We know that most of those AAA games will be Halo, Gears and Forza plus The Initiative game which has just started so it's going to be 3-4 years till its release. That's half of the generation without major new titles. If you're a teenager who likes supersoldier boom-boom and fantasy car vroom-vroom, then fine. Sales of those franchises show that there's a certain, quite substantial market for such games, but that market isn't growing.
What does talent have to do with the budget you're working with? I'll tell you: exactly nothing. A lot of devs have a burnout after working for big studios and they switch to smaller projects. Maybe those projects will be of great quality, who knows. But they won't be big. Having a very powerful console with no games to utilize that power is a stupid idea.
I already considered that big budgets are not a good thing at this point, teams are going for 500+ people, videogames are already a very complex medium, to get all those people working together in a span of 3-4 years is a fuck ton of guaranted problems, I think we are kind of reaching the limit of how it is possible to manage a vast production, at least until we don't get some new magic tech that seriously speed up and make work much easier.
We all know where Ken Levine went: nowhere. After Bioshock Infinite he got the fuck out because he was tired of taking compromises and cutting shits from games, and he's just one of many that actually prefers small/medium size teams. The heads of Obsidian said the same for The Outer Worlds.
So that's why, again, I don't trust MS in what they are doing as I don't trust almost anyone else but Sony, especially with this Gamepass. On the other hand I'm fine with AA titles: Prey and Dishonored 2 are AA titles, Dark Souls basically was one, it's a sweet spot that can do magic, so unless MS doesn't want to simply release group of average games but actually use the focus of smaller teams than I'm happy.
Golden rule: with less you do more.
I'm personally more concern about the lack of linear dudebro corridor shooters, PS360 era was the shit for real, I want to blow stuff up, now walking around for miles in all those open-world walking sims, and neither MS nor Sony provided me any of that, maybe except Gears 4/5 in which I have no interest. Or any 3rd party for the matter, with BF going all the way downhill, and CoD being willed with retarded exo-skeletons and monkey-like jumping all over the place. The Division and Titanfall 2 are the only shooters I remember from this gen, I cannot recall anything else that had guns in it and sucked me for longer than 2-3h, like Doom for example. And with the rise of SSD I fear that I'll get even more open-world games, with even larger worlds a.k.a. even more walking, and that's simply not my cup of tea, I don't have time for that bullshit.
I don't miss dudebro corridor shooters at all, at least not the standard ones. At the very least I need Bulleststorm, Titan Fall 2 saw me sleep after 3 hours because the story, the art style and the I.A. were so bland I couldn't play it for long. However, Doom Eternal...
But try Wolfenstein.
Yeah well this is pretty in line with my internal thoughts. I don't want more open worlds and especially not bigger ones, full of filler. Give me Syndicate, Max Payne 3, Revengeance, 50cent: Blood on Sand, CoJ: The Cartel, Crysis 2, etc... Oh and fucking Black Ops, why the fuck cannot be good anymore. Also Bad Company, semi open world game still can be fun. I sure wish I could stay entertained in AC: Oddysey, but I just could not do it. Only Open World which I thoroughly enjoyed this game, was...suprisingly 2 Watch_dogs games.
Some really good classics there. Syndacate is very underrated, but immersive sims and stuff never got enough attention and sales. Also too bad StarBreeze went for other things, Riddick and The Darkness were interesting as well.
Max Payne 3 is Rockstar version of Max Payne, so it's different and similar at the same time. Good times for sure.
Crysis 2 is one of the best shooter of its generation, with one of the best single players but I also liked a lot the multiplayer.
Bad Company was a very good start for the series, Bad Company 2 felt more linear and simplistic, didn't like it as much. At the time, 60 fps, very good graphics, big maps, destructible scenarios, crazy audio, big multiplayer... it was next gen.