That's not what he is saying, he's talking about scale, it's not going to be some massive AAA, 20+ hour blockbuster with extremely high production values, there's not many games out there with production values that big.

Instead compared to Remedy which are more like 10-12 hour experiences, still AAA but definitely not near Naughty Dog levels of production.

But even then it would be unrealistic to expect a brand new studio with 60 employees, to release a 93+ meta title on their first attempt. If they can be like Remedy, releasing great quality titles, except on a much faster basis, that'd be awesome, especially set in a Cyberpunk universe.

With the talent they've been recruiting you'd expect a Naughty Dog production even for new studio. Anything less is a disappointment imo.

To be fair, the AAAA thing was only in their earliest job listings, it was later removed, and the studio head, Darrell Gallagher, has played down the AAAA angle in interviews, saying that his goal was to stay small and agile for their early projects, with a focus on innovation rather than scale. So yeah, if people are still expecting a AAAA like GTA V, RDR2, or Cyberpunk (the only 3 games released so far that I would class as AAAA), they are going to be majorly disappointed.

I’m expecting AAA short games, similar scale to Ninja Theory’s Hellblade 2, which is expected to be a good bit bigger than Hellblade 1 (dev team is twice the size of the first game). Maybe 10-12 hours for each of The Initiative’s early games/episodic campaigns, at least on the singleplayer (maybe there will be The Coalition developed multiplayer to lengthen the first game, since it has been rumored for a long time the Coalition is developing the multiplayer aspect of the Perfect Dark universe spy cyberpunk game). I’m certainly not expecting some 100+ hour open world AAAA behemoth like RDR2 or Cyberpunk, or even a 15-30 hour AAA experience like Naughty Dog specializes in. If they surprise me with something bigger than I am expecting, great, but I don't want to be let down by expecting the AAAA thing at this point.

Sadly most gaming writers missed the fact that The Initiative stopped calling it a AAAA game and downplayed the AAAA thing in interviews, you can do a search for "The Initiative AAAA" and see many recent articles that are still calling it a AAAA game. These journalists are fueling the fires of massive expectations that the studio will be unable to live up to. This game is probably going to meta sub 90 even if it is amazing, simply because critics will still have AAAA expectations for it, maybe even sub 85. User reviews will also suffer as a result of the massive AAAA expectations many still have. 

So, do you guys think they may show a tease for Horizon 5, with a full reveal at The Game Awards next Thursday? If so, it definitely feels like Horizon 5 may be a Spring release, Horizon games have always been announced about 4 or 5 months before release. 

I'm not expecting anything ground breaking, I'm just expecting them to deliver on the talent they've acquired, the freedom and money MS provides.

If I get an episodic and/or anthology, it should hit somewhere between he 80-90 range in my personal review. It doesn't necessarily matter that they've stopped calling themselves AAAA. It's a bar they personally set themselves. I don't expect the to reach it first try out but I do want a compelling experience.