Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty has very casually revealed a genuinely encouraging update on the new Fable game: Blizzard is going to be "helping out" with the reboot's cinematics.
This is fantastic news. Blizzard cinematics have been best-in-class for literal decades. I'll never forget seeing the original Diablo intro cinematic on my 1997-era CRT monitor and thinking video games would never look better. To this day, Diablo 4's recent Lord of Hatred animations have been blowing me away. I was surprised, then, that Booty made so little fanfare about tagging in Blizzard to help out Playground Games with Fable cinematics.
During an appearance on the Official Xbox Podcast, Booty explained how different Xbox studios are using their unique expertise to benefit projects from other teams.
"Our team in Vancouver, The Coalition, they are really our center of excellence for Unreal Engine work, and that is benefiting the teams, for example, at Bryan Fargo's studio, inXile, working on Clockwork Revolution," says Booty. "They're able to benefit from all of the really technical work that they're doing up at The Coalition.
"There are other examples," he added. "We've got the Blizzard cinematics team helping out on Fable. We've got our studio in Montreal, Compulsion Games, using the Activision MoCap studio. We've got, I think, the team at Rare—with a lot of multiplayer experience working on Sea of Thieves—helping out at Double Fine on Kiln, the pottery game. There are a lot of examples of that."
I was already pretty psyched for a new Fable game after so, so, so long, but now that I know my world is going to be rocked every so often by beautifully animated, visceral cutscenes, I can hardly wait. Playground Games, best known for the Forza racing games, has yet to prove itself in the RPG space, but you'd better believe those cinematics are going to be stunning.
