Xbox Game Studios’ „elite” team, The Initiative, got some praise by Phil Spencer, the head of Xbox, who also talked about what Microsoft will prioritise with the Xbox Series X.

The Initiative was founded in 2018, and it is led by Darrell Gallagher, who was formerly at Crystal Dynamics, lending a hand in rebooting Tomb Raider via a trilogy. Multiple people joined the team since, and while we don’t know what they could be doing, Spencer wrote the following on Twitter: „[The Initiative is an] incredibly talented studio challenging themselves to do new things (and old things :)) in new ways.” It sounds suspicious, and at E3 2018, Spencer said about Gallagher that he enjoyed working on Tomb Raider’s reboot at Crystal Dynamics, so we should suspect that an older IP, series could be in the works at The Initiative.

Their work will likely be on Xbox Series X (and maybe on the Xbox One, too… it could be the Achilles heel of Microsoft at the beginning of the next console generation: supporting the old hardware). Phil Spencer told Stevivor what they will prefer with the new console: „We’ve never really tried to limit what developers are trying to do on our platform, whether it’s 60 frames per second on Xbox 360 or people doing 4K, 60 [frames-per-second] now on Xbox One X. We want to give developers the tools to go try things that they want to go try on any of the hardware platforms and capability can be there for them to go try things.

I think we’ve reached a point with Xbox One X in the generation where games look amazing, and there’s always work we can do to look more amazing. But I want games to feel as amazing as they look. We don’t have that in today’s generation, mainly because the CPU is underpowered relative to the GPU that’s in the box in order to reach a feel and frame rate and kind of consistency or variable refresh rate and other things that we want. As we were looking at the future, the feel of the games was definitely something that we wanted to have more focus on, not just throwing more pixels up on the screen.”

Frame rate over resolution is a good idea. The Xbox Series X will launch at the end of this year. Its price and release day is unknown. We have seen the console on photos before, too.

Source: WCCFTech, WCCFTech

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