Fable delayed to 2026
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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.
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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?
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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 similar professional credit list while costing the consumer less 10€ and being an excellent game. Good management is not churning out mediocre shovelware while charging AAA prices.
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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 similar professional credit list 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.
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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.
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.
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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 similar professional credit list while costing the consumer less 10€ and being an excellent game. Good management is not churning out mediocre shovelware while charging AAA prices.
Bruh avowed is great, I've been loving it.
This sounds like a you problem.
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Very likely will be a launch game for MS's new handheld console.
Hopefully it will launch on Steam ex aequo.
Fable already came out, and it was a pretty mid game. Why are we doing this again?
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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.The studio is pivoting from making Forza, to making Fable, this feels like a perfectly normal development timeline.
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Fable already came out, and it was a pretty mid game. Why are we doing this again?
Microsofts too lazy to make new IP so they're trying to reboot any game that wasn't a complete flop.
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Microsofts too lazy to make new IP so they're trying to reboot any game that wasn't a complete flop.
Miceosoft!? Create original IP? Agreed they'll keep regurgitating their IP no matter how many lame halos it makes.
Hell not even dos was theirs.
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Very likely will be a launch game for MS's new handheld console.
Hopefully it will launch on Steam ex aequo.
does lemmy ml have more reach beyond their own instance because they are developers? how can we be sure?
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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.
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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.
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!
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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!
Any given game being more successful does not make Avowed unsuccessful. Grounded has a 33% higher peak and also cost 57% of what Avowed cost for the audience to buy; they may have sold more copies and made less revenue. A more repetitive multiplayer focused game will retain players longer than a single player game with an ending. But ultimately, we have no idea if the game was successful outside of the team saying publicly that they're happy with its performance. That will never mean raw sales anymore, since they are a part of Game Pass. Game Pass pulls in, in all likelihood, 3-4x Avowed's budget in revenue every month. Even with the overhead they have of running the service and licensing third party games for it, they can probably afford at least one Avowed on their books every month and justify it as long as they feel like the presence of a flashy new game is what's keeping people subscribed. No one knows how many people on Game Pass need to play a given game for Microsoft to consider it a success, but perhaps the worst way to evaluate the game's success is to look at Steam charts and compare it to some other game arbitrarily, much like what's happening with Assassin's Creed right now. The Steam forums are full of armchair quarterbacks that are sure that Shadows has flopped by doing the same nonsense comparisons to Steam charts even though this is a series that handily sold tens of millions copies on non-Steam platforms for years.
Mismanagement has and will continue to happen at Microsoft. The first iteration of Avowed was aiming at being "Microsoft's Elder Scrolls"...but I wouldn't be surprised if there was no need for that design anymore once they bought Elder Scrolls itself in the next couple of years after that. I'm not too concerned about how long Fable has taken to develop thus far considering when their last Forza Horizon game came out and that full development on Fable probably didn't start until that game shipped. What I did hear was that when Microsoft originally announced it for 2025, the development team laughed at the idea.
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Very likely will be a launch game for MS's new handheld console.
Hopefully it will launch on Steam ex aequo.
BEAT THAT PETAR MOLINEXU!
::: spoiler spoiler
Explanation: it's an ancient SomethingAweful meme.
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That game came out years ago
This is fable 4. It's a new game...
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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.
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This is the 4th game... Not the OG.
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.
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This is fable 4. It's a new game...
The headline confirms that they're talking about Fable
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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?
