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Senior Producer responds to scope concerns of Fable (some article blamed ForzaTech after the video of a YT with 0 track record)
- Thread starter arsene_P5
- Start date
What is scoping?
Evaluating the work to be done with the resources available to do it.
What is scoping? (Another answer)
Features and content, from a production standpoint, need to fit within time and budget constraints. When there's a deficit (and there almost always is), you are "out of scope", or even worse, content is getting *added during production* according to the whims of a director, designer, or otherwise, known as "scope creep".
Of course, sometimes it's unavoidable...you realize that players are absolutely lost without an in-game tutorial reference guide or something, so it has to get added. But constantly reprioritizing and adjusting is necessary.
you would only be upset by this if you had no idea what you were talking about in the first place
Honestly i don't think the "Scoping" was the main issue the "Leak" revealed. The main take away i think was, that they had issues implementing gameplay mechanics into the Forzatech engine. Scoping is something that is prevalent in any Software since Scrum is mainly used in projects and is literally a non-issue.
Don't know if that part is true at all, but she at least commenting on the "Scope" thing might give some truth to that. But we will probably never know.
Don't know if that part is true at all, but she at least commenting on the "Scope" thing might give some truth to that. But we will probably never know.
my main takeaway from these tweets is that they don't really contradict any of the specifics of the rumors. she doesn't say they're inaccurate in any way, only contextualizes them a bit, which makes me think they're mostly true. if they were false, she would say they were instead of talking about why they're totally nothing to worry about
Gotcha, got it now. Thanks for your replies. I appreciate it!
OP
OP
I interpreted it as her saying: No we didn't remove things due to engine issues and rather removed things to keep the project in check, while trying to not crunch as much or at all.
And there you have it. Good to know development is going fine.
Thanks to Khanimus elenarie Feep and Taleboules for explaining the term "scoping" as used in game development..
Thanks to Khanimus elenarie Feep and Taleboules for explaining the term "scoping" as used in game development..
What did you expect? everyone is quick to push out some clickbait article based on nothing.
true.
She's gently telling you the person peddling the "rumor" doesn't know wtf they're talking about.
At best, they actually heard of some scoping exercises and turned that into "omg engine problems Fable in shambles!!!" At worst (and much more likely given they have no track record, much less a track record inside Playground) they're just repackaging the same stuff from the March interview, so there's literally nothing to respond to here, but the producer is trying to educate people a bit on how concerned they should be if they hear a feature is cut from X game. And as elenarie says probably shouldn't engage at all.
I feel like I'm coming in at the ass-end of a rumor...but going by the responses here it seems for the best I missed it. Sucks someone from within the studio had to respond
User Banned (3 days): Trolling, history of infractions for similar behaviour
OP looks afraid lol.
Moving from racing to rpg isnt easy.
Im sure as hell they have their own problems with that. And while rescope is normal, their rescope was so huge that somebody decided to talk about it. MS pipiline has many leaks and overall problem witch confidentiality. My resonalble take.
Moving from racing to rpg isnt easy.
Im sure as hell they have their own problems with that. And while rescope is normal, their rescope was so huge that somebody decided to talk about it. MS pipiline has many leaks and overall problem witch confidentiality. My resonalble take.
The scoping of the projects is a pretty normal thing, so I hope this helps people who weren't aware of it.
But my main takeaway from this is that it appears there is some truth to that rumor or a producer wouldn't bother to respond to it at all: it seems they recently did reduce the scope of the game in some fairly significant way; whether it's because of Forza tech requiring too much resources to implement a feature or not remains to be seen.
But my main takeaway from this is that it appears there is some truth to that rumor or a producer wouldn't bother to respond to it at all: it seems they recently did reduce the scope of the game in some fairly significant way; whether it's because of Forza tech requiring too much resources to implement a feature or not remains to be seen.
OP
OP
I am not afraid at all and I agree that the task of rebooting a beloved franchise, while establishing a new team and working on a new genre for the studio will likely lead to problems. Development is hard and there are always issues, so nothing to worry about imo. Scoping for example is normal.
I wouldn't call it "moving" since they've been building this 2nd, SEPARETE team specifically for this project since 2017/2018
Yeah. I dismissed the rumour when I first saw it, but having a Senior Producer respond certainly adds some credibility to it.
They likely responded because there are a million click bait articles claiming things about a game they are working on because of a random YouTube video. Obviously they aren't going to comment on everything but I did see a couple of headlines talking about the game being scaled down. Assuming things based on a response like this is weird.
I know probably, 75% of people who latch onto this type of thing are trolls and console warriors who only want to argue things in bad faith, but hopefully a response like this from a dev will serve to educate the other 25% about game development a bit.
