Finished Middle-earth: Shadow of War (well technically there's still the epilogue and DLCs so I still have a few more hours).
Already my third post about this game. The first one was very positive and I was a little pissed when I wrote the second.

Big step up from the first game in almost every regard. Mission design, story telling, graphics, enemy variety, content etc.

I'm still a bit mad about the abilities you can unlock. 70%-80% were completely uninteresting to me so I was "fully upgraded" after less than 10 hours of playtime with an occasional unlock here and there due to some of them being locked to story progression. I finished the campaign with 25 unspent ability points so that's pretty telling.

I had a lot of trouble dominating orc captains in the mid-game. They were either always just one or two levels above my own level so I couldn't recruit them (only shame them to lower their level) or they had some insane ability that made it pretty much impossible for me to recruit them (one of them continuously spawned four olog warriors). My solution was to ignore them and complete all other main missions first that don't require capturing strongholds. When I came back I was higher levelled than most orc captains and I had the ability to dominate orcs quicker which helped immensely.

In the end everything worked out and I had (and still have as I bought the season pass from the latest sale) a great time.

9/10

I would love to see The Initiative focus on different kinds of experiences. After they finish what they are working on, move on to something new. Ideally, be a 2 team studio eventually.

It's on my list of games I want to play. I enjoyed the first one a lot, but was turned off from all the microtransactions and other issues I heard about in the 2nd. I know they fixed most of those things. Its been on gamepass for awhile so its bound to leave sometime soon. 

I agree with you. I just hope they don't become a one franchise studio like 343 and The Coalition. 

I've been watching Deebeegeek play through of his first time experience playing the Halo franchise. His reactions are genuine and it's easy to tell he loves the franchise. He's played all the Halo games, and is playing Halo 5 right now. His thoughts of the game are pretty much how I felt when I first played it (and the other Halo games too).

The Initiative might be something in between a typical studio and something like Xbox Global Publishing. A team of 30-40 person will work on pre production stuff, develop the groundwork of the game and then assign a Sumu or Splash Damage to do the grind work.

I think they will have 3-4 teams within the studio. That is what is meant by "small and agile" comment and they have to many senior, high position people to have only one team.

Jason Shreier is full of sh*t. According to him late last year, Xbox dev kits were not ready and not on the hands of devs. Now third party is showcasing their games first on Xbox. 

I’m thinking a Halo limited edition console would need at least 1 million of its own production 

This is actually a great strategy because usually MS goes first and Sony is in a advantageous position to respond and one up them, like E3 2013.

The next week 3rd party reveal from Xbox will trigger Sony to actually show something of their own. Xbox can wait till after Sony to showcase the 1st party showing/Series S/price. 

Sucks that we have to wait longer but guess we have to make due with next week. 

September launch to go with Cyberpunk is the dream.