New studio Maverick Games from Ex-Playground Devs Formed

[peter42O]

Yeah thats not entirely true. "Brain drain," as it is called, is a real thing. You can't just replace top people that easily, if at all. This many leaving at once to do their own thing seems bad.

It's 5 people but my thinking is that perhaps they're just sick and tired of working on Forza Horizon. Besides, with so many here constantly complaining about consolidation, well, here you go, another startup AAA development studio so if anything, people leaving to startup their own studio should be praised instead of it being looked at as a negative and Playground Games and Microsoft will be just fine.

 

[peter42O]

I think a lot of what he's referring to here is actually very much a worry many of us have with sub-based gaming models attempting to grow in popularity in gaming. And, we can actually see this reflected quite a bit in certain Game Pass user stats for example, where games like Pentiment have a completion rate of less than 1%, and who knows how many people actually bothered to download the game on the service.

It really just shows how no matter how cheap you make something, you ultimately can't get people to spend too much of their time on something they either don't want to play, or feel they can't put much time into due to so much choice for cheap content on the service they may feel needs to at least be played a bit to make the sub worth the cost. It's a problem all sub services run into but gaming ones face more potently because the content is interactive. And while it's only a modest issue with older games in sub services, it's probably a significantly larger one for new releases because those naturally ask for time commitments by the player so that they can actually develop a connection with the game in the first place.

I also personally think that games feeling they have to be designed for subscription services, they just run a risk of diluting game complexity and depth. If people only want bite-sized pieces to occupy a few minutes of their time, then you either go with dumbed-down game depth/scope/complexity and make stuff like a Temple Rush, Subway Surfers or Angry Birds (TBH I think Subway Surfers is a fun series for what it is, but still), or you have those more complex games, just designed as MP-centric titles. Meaning there are going to be things WRT art design, level design, storytelling etc. you simply can't do like you can with single-player style games.

I'm trying to figure if Mike Brown is giving a personal perspective of games development being services-driven and expressing some disdain for it (which given his work on FH5 and how that was being designed with "snackables" in mind, could give some indication as to a reason they've left to start a new group), or is speaking of this in a way to suggest what way they want games from their new Maverick studio to be developed. Given the game they're said to be working on, though, and what feels like their mission statement, maybe it's fair to detect a bit of criticism from Brown towards the services-orientated game development model, given their experience with it.

Pentiment is a niche title that isn't going to be for the vast majority of gamers regardless of if it's on Game Pass or not. And this entire argument applies to paying full priced games as well where the vast majority of gamers don't ever complete the games they buy which is why they all have a massive backlog that they'll never complete. Also, games are too fucking long nowadays which is why many gamers lose interest and drop the game.

At the end of the day, not everything gaming related is going to be for everyone. Take me for example. I'm a huge fan of Game Pass and want more publishers to give me a gaming subscription that includes their games day one but at the same time, on Game Pass or not, if your game is of no interest to me (take Persona for example) then playing it via a subscription or paying for the game as a purchase isn't going to happen either way.

 

[Heisenberg007]

WTF does this even mean?

Is he talking about releasing story chapters on a steady flow, like RE Revelations 2 or Life Is Strange?

He meant to say that they will design their new game in a way that captures the gamers' attention from the very start and doesn't let it off.

According to him, that's important because subscription services and content availability means gamers always have something else available to jump off to. The games need to very good to hold someone's attention nowadays.

 

[Heisenberg007]

So i take it the Forza side of the studio developers left?

Some people are saying that, but I don't think that's necessarily true. There must be some overlap b/w the two teams, unless the separate Fable team has its own Lead Product, Art Director, Technical Art Director, Audio Director, etc.

 

[arvfab]

I think the top people of the studio leaving is a logical consequence for being bought, and I don't mean it in a bad way against them or Microsoft. They were the ones deciding the direction of the studio when it was independent, now they can't anymore but still want to, so they created a new one.

 

[Old Gamer]

I think the top people of the studio leaving is a logical consequence for being bought, and I don't mean it in a bad way against them or Microsoft. They were the ones deciding the direction of the studio when it was independent, now they can't anymore but still want to, so they created a new one.

Yes.

Also, they likely prepared the studio for their pending departure well in advance, and there already are new leads in place. The studio won't be aimless (at least in terms of internal management).

But they could not have picked a more badass name for their new studio.

 

[Yurinka]

WTF does this even mean?

