New studio Maverick Games from Ex-Playground Devs Formed
- Thread starter Lord Mittens
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because they are more like arcade guys, Driveclub 2 would be proper use of their talend. add guys from firesprite and you have solid ground. of course, this is just theoretical
Well let's hope things work out better for Maverick than they did for The Initiative. Maverick forming outside of Microsoft's purview may actually be a hidden benefit.
Interesting. Usually with Xbox these days where there's smoke, there's fire (even if it's a small fire).
I would hope the engine switch, if it's real after all, doesn't result in assets made needing to be redone, or game mechanics needing to be significantly redesigned due to limitations or feature quirks of UE5 vs. the modified Forzatech engine. It would just generally suck if this is a 2025 or a 2026 release.
@Yurinka I get that these are all people primarily on the FH games, but don't you think they would have been contributing in some capacity to the Fable project given FH5 just released in 2021, and any planning or scoping they'd need for FH6 would have been minimized due to not needing engine redesigns? I think they could have been at least been contributing to helping with customizations to the Forzatech engine for the Fable team to use on their project, which would have been significant involvement in its own way.
Well anyway, I think we'll have an indication how true the Fable rumors are depending on if we see it again this year and get a release window.
Pretty likely the assets are made using standard file types, normal images for textures, and for the models and scene types from the popular 3D modeling apps like Maya, Blender etc. And the music or sound effects using the typical file types from audio designing apps.
Consider that most of the assets are made by outsourcing companies, who pretty likely are familiar with these 3D apps and also engines like Unreal or Unity but pretty likely not with their in-house engine.
So the assets could be reused if desired, pretty likely already are compatible. And if not, any programmer may make a conversion tool to adapt them to another engine. Moving to an engine like UE5 makes easier to work with outsourcing companies, and also to hire people because a ton of devs are familiar with it so don't need an adaptation period. I don't think that to move to Unreal Engine may cause any important issue.
Also, these are top guys who I don't think work with engines, their roles are more about doing management stuff like managing their teams, decide where the project goes in their areas, etc. Only the techical director may use it, or decide which engine they'll use. UE5 adds several huge paradigm shifts that are going to be difficult to replicate in-house in the short term and makes easier the life of many people of the team, so I understand many AAA people may want to move to UE.
The technical director is the only one I see could be more attached to their own engine, so also the one who may get angry if forced to use other engine. But also the one who can see all the benefits that UE may bring them and also all the headaches that they would avoid now (at the cost of not having full control about everything even if UE provides the source engine and support to change anything they want).
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I'd love a touring style racing game..... just take a region and put some of the best roads in there and have huge races and then you could have shorter races along stretches of the roads.
Route selection and planning. Although it might sound boring to some. Gran Turismo Touring ?
I assume they are aiming to be a multiplatform team?
OP
OP
Yeah it was quite late when I made it lol
@TubzGaming could one of you kind sirs update the thread title please?
New studio Maverick Games from Ex-Playground Devs Formed
WTF does this even mean?
Is he talking about releasing story chapters on a steady flow, like RE Revelations 2 or Life Is Strange?
Wow, that was one of Xbox studios' most reliable teams, I wonder what happened. Guess they wanted to explore fresh ideas, looking forward to what they put together since they are clearly pretty competent
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?
I've said it before and it bears repeating, Xbox Division is top heavy with deadwood. Gut that deadwood and get the senior players in the successful first party studios (Coalition/Playground) promoted to oversee the underperformed studios and fix what's wrong. They may have left this too late for Playground (losing such talent so soon that they may need time to rebuild) but maybe look now to The Coalition to steady the overall management ship.
P
peter42O
Guest
No biggie whatsoever. First, those who worked on Forza Horizon are not the same people who are currently working on Fable as they're two separate development studios. Second, people leave development studios all the time.
True. All the soft soft and unionisation ultimately ends with bloat and dead wood you cannot trim. Only way for the talented to progress is to reset elsewhere.
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.
So, uh, this is interesting....
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.
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.
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.
Sounds like Outrun mixed with Football Manager mixed with B-Spec mode.
Could be interesting.
I think it's some of the themes they want to explore with their new game. Honestly it would be interesting to see how they could thematically explore it (with subtle meta commentary) in whatever story they are doing with their open-world AAA game, if it's going to be narratively driven.