Playground Games is one of the five companies that Microsoft bought earlier this year to improve the quantity and quality of Xbox One games. Forza Horizon is the main franchise assigned to the British studio, but they announced in February a new adventure game under development in a second, new team.
Rumours said that these plans involve competing with Horizon: Zero Dawn by using the Fable franchise, and although this is yet to be confirmed, we now know that the new team is bringing quite a few talented people on board. After hiring veterans from Rockstar Leeds and Kojima Productions, Playground Games recently welcomed six people in key roles, coming from the likes of EA Motive, Rocksteady, and Guerrilla Games, according to GamesIndustry.biz.
Principal environment artist Scotty Brown worked on Star Wars Battlefront II and environmental artist Noel Lukasewich on Mass Effect, for example, while Chriss Goodall was the lead animator for one of the best games of 2017, Hellblade, and Joe McKernan was directly involved in Horizon: Zero Dawn as lead UI artist. Martin Lancaster will be a key name too, as he was narrative director for Rocksteady Studios, also being a senior scriptwriter and lead scriptwriter on Batman Arkham Knight and Batman Arkham VR.
It looks like Gavin Raeburn, leader of the studio, knows how to spend the money Microsoft put into the company, but what do you expect from them?