How Fable Fortune Survived the Death of Lionhead
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Fable Fortune, a CCG/RPG that was supposed to be Fable Legends' Gwent, is currently in Early Access and is still kicking despite a failed Kickstarter campaign, while the main franchise and the studio behind it are pretty much dead. To figure out how that happened, Eurogamer spoke with the game's producer Craig Oman about Fable Fortune's troubled journey from a vague concept to a playable standalone game. An excerpt:
Fable Fortune, a Hearthstone-like collectible card game set in the Fable universe, sprang into life in October 2014 after the small team responsible for Fable Anniversary wrapped up the Steam version of the game. With Fable Legends development in full swing, the Anniversary team was asked to come up with an idea for a mini-game of companion game that would slot into the big Xbox One and PC project. Lionhead had form when it came to Fable companion pieces, of course, with Fable: Coin Golf and Fable: Pub Games both past successes.
The idea to make a collectible card game came to the team almost immediately. Lionhead designer Mike West, a big physical collectible card game fan, had unsuccessfully pitched a CCG for Fable 2 years prior. Blizzard's Hearthstone, though, had made CCGs cool, and so a CCG for Fable Legends was a much easier sell.
Fable Fortune's design mantra was established early doors: even though it was a card game, it had to be Fable. It had to have the famous Fable humour. It had to have quests. It had to have some kind of god and evil morality system.
Lionhead wanted to integrate the game into Fable Legends, but also make it so players could access it externally. The idea was while you were in Legends waiting for a match or your friends to turn up, you could play Fortune for a bit, then jump straight back into Legends. And if the developers could get Fable Fortune onto mobile phones and tablets, players would have something Fable-related to play while they were away from their Xbox One.
Why would you bother with Fortune? Apart from it being fun to play, you could also unlock items for use in Fable Legends - and vice versa. Play Fable Legends and you would unlock card packs for Fable Fortune. Play Fable Fortune and you would unlock items for use out on the battlefield in Fable Legends. That sort of thing.
Lionhead's leadership team liked the idea, and told the group to get to work on a PowerPoint that would hopefully secure approval from Microsoft itself. This is where the fun with gates began.
Microsoft Studios uses a gating system to not only greenlight projects, but act as internal milestones. The requirements per gate vary depending on project size, but all projects face scrutiny. When you pass through a gate you unlock some development funds. Gate number one: concept approval. Pass that gate and the Fable Fortune team would unlock enough money to build a prototype.
In late 2014, Kudo Tsunoda was in charge of Microsoft's first-party studios. Tsunoda, the public figurehead of Kinect, was in the process of taking over Xbox game development from the outgoing Phil Harrison. The Fable Fortune development team would have to get the thumbs up from Tsunoda before moving onto pre-production. It turns out the gate number one meeting involved not on Tsunoda, Phil Harrison and the Lionhead leadership team, but Xbox boss Phil Spencer, who alongside his entourage was on one of his regular tours of the UK. No pressure then.
"This was very much like, yeah, if we fuck up, then the project gets canned and we have to go and find some other work to do," remembers producer Craig Oman. Fable Fortune, which ex-colleagues tell me was "Oman's baby", was pitched via a rudimentary PowerPoint presentation with 2D graphics viewed from a top-down perspective. But the essence of what the game was was there.
The high-profile audience made for a nerve-wracking presentation. Phil Spencer, Phil Harrison and Kudo Tsunoda, three powerhouses of Xbox, laid in wait. But it was Tsunoda who worried Oman most.
"Phil's great. He's real easy to talk to," Oman says says. "Kudo is... I really like Kudo but he can be very difficult to present to.
"He might not even look like he's paying attention to you, but he's normally taking it all in. But he wants to know the answer to the question he's got. He doesn't really give a shit about the presentation you've spent two months preparing for and you've practised or that you've got this flow ready to go. He'll have a question and he just wants the answer now. You can't just say, well we're going to get to that in seven slides' time, if I can just take you on the journey... he will be like, no, go straight here."
This description of Kudo Tsunoda's meeting style - backed up to me by another ex-Lionhead member of staff - explains the nervousness Oman felt during the Fable Fortune concept pitch. But, Oman says, it was something he got used to - and even managed to prepare for.
"He did that - every single presentation we ever did with Kudo," Oman says. "You learn after a while, he's just going to throw you a curve ball, so you've got to be able to move around. It's infuriating and difficult to work with, but it's good because he knows what he wants and he doesn't want to mess around. So if you don't have an answer to the question he's got, you're done. You're just wasting his time. But once you know that's coming, it's a bit easier. You tend to frontload as much stuff as well, so it's all there."
Fable Fortune's concept presentation was high level, as you'd expect, and designed for those unfamiliar with the CCG genre. It ran through how the game would work and had a section devoted to explaining how CCGs work. It turns out Oman needn't have worried about the latter.
"We didn't really know how much the execs would know about CCGs," Oman says. "Mike [West, Fable Fortune creative director] was up doing his talk, and I was standing off to the side. I was just behind Phil Spencer. Mike's talking away and I see Phil open up Hearthstone, and I was like, yes!
"We asked, are you familiar with CCGs? And he's got his account already open. It's like, good, okay, we don't have to explain why this is a good space to go into.
"There was somebody else there, one of the finance guys, he was this uber Magic the Gathering fan. He was like, I've got a $50,000 Magic collection, so you don't have to explain this to me. There were a couple of people who were big votes who were like, yes!"
X-Factor style, the votes were cast, and Fable Fortune passed the first gate. But the thumbs up came with difficult questions, the most difficult of which came from Phil Spencer himself: how Fable Fortune would beat Hearthstone?
"We were like, what the fuck are you talking about?" Oman says. "We're talking about a very small team that's trying to do something that's inside of Legends. But Phil's brain is already working: well look, if you're going to do this, do it properly. How are you going to take them on?
"And that was like, oh shit! Actually, that's where we should be thinking. Nobody's saying we're going to beat Hearthstone. It's massive. But if you're going to make a football game, you've got to ask yourself, how are you going to beat FIFA or Pro Evo? You should be setting your ambitions right at the top."
Inspired by Spencer's question, the developers began to think of Fable Fortune more as a standalone game than a Fable Legends mini-game. They explored making Fable Fortune a separate app that would be "deeplinked" with Legends on an Xbox One. So, you would be in Legends, press a button and load up Fortune as a different app. Because the Xbox One can run a game and an app at the same time, both Legends and Fortune could theoretically run on the console at the same time without ever shutting down - and at full quality.
