A number of Rocksteady Games’ scriptwriting team have now joined Microsoft’s Playground Games.
Forza developer Playground is staffing up for a new RPG title, understood to be a reboot of Xbox franchise Fable, and following a recent hire most of the Batman: Arkham Knight scriptwriting team are now on the project, VGC understands.
Senior scriptwriter Kim MacAskill joined the RPG team from Rocksteady in August 2019.
Meanwhile, the new team’s narrative director is Martin Lancaster, the lead scriptwriter for Batman: Arkham Knight. Another of Rocksteady’s senior scriptwriters, Craig Owens, is now principal scriptwriter at Playground.
Phillip Huxley, the final scriptwriter on the core Arkham Knight team, left in 2018 to join EA’s Ghost Games.
Rebecca Haigh, the writer of adventure game Du Lac & Fey: Dance of Death, also joined Playground in August.
Although Playground remains extremely secretive about its RPG project, the studio has been actively hiring for the game’s development team for the past three years.
So far it’s snapped up Anthem’s lead environment artist, Ghost Recon Wildlands’ lead character artist, Hellblade’s lead animator, Metal Gear Solid V’s project manager and more.
Xbox parent Microsoft announced it had acquired Playground in June 2018, following the release of several successful Forza Horizon titles.
An ongoing Epic Games store promotion is offering six free Batman games this week.
