Interview with former Playground Games' combat lead (yep, he worked on Fable and talks a bit about the project).
The Spanish magazine Vandal has interviewed Juan Fernandez, who was the lead combat designer at Playground Games for 3 years. In it he talks about his experience at Playground and how the team behind Fable works.
"PlayGround is a series company, very organized and production driven, every two years they release a Forza Horizon, which has more than 90 on Metacritic, with incredible quality. They have taken racing genere and have dominated it last few years, they are very smart and know very well what they do. They wanted to expand with something different [...] and they lacked people with the knowledge of how open world gameplay is done".
He came in to handle the combat part, define what technical requirements need to be met, and the concept of what an updated Fable should include. He spent three years at Playground, above all creating technical systems, writing documentation, doing competitive research (studying the characteristics of the best action RPGs that had come out in those years to find out what made them attractive) and analyzing the classic Fables to understand the essence of the game series and be able to maintain it.
"Open world action RPGs are incredibly complicated to make, they take a lot of time, a lot of people. PlayGround have the mentality of doing more with less, that if Assassin's Creed is made by 5,000 people they will have 150 or 200 and if they (Ubisoft) do in 7 years, then (Playground) will do Fable in 5. It's okay to be ambitious but you also have to be realistic and what I saw is that (the project) was getting longer and longer and I, personally, don't know if I have the creative capacity to working on the same thing for so many years".
With the pandemic, the need for a job change became more acute. Fernández had already laid the technical foundations, he points out, "which is the important thing. The change to working remotely in a game as big as Fable, which has a lot to do with talking to people, bureaucracy, meetings... there were many factors and I needed a change. It's been a nice three years and I think Fable is a super, super interesting IP, the game has incredible potential and there's a really good team inside. The best thing that Playground has done in the years that I've seen is the people that it's gotten for the team, there is a lot of talent. I wish them all the luck in the world and I really want to play it".
Juan Fernandez left Playground Games last year and now works at Ninja Theory as Principal Game Designer on Senua's Saga: Hellblade II. As replacement, Playground hired Paweł Kapała, a CD Projekt veteran who worked on the combat systems for The Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077.