This is where PG is going to show what they know about RPG. About interesting characters, combat, game world, atmosphere and so on. Wasn’t it PG that got talent from open world games like GTA and Witcher 3 amongst others?
For sure they have some people from many various studios, like DICE, Kojima Productions, Rockstar North, Ninja Theory, Tequila Works, EA Motive, BioWare, Rocksteady Studios, Creative Assembly, Guerrilla Games, Ubisoft (they’ve many divisions, so I don’t remember which one exactly, but from few of them for sure), Massive Entertainment, Rebellion, and probably many more. For Senior and Lead positions as well as some typical labour one with completely fresh people (like already graduated from university).
This is fault of people at CD PROJECT RED and this is fault of gamers. They inflated that hype balloon to unbelievable limits. Both of them. Gamers were hyped after The Witcher 3 on unimaginable scale, putting them next to Rockstar Games or Naughty Dog (just after ONE game, where these two studios were working for that success for many years and after many games). CDPR made a huge marketing campaign, but they also lied about stuff and possibilities in game and of course about technical side just before the release.
I don’t think that will ever happen again with any big game. This is a huge lesson for the industry, for developers, for publishers and for gamers as well.
Development of Halo Infinite started mostly with Xbox One in minds and then they just added Xbox Series X|S to the game. It’ll be benefited with up to 120 fps mode, with textures in better quality, faster load times, maybe ray tracing. It’ll have native Gen 9 version, but it still will be just upgraded version of Xbox One game.
If they wouldn’t be sure where and when to release Halo Infinite they wouldn’t announce that already as a Xbox One game and then without failed marketing campaign as a launch title for the next-gen. In that case we would get know that Halo Infinite would be released this year and we would get know that it would be next-gen only title (like Starfield which was announced without any platforms in 2018 and we know about them for more than week – excluding the issue of acquisition, which made it more obvious).
If they would cancel Xbox One version now because of customized Xbox Series X in server blades and future Xbox Cloud Gaming support on old consoles that would be still something really silly to do (people would be very upset – to put it mildly), because there are still lot of people which will play it just on Xbox One and there are lot of people which are not convinced to cloud gaming or they don’t have technical abilities to play in cloud.
It’s very complexed thing and it wouldn’t be just like that.