Fable developer Playground Games has revealed with new job openings that they are opening a third studio.
As reported by WCCFTech, Playground Games gave this description on their LinkedIn:
“Playground Games was established in 2010, bringing together some of the most experienced and talented developers from the UK industry, with the vision to create genre-defining titles for a global audience.
Since then, we’ve created five critically-acclaimed, award-winning hits; our Horizon games have garnered more than one hundred awards and have been played by many millions of fans.
Today, Playground has three world-class studios in Leamington Spa. In our original HQ, we continue to support and grow the huge, vibrant Horizon community. In our new studios on the other side of town, we are excited to be developing Fable, a new beginning for the legendary franchise.”
The reason this is news is that Playground Games had not previously revealed their third studio. The two studios we do know about are in ortland Street (St. Albans House) and Newbold Terrace (Rossmore House), respectively. And for those wondering, Royal Leamington Spa is a town found in the county of Warwickshire, in central England.
WCCFTech found that Playground Games has openings for these positions:
- 3C Engineer
- AI Engineer
- Associate Lead/Lead Environment Artist
- Associate Technical Designer (Contract)
- Audio Programmer (all levels)
- Capture Artist
- Community Director
- Experienced Audio Designer – Cinematics (Contract)
- Gameplay Animator (all levels)
- Gameplay Engineer
- Outsource Environment Artist (Contract)
- PC QA Technician (Contract)
- QA Manager
- QA Technician (Contract)
- Quest Designer
- Senior AI Engineer
- Senior Animation Engineer
- Senior Character Artist
- Senior Cinematic Animator
- Senior Environment Artist
- Senior Foliage Artist
- Senior Gameplay Engineer
- Senior Material Artist
- Senior Narrative Designer
- Senior Producer
- Senior Quest Designer
- Senior Rendering Engineer
- Senior Systems Engineer
- Senior UI Artist
- Senior UI Engineer
- Senior VFX Artist
- VFX Artist (all levels)
These are open positions which explicitly state they are for the team working on Fable. Other job listings are still up for work related to the Forza Horizon series, such as for a Vehicle Artist (Contract).
WCCFTech speculates that these are a lot of openings for a game that’s planned to release next year. But, we can take this information several ways. For example, it’s possible that PlayGround Games is nearing the final stages of development, and have chosen to ramp up so that they can speed up work and meet their deadlines.
It’s also possible that Fable will require long-term support that we are not yet aware of. If Fable turns out to have some sort of live service element to it, that would justify ramping up the studio to this degree.
Or, if you want to be pessimistic, maybe the Fable project is doing poorly and this is some last ditch effort to save it. But we haven’t heard any rumors of turmoil going on behind the scenes for PlayGround Games, and we certainly haven’t seen news of people leaving the studio unceremoniously.
The pressure is definitely on for Microsoft’s many studios, even those outside of Activision Blizzard and Bethesda, to deliver games for their Xbox consoles and Game Pass. While it seems that Microsoft Gaming is a healthy business now, their customers have been waiting for too long for their games.
Thankfully, Microsoft decided not to rush any of their projects again, but now we’re left wondering how much longer before their many, many titles in development will finally get released.
