this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025

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Fable delayed to 2026 (www.gamesindustry.biz)

submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

65 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (8 children)

Fable already came out, and it was a pretty mid game. Why are we doing this again?

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (3 children)

That game came out years ago

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago

2004

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[–] [email protected] 59 points 1 week ago

Just FYI for any curious: this is the same delay that was announced last month, no additional changes since then.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 week ago (6 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] -12 points 1 week ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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!"

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

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?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Bruh avowed is great, I've been loving it.

This sounds like a you problem.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (7 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

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.