, has a 33% higher player peak and gigantic tail compared to avowed’s player drop off… This is a game, from the same studio, that cost a fraction of what avowed cost (1/4 people credited) to make. MS pulled all the stops for people to engage with avowed but ultimately failed because the game is just mediocre.
Regarding management, MS are the paragons of good management and would never put a team on a game they don’t want to make, resulting in several delays and ultimately a poor quality product. This never happened at Microsoft… EVER!
Bruh avowed is great, I’ve been loving it.
This sounds like a you problem.
I think Kojima said it best in the Resetera review, and I think it applies here too. Avowed is basically a shooter with fantasy trappings and it does appeal to a certain demographic. I’m not it.
The studio is pivoting from making Forza, to making Fable, this feels like a perfectly normal development timeline.
Actually there are two studios within Playground Games, I’m sure there’s cross pollination but the other studio is still making Forza supposedly.
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.
Yeah you’re right. It is quite a lot, especially with this kind of an IP and expectations to deal with
Just FYI for any curious: this is the same delay that was announced last month, no additional changes since then.
“Late is just for a little while, suck is forever”
- Lord Gabe
No Man’s Sky and Cyberpunk 2077:
Hold my drink
Yeah but this one’s going to be late for a little while and then suck forever
I would like to predict the future too but alas I’m quite bad at it
Cries at Wonder Woman videogame
Oh no. Anyway
That game came out years ago
2004
This is fable 4. It’s a new game…
It’s a franchise reboot, no? Not a report of the first game.
I’ve liked all the fable games. I’m excited.
The headline confirms that they’re talking about Fable
MS handheld, so we get all the bloat and spyware of Windows on limited hardware.
It’s like having an EEEPC running XP rather than Linux