OR she saw some bogus articles popping up and decided to comment on it. Responding to something being an admission of guilt is such a weird Resetera/Reddit take.
And game still in rescope period Which is prr production imo. Years away
So, concerned about the big rescope, this Playground employee decided to talk to a random YouTuber with no track record in order to ... What, exactly? Let's stop and think for a moment.
You literally just had a verified poster in this thread explain this, scroll up. Scoping isn't limited to preproduction.
dude it's from a person who I never see in XGS-related threads...the intention is clear lol
getting into "fanboy on Twitter" levels of posts here
OP afraid? wut?
It wasn't easy for Guerilla either. They had to move from first-person shooters to RPGs and it took them 7 years to get the first Horizon made, in that time they had to hire the right devs with the experience needed and probably went through various iterations of the game. It's probably the same here..so what's the worry?
There are always bogus articles popping up about games in development. Senior producers normally don't comment about them saying that scoping the projects is normal if that rumor were total BS.
Not saying Fable is in trouble--I sure hope not because it's one of the games I'm most excited about this gen--but this adds some credibility to that rumor instead of completely dismissing it.
Anyway, scoping the project can be a good thing if it's removing unnecessary bloat/features that aren't needed for great experience. We'll see.
Man sometimes I get the feeling that the people talking about games have never worked a day in their lives... isn't it fairly obvious what working on the scope of your project means? A 5 minute internet search can clear all doubts as well. It's always got to be something negative about this or that in some strange way... like, yeah they scope around the estimated effort of this or that task using their tools, and of course the engine is a set back, no software takes zero effort to do anything. It always requires work to use any engine. It's a set back the way having to spend any time doing anything is a set back! Doesn't mean it's horrible beyond belief!
Seeing so many people say this is strange to me. I dont know anything of the project, so ... my 2c is pretty worthless here...
But it seems like this is a no win situation for a studio. If someone puts out some nonsense rumor/leak/speculation based on incomplete or incorrect info, and it gains steam via influencers and social media, the options are to.... Let it spin out of control, spread and damage hype and faith in the project, or respond in some manner, and if you didn't LITERALLY bullet point refute every minute thing, it will just cause people to believe that your response MUST mean there's truth in it?
Either way you are going to take it in the teeth, so I guess you go with the one that requires less effort/attention on your part and just ignore it and never engage with that stuff. Kinda sad though.
The problem with the first option is you get critized for releasing an "incomplete" game if you kill features and move things to post launch
a la Halo Infinite. 343 is getting KILLED for doing this exact thing
Gaming stands out to me as one hobby where a lot of the biggest enthusiasts know the least about how the thing they love is actually made. But still talk like they do anyway. It can be so frustrating reading some of the discussions here and in other spaces. Even commentary from journalists can sometimes be so misinformed.
people know, it's just confirmation bias, they don't care about a game so they shit on it on every opportunity because they find some fun it it.
I imagine if development is going well they should have something to show this year? Feels like this game has been in dev for ages...
343's issue was that a Halo game has a certain expectation regarding features and the studio did nothing to manage these expectations.
Outside of it being an RPG, we know nothing about the game or how it was scoped. For all we know, it could have originally been planned to have a 100mĀ² world which was cut to 90mĀ² or multiplayer raids were cut from 16 to 8 players. Ultimately neither of those cuts would effect the end product in the eyes of the player as this isn't something which would be communicated outside of maybe a postmortem interview.
Every game begins more ambitious than what is shipped. Never forget that.
They started the studio from scratch though...it wasn't 200 people working on it from day one.
It's funny, even before that "leak" or what ever you want to call it... a few days ago I randomly thought of PlayGround games and I watched an old DF dev video when Richard went to visit them...
And as I was watching the video and seeing all the hard work they put into Horizon 5, I was excited once again to see what Fable would look like with their engine and from their talent. Hopefully we get gameplay footage in a few weeks.
Now I believe this isn't the exact team working on Fable, but you know the Fable team will have the same optimization tools and strategy of tackling a big project.
Here's the interview..
And as I was watching the video and seeing all the hard work they put into Horizon 5, I was excited once again to see what Fable would look like with their engine and from their talent. Hopefully we get gameplay footage in a few weeks.
Now I believe this isn't the exact team working on Fable, but you know the Fable team will have the same optimization tools and strategy of tackling a big project.
Here's the interview..
The best part is after game's release said people will use data mining findings, interviews and whatever info/rumor to theorize what an awesome game the initial vision would have been but got a lazy effort instead.
