Microsoft is closing down Xbox studio The Initiative, with Perfect Dark killed as well — joining Everwild and ZeniMax's new IP, and other unannounced projects
Microsoft is closing down Xbox studio The Initiative, with Perfect Dark killed as well — joining Everwild and ZeniMax's new IP, and other unannounced projects
Microsoft is closing down The Initiative, after 7 years. The partnership with Crystal Dynamics will end, and "Perfect Dark" will be cancelled.
Fuckers buying up studios and then shutting them down. I knew this was going to happen.
While I agree with you in principle, they didn’t buy the Initiative. It was a studio they founded that hasn’t shipped a single game.
Perfect Dark looked cool though, this is a major bummer.
Good lord I hope Nightdive stays intact long enough to make a Dark Forces 2 Remaster. Jerec needs to show the new kids how an Inquisitor does things.
I can -sort of- understand cancelling games that have been in development hell but it's insane than they cancelled the Perfect Dark remake. It looked very far along when they showed it last year.
Anytime I see super-smooth transition animations in a demo, or even just gameplay mechanics that seem to work out way too conveniently, it tells me it’s an animated “pre-viz” demo of the game they want to make. That’s kind of the impression I got from Perfect Dark.
#150 on SteamDB wishlist - friends and I were really looking forward to this remake.
I swear to god, the entire immersive sim genre is cursed.
Fables got to be far along enough to not get cancelled but my expectations are incredibly low. Nothing against Forza Horizon but giving a studio that has only ever made Forza Horizon games a AAA RPG reboot where the original game was known for it's super endearing and fun writing along with a hodgepodge of promised god game mechanics in a third person RPG is a bad idea. Also using the Forza engine
So they need writers, they need game designers that do third person combat, level/creature/etc designers since racing simcades replicate real world stuff, I imagine them even needing a different voice acting director rather than whatever they do with Forza Horizon.
It's pretty much a startup studio with a huge budget that has to upgrade the Forza engine to make content creation for quest/gameplay designers/non-programmers easy. Also studio heads have to learn how to manage the staff and content pipeline for a huge RPG game. Recipe for terrible growing pains. Should have never pushed almost all their studios towards Kinect and then live service. Maybe then Lionhead wouldn't have atrophied and been shut down
Not surprised at all. What WILL surprise me is if M$ actually releases another XBOX console. Because as far as I’m concerned right now, regardless of what they say, they are not.
Seems a foregone conclusion at this point that they’re going to brand a PC as an Xbox and allow it to run both Xbox and PC games on it. They may not even bother making the hardware themselves like they’re doing with this partnership on the “Xbox” handheld which is really just a cross branded Asus handheld.
I really hope they do, or either allow Devs to publish games only on the good console. Having to release for the S if you want to release Xbox at all is a nightmare that needs to stop, it's gonna get harder as time goes on.
Selling Bethesda to MS was a mistake.
Honestly? Its kinda good Perfect Dark was cancelled.
When MS first showed Perfect Dark, there was nothing of substance really to base any expectations on. Except previous games, which were only ever "okay." But the second time they showed it, with their idea of gameplay, it looked bad. It didn't look like what one would expect from Perfect Dark, it looked like some weird hybrid between Battlefield/Call of Duty, Mirror's Edge, and a high tech cyberpunk game.
Perfect Dark was really only ever "that game Rare made because they weren't allowed to make GoldenEye 2." It wasn't really revolutionary or prolific or anything, unlike GoldenEye.
Its better that it stays the way it was than be ruined by whatever it was going to be cobbled into. I am kinda shocked it took MS this long to cancel it.