Microsoft's "AAAA" studio, The Initiative, continues to be incredibly enigmatic with regard to whatever game it's currently developing. Despite reports saying otherwise, the studio didn't appear at the last Xbox Games Showcase in July, even though there were several high-profile reveals and updates, including Halo Infinite and the new Fable.
While whatever the game is remains a mystery, we are well acquainted with some of its staff. Back in April, we learned that Uncharted 4 developer Sylvia Chambers had been hired, and now it has been discovered that 16 new hires have been brought into The Initiative, with more prolific and well-known talent among them.
Studio lead Darrell Gallagher, whose own credentials include work on Grand Theft Auto 4, Destiny 2, and Tomb Raider, shared the names via a LinkedIn post, which shows Remi Lacoste from Crystal Dynamics has joined as an experiential director.
Lacoste also worked on the Tomb Raider reboot trilogy, which began in 2013, where he started off as lead camera designer, before working as a cinematic experience director on Rise of the Tomb Raider, and then becoming game director for Shadow of the Tomb Raider. He was also originally game director for the upcoming Avengers game.
Secondly, there is Christine Thompson from Bungie, where she worked as narrative lead and lead writer for Destiny 2 and its various campaigns. She'll be bringing her writing expertise to The Initiative in a lead writer position.
They will be joining the likes of God of War lead producer Brian Westergaard and Red Dead Redemption lead writer Christian Cantamessa, both of whom had already been snapped up by the studio. All in all, it's sounding like quite an all-star team.
Whatever game is being worked on at the studio, we can probably expect it to be of high-quality with a team like this, but have almost no indication as to what kind of game it is. A popular theory is that the studio's making a new Perfect Dark game, but there's no real evidence to support this. It certainly sounds as if it's going to be something big, with the studio describing itself as a AAAA studio, which is a completely new term.
While we might still be in the dark, Microsoft still has numerous other studios working under it, with their own big releases planned for the upcoming Xbox Series X. For example, Obsidian of The Outer Worlds fame has a fantasy RPG called Avowed, which could very well rival the juggernaut that is Skyrim.