The studio known as Playground Games has been synonymous with the Forza Horizon racing series for the Xbox brand. Now it seems that they’re looking to change that. In a recent interview with Gamesindustry.biz, they have announced that they are working on a new title. While the upcoming IP doesn’t have a name just yet, Playground Games did mention that the game will be an open-world title.
A non-racing open-world title to be exact. Yes, they’re branching out and this will be their first title that won’t feature racing of any sort. Pretty exciting if you ask me.
“We feel like we’ve become pretty good at racing games over the years,” “We can always get better, we can always strive to get better but we’d love to prove ourselves in a different genre.”
“That’s another goal of Project 2, to allow us to do that. We’re going to need to hire some very talented people with experience that we don’t have.”
To do this, they’ve also announced that they’ll be opening up a new studio, which won’t be located too far from the original location. Founder and creative director Ralph Fulton was quick to point out that this was part of their plan for quite some time.
“Opening another studio is something we’ve been talking about for a good few years, but we’ve been keen not to rush into it,”
With the opening of this new studio, this will allow Playground Games to not only bring in some new talent but also shift over some of their more experienced staffers. They’re already in a great location that will provide them with plenty of talent, so there’s no reason to set up the new studio very far from their current studio.
“We have a great studio here, with a really broadly experienced staff, some of whom joined us five, six years ago as graduates. For some of them, this was their first job in the industry. I remember many of them starting green as you like. They’ve grown up in this studio, grown in experience over three games of increasing quality, and are now in a position where they are looking to develop their careers. We want them to do that here rather than somewhere else, but with only one team the opportunities for that are limited.”
“We’re not doing this to diversify our recruitment pool, we’re not trying to open up a studio somewhere there’s already lots of people we can hire. We’ve had great success already in bringing people to Leamington, and we want to build an extension of Playground with the same values and principles.”
This is fantastic news for a super talented studio and also great news for Xbox fans. As you know, Playground Games works hand in hand with Microsoft and Turn 10 Studios. This likely means that their upcoming title will be a first-party exclusive title for the Xbox. Perhaps this was the new IP that Phil Spencer eluded to here.
Click here the entire report from Gamesindustry.biz.
