Andy "Starfield Showcase Announcement is Imminent" Robinson Still Salty.

This is basically exactly what I've been assuming so the rest is useless to me without knowing "how near" and what they consider to be "not close"

Hellblade II > Avowed > Fable > Perfect Dark > Everwild was my recent order assumption.

The combo of Eidos (who are huge) and Playground (who are quite large) should put Fable out before Perfect Dark which is The Initiative (tiny) and Crystal Dynamics (large, but according to recent reports, knee deep in Tomb Raider production so whoever is on Perfect Dark is likely Crystal Dynamics smaller B-Team).

And Everwild, I'd expect once the Creative Director left and Gregg Mayles took over, it was essentially rebooted from the ground up and it's now entirely Gregg's vision which should be good but will take a long time.

I'd adjust my Fable expectation to early 2025 though if it recently entered full production.

Forgot what Todd Howard said when he gave an estimation of how long Bethesda's pre-production vs full production tends to be but I think for Bethesda he said their full production is usually 2 years but I may be misremembering.

Worth noting though that a few users are saying they don't even sound confident in the Podcast so...Could just be best guesses.

"Witcher-like" was thrown around a lot for Fable.

I've got worries about this statement.

Sure, I absolutely loved The Witcher 3, it was one of my favourite titles of all time, but Fable is Fable and Witcher is Witcher and they are absolutely nothing alike.

What could they even make "Witcher-Like" about Fable? Hopefully not copying Witcher's combat because Witcher's combat is bad, Lol.

Maybe the Art-Style? Think I'd be okay with that.

Hopefully not the tone, Witcher is funny at times but it's still mostly a serious WRPG...Fable's tone is completely different and I like that because it makes it unique, there isn't a RPG like Fable out there and it would be a shame if it just became a Witcher clone.

I think I'd still enjoy it because I loved Witcher but I'd also be disappointed if Fable lost its identity/uniqueness to become closer to other WRPGs and I'd just be thinking "why didn't you just make a new IP" Lol.

Then again as I write this up, I'm thinking back to the trailer which was very Fable like in humour/tone and visuals so maybe this is just a case of people throwing around a descriptor because they can't come up with anything else other than the last biggest WRPG which released, Lol.

Or maybe like those "Starfield is just No Mans Sky" comparisons

Eh, I might as well just ignore it, it's a fairly useless description without knowing what aspect of the game they're talking about.

Well, I can understand Everwild but... I was kind of hoping Perfect Dark would be far along since it's been over 2 years since its announcement (and presumably longer actual development?) I'm going to take a gander and say SoD 3 probably falls in that "not close" category. 

I feel this is going to be like Grubb referring to Pentiment as Disco Elysium-like. The games will have basically no similarities but the press will keep mentioning Witcher whenever they talk about the game because an insider said it.

I’m still worried about The Initiative post Perfect Dark, they should have just expanded into a full team since there is no guarantee that Crystal will be available for their next project and then MS will have to look around find a dev to do the heavy lifting.

Then again maybe Darrell Gallagher could just be given his old position back at Activision as Head of Development and move The Initiative there to incubate new AAA games that some of the Activision studios can work on after they get freed from the CoD mines.

I'm pretty sure Perfect Dark got a partial reboot after a bunch of the team quit and Crystal Dynamic got brought in to help. It would be a 2024 release for sure if the original build had continued, Drew Murray said it was playable more than 2 years ago now, a game that was already in a playable state in 2020 would definitely be ready for release by 2024 if it hadn't been rebooted.

Perfect Dark, Avowed, Everwild, and Fable all feel like they got partial or full reboots at some point, each of them is taking too long for that not to have happened, and we have heard about reboots from insiders on some of them.

I would imagine he is referring to it being an open world, medieval fantasy, action RPG just like Witcher 3, and maybe a few of the gameplay systems are similar, maybe some kind of in-game card game or something, or maybe you can hunt monsters and get paid for it. Maybe the art design is somewhat similar, or perhaps the soundtrack. No way it is anything like Witcher in terms of tone, Fable is supposed to be comedic and light, not dark like Witcher, and the reveal trailer suggested that Playground understood it is supposed to be comedic and light. If you recall, we also heard that Fable was alot like Horizon: Zero Dawn at one point, I get the feeling that Playground is attempting to mish-mash popular ideas and systems from other recent open world RPG's into a single game.

Thanks 🙏 

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