Means that he considers the rise of PS Plus, Gamepass, etc. plus the rise of spend on addons (dlc, microstransactions, season/battle passes et) and I assume also that AAA games now get discounted fast.

So maybe he thinks about a GaaS AAA game that doesn't offer a huge super long experience from the get go that most of the players don't complete, but instead starts with a smaller amount of content and then they keep adding after launch more or less content in seasons depending on how the game performs.

Thanks for the detailed explanations as always.

Do you think maybe the Technical Director might've become acclimated to peculiarities with ForzaTech, to the point where switching to something like UE5 would feel alien to concepts and ways of doing things in ForzaTech they'd become accustomed to?

Might be something to consider here.

Nah, tech directors typically are insanely talented and experienced programmers. They are in charge of the programmers, but also of the tools and engines that the team uses. Depending on the needs and resources of the team (which also includes the knowledge of their artists or coders), they decide the tools and engines that the team will use. Some of them are custom solutions built in-house, other ones being 3rd party solutions, standard apps that most of the people they can hire know to use (like UE, Photoshop, Maya, Blender, etc).

Part of their job is to investigate what is there available outside and what the competition is using and doing. Not only in the recently released games, but also in technology that is being built for the future, because remember that AAA games nowadays can take 5-6 years to be made so if they start a game today, the engines and tools used by this game will be chosen considering on what's going to be big in 5-6 years from now, not what it is big today or when the AAA games released today started to be developed 5-6 years ago.

In the past, in-house custom engines like ForzaTech were pretty comparable to external engines like Unreal Engine and didn't require a shit ton of people to made them. Now, Unity or Unreal have hundreds of developers working for them, plus an insanely big community of game and tools developers that don't directly work for them but keep adding new features and stuff that in some cases ends added to the main engine, plus also provide feedback to the creators to help improve and fix their engines.

This means that after many years now UE and Unity are giant, powerful mamooths that can do a shit ton of cool things and are super versatile, capable of doing basically any genre and work in any platform. And to learn to use them people can start doing stuff by following some youtube tutorials. They are full-featured and do a shit ton of things, unlike the in-house engines that are focused typically to a few game genres. In the case of ForzaTech is focused on racing games so they needed to start building everything related to combat, npc dialogs and animations, etc., something already included and realively easy to use in stuff like Unreal or Unity.

The technical director will know this, and will also know that if in Microsoft they could do Forzatech or engines for shooters but couldn't do something as complete as Unreal Engine, now will less staff to work on engines and tools, and with no access to the tools and engines like ForzaTech that they did at MS, the smarter, cheaper, faster and easier solution for them will be to use Unreal Engine. And if they want to build some specific thing on top or modify anything, they'll be able to do it because Unreal allows it.

I've heard people say Playground pitched the Fable idea to MS seniors execs. I wonder if there was a plot internally about future direction?

Maybe it wasn't their idea to use forzatech for fable?

A separate brand new studio and team was built for Fable overviewed by PlayGround. They started using ForzaTech but heavily changing/expanding it to implement all the things that an action RPG needed and that Forza games didn't have like the things for combat, interactions or dialogs with NPCs and take into consideration the actions for later, etc.

 

[Vertigo]

That’s maybe in reference to older boxes strategies to modern online strategies. I was listening to some gdc summary vid about it….

Basically means that you’re better off launching skimp and speedily delivering updates and addressing player feedback than rushing to launch big and be stuck with nothing.

 

[Bodycount611]

seems like they have issues with gamepass.

we've seen how gamepass can make kings out of 'undeserving' games and studios, based on things other than merit or quality. It's a popularity contest. Stuff like High on life (a meme game) or vampire survivors come to mind (a fad game).

i wonder how developers who put out expensive, AAA games feel to have the playing field equalized with 'low-effort' games that are the majority on gamepass.

we already know this is why Square Enix and Capcom avoid the platform. Must really suck for internal devs like PG who have no choice but to launch into GP.

GP is culling AAA games on xbox. it just isn't designed for them.

 

[voke]

Anyone else feel like Fable wasn't a good choice for them. 2 completely different genres with no overlap. Giant task for them.

 

[Gods&Monsters]

Anyone else feel like Fable wasn't a good choice for them. 2 completely different genres with no overlap. Giant task for them.

The robots will quickly tell you Guerilla did it with Killzone and Horizon but that comparison never made sense. Besides the settings and 1st/3rd person, it was still a full game with story/missions and exploration. Unlike racing to open-world RPG.

Eidos Montreal was hired to help because the new studio for Fable have no clue what they are doing.