I was awfully late to the joys of Blizzard cinematics—I once mistook a Mists of Pandaria trailer in the cinema to be a new Kung Fu Panda movie, and only really came to appreciate them with the slew of Overwatch shorts the developer pumped out in the run-up to the hero shooter’s original 2016 release.
But I am much older and a little wiser now, and able to see just how good Blizzard is when it comes to crafting these animations. So much so, it seems, that Xbox is taking advantage of its ownership of the developer and putting them to use with the upcoming Fable game.
As spotted by Wccftech, Xbox chief content officer Matt Booty noted Blizzard’s cinematic contributions on Fable as just one of the many emerging collaborations between different teams and studios.
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“We’ve really seen a lot, once we build those connections, of teams starting to share things with each other,” Booty said on the Official Xbox Podcast. “Our team in Vancouver, The Coalition, they are really our center of excellence for Unreal Engine work, and that is benefitting the teams, for example, at Bryan Fargo’s studio inXxile working on Clockwork Revolution. They’re able to benefit from all of the really technical work that they’re doing up at The Coalition.
“There are other examples,” Booty continued. “We’ve got the Blizzard cinematics team helping out on Fable. We’ve got our studio in Montreal, Compulsion Games, using the Activision MoCap studio. We’ve got, I think, the team at Rare—a lot of multiplayer experience working on Sea of Thieves—helping out at Double Fine on Kiln, the pottery game. There’s a lot of examples of that.”
I was already pretty amped up for a new Fable game, the original Lionhead numbers being hugely formative in my pre-teenhood. But working some top-class cinematics into the mix? That makes things just a little more exciting for me. I’d put Blizzard up there with my beloved Square Enix in terms of incredible cinematics that continue to hold up years beyond their creation, so putting a little bit of that magic into Fable has got me all giddy.
As far as we know, everything is on track for Fable’s (already delayed) release. Rumours of a delay began to ripple out earlier this month, but developer Playground seems staunch in its commitment to its autumn 2026 window.
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