Touché. Fair point.

They’re also going to inherit a lot of heavily experienced FPS studios with Activision Blizzard so maybe let some of them have a bash at the MP too.

Halo red, Halo blue. FIGHT!

IF, the next Halo game takes has development problems and takes an excessively long time for its release and it is not a clean launch and has missing features, then the blame goes right to the top of Xbox.

I wonder if we what we'll see is that 343i continues to 'develop Halo' whilst another studio, like Id Software is brought in to partner with it, like with the new Perfect Dark game which is being 'developed by the initiative' but has brought in Crystal Dynamics to make it.

I know right. I'm not interested in an ID software Halo. I rather have them make a new IP

Agreed

It seems that Coalition already works on various projects (not just Gears)

https://gamingbolt.com/the-...

So the capacity is there. If however all secondary projects are side projects of small scale, then it would not be feasible to handle a Halo scale project unless they abandon Gears (unlikely)

Rod Ferguson is at Blizzard these days isn't he? So he'll be back to Microsoft soon anyway and Phil Spencer could do a lot worse than put him either in charge of Xbox Studios or similar position - he's got a track record of fixing teams and projects and it sounds like Xbox needs as much help as they can get.

Playground has consistently released great games (even though I think FH4 & 5 had their issues) but yeah, other than that, I think its a fair point.

agreed Dom, Rod has shown a timeliness to finish quality projects on schedule. MS would do well to put him in charge of software development when finally acquired. But at the present, he's not employed at MS. Really the question is though why restrict his talent to just Gears? Let him oversee game development and put Cliffy B back in charge of Gears. This bit of humble pie since he left Epic did wonders for his ego and who else cares more for the franchise than he and Rod?

Gears 5 metacritic of 84% critic and 8.2 user on the original release of the x1 console.

So pretty far from a bad game it's not 100 but if you played gears 4 which was critically well received but has a low user score of 7 or judgement which pretty much everyone dislikes at at 5.7 user scor and then 5 you wouldn't be complaining at all.

Is it a return to form of the original trilogy no because it's a game that formed its own path it wasn't gears 1 but made in 2019

So yeah I'd still say it ushered a bit of a franchise revival it was actually a good game even I played it and loved it after feeling burnt out by the franchise after playing every entry since the 360 days