Microsoft's secret studio, The Initiative, continues to sign great talents for its first game, which will be announced in 2020 for Xbox Series X and PC.
The transfer market seems to never close for The Initiative, which continues to hunt for an All Stars team for the development of its debut opera. The studio, the ace under the sleeve of Microsoft, has incorporated this Christmas to its staff Erik Jakobsen, a stage designer who has been at Sony Santa Monica for more than nine years and whose last work was the 2018 GOTY, God of War . It is not the first name that joins the project after being under the protection of Kratos, with Brian Westergaard, producer of the game having also joined a few months ago.
The Initiative is one of Microsoft's new first party studios, has no title in its curriculum and has not yet revealed anything of what will be its first release. All we have known about the company in recent months has been the innumerable list of names that have been added to it, most of them loaded with talent and from great developers. They have been the cases of Darrell Gallagher, responsible for the rebirth of Tomb Raider; Christian Cantamessa and Tom Sheperd of Rockstar Games; Daniel Neuburger, of Crystal Dynamics; or Blake Fischer, from Microsoft. Come on, as Matt Booty said a few days ago in an interview, not having done anything together before, if anything left over to the study members is experience.
Your first game will be shown in 2020
The incorporation of Erik Jakobsen continues to raise expectations around that first work of the study, which Booty, head of Microsoft Studios, has already set a date for its presentation. It will be shown to the world for the first time over the next 12 months and is so advanced that even The Initiative has a playable prototype from start to finish. We will see what 2020 holds for us and if finally the title of the studio becomes one of the great bulwarks of Xbox Series X, the new console of the company, which has a first list of confirmed titles for it among which are names of the caliber of Hellblade 2 and Halo Infinite.
