A new job listing for Microsoft has confirmed that the highly anticipated revival of Fable is being developed on the same game engine as Forza.
This news came by way of a job listing for Turn10 Studios, where it says “Do you want to have a major impact on 3 AAA titles in development across 2 beloved Xbox franchises? ForzaTech is the engine, tools, and pipelines that drive both the Forza Motorsport and Forza Horizon games. In addition to adding new features like raytracing to support the next console generation, we are also enriching the toolset to support an open world action RPG – Fable”
This news isn’t exactly all too surprising, considering that the developers of the new Fable Playground Studios are also the developers of Forza Horizon. The engine though still sits as an interesting choice. It has open world elements from Forza Horizon that look and feel great, but it will still take a fair amount of effort to fully flesh out ForzaTech as an engine capable of handling deep RPG’s like Fable.
That is most likely though the root cause behind the decision. Microsoft has been investing in their first party development heavily by purchasing multiple studios, making history with their acquisition of Zenimax – but that investment doesn’t stop after the studio is purchased. Engine’s like Sony’s proprietary Decima Engine which we’ve seen build games like Death Stranding, Killzone: Shadow Fall, Until Dawn, Horizon Zero Dawn and its upcoming sequel, Horizon Forbidden West could be what Microsoft is trying to emulate here. None of those are racing games but Decima is clearly an engine that has expanded and grown as Sony continues to work with it.
In any case, we’ll just have to wait and see. More than anything this news tells us that Fable is still far off, and the effects of COVID-19 on the industry couldn’t have done anything to help development move any faster. Considering how many long-term plans and decisions Microsoft has been making of late, it would seem like a pretty safe bet this will be the start of further expansion for their own game engine that any developer working with them could use.
