Blizzard is helping with Fable's cinematics in an expression of Xbox's cross-team synergy

Xbox's chief content officer Matt Booty shares interesting behind-the-scenes stories on how Microsoft's gaming teams collaborate across all of its divisions--from Obsidian iterating on Undead Labs' shared worlds tech to Blizzard helping out with Fable's cinematics.

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One thing that struck me about the new Fable reboot is how impressive the cinematics look. Xbox debuted the game with some high-res visuals that aren't usually associated with the Fable franchise, which has traditionally been more cartoonish. Now it looks like a fully-fledged medieval fantasy befit of something like Lord of the Rings or maybe Elder Scrolls. As it turns out, Blizzard is helping Playground Games with Fable's visual sequences--if you've ever played a Blizzard game, then you know their cinematics are next-level.

Now in a recent Xbox Podcast episode, Microsoft games exec Matt Booty outlines some of the different ways that Xbox's first-party teams are collaborating on a number of projects. We don't often get info like this, so the candid take expresses an appreciative look at how Microsoft's video games empire is able to release new content at a regular cadence through the power of multidisciplinary organizational teamwork that sometimes spans the world.

Below is a quick transcription of what Matt said on the topic of collaborative efforts among Xbox studios, including Activision Blizzard King, who joined Xbox as a limited-integration company in 2023.

"It is the case that we've got a lot of different kinds of studios, who all have their own cultures--we think of it like a culture of cultures. I see a big part of my job is to provide just enough connection and structure that they can communicate with each other, that they can share things back and forth, but never to the point where we're coming over the top to change who they are.

"Once we build those connections, we've really seen a lot of those teams share things with each other. Our team with Vancouver at the Coalition, they really are the center of excellence for engine work, and that has been benefitting teams like, for example, Brian Fargo at inExile working on Clockwork Revolution, they're able to benefit from all the really technical work they're doing at the Coalition.

"Other examples....we've got Blizzard cinematics team helping out on Fable, we've got our studio in Montreal, Compulsion Games, using the Activision mocap studio.

"We've got the team at Rare with a lot of multiplayer experience working on Sea of Thieves, helping out Double Fine with Kiln, the pottery game.

"There's a lot of examples of that. Just to show a more complicated round trip, you had State of Decay 2, which had some pretty sophisticated technology for saving shared worlds and persistent engine states. The team at Obsidian took that tech to make Grounded, but Obsidian has added to it. Now it's gone full-circle back to Undead Labs to go into State of Decay 3.

"So that's kind of an example of how there's a lot going on in between these different teams once we build those pathways.

"I think that is where Xbox really shines, and where we really stand apart. It really shows what's unique about us both as a platform and as a set of game development studios, is when we come together."