The Initiative Starts Playtest On Huge Xbox Exclusive

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The Initiative was revealed back at E3 2018 and is likely the team at Xbox Game Studios, which is going to offer the most ambitious game as soon as it’s ready. It’s being assembled with the best talents in the industry and has a big budget, so Xbox fans can look forward to what they’re working on.

We do know that times are going to be a bit longer still before we can see what they’re working on, actually, but thanks to a tweet from Sunset Overdrive‘s game director Drew Murray, now at The Initiative, we can see that the work on that unannounced title is underway and proceeding pretty well.

In a first tweet, Murray posted a photo with the team and said that “playtesting is informative, essential, and, if you have any ego, will leave you in the gutter.” He added that “fortunately, the design team have souls of iron coated in Teflon, so we just have fancy cocktails and talk about what we learned and what to fix next.”

So, it looks like the studio has done the initial phase of game design and now is testing stuff right as they end a portion of the game to see how and if it works at all. He also shared a second tweet where he claimed that the “playtesting phase for me runs from the day you have anything working onscreen until after you’ve shipped. Don’t read too much into it.”

Again, it’s very early, but the simple fact that The Initiative has something working on a screen is a step forward if you consider that the studio has been founded only one year ago or so.

It features Christian Cantamessa, the writer and designer of Red Dead Redemption, God of War producer Brian Westergaard, veteran employees of Respawn, BioWare, and Naughty Dog among its ranks, and is led by Square Enix and Activision boss Darrell Gallagher, so we can surely expect something big to come out of that.

From what we know, it should be a third-person action-adventure game, so something in the vein of God of War or Red Dead Redemption should work, and of course, considering the trends in gaming, it should be open world or at least feature some sandbox areas. Is this your cup of tea?