I'm not sure you've read my posts, because you seem to be shadowboxing with a position I've never taken. I have explicitly said that these sort of projects are unpredictable. There's an immense amount of existing IP that could be revived or extended (not to mention new IP), and no way to say precisely which studio will be tasked with it.
My point was that, though the specifics can't be foreseen, there isn't an infinite amount of resources to pull from. As you say, Double Helix fit the bill, and the potential pool of such devs for a AAA game is not huge. This provides a basis for discussion.
Again, let me be clear: I believe that Microsoft will announce new games from third-party partners at E3, and some will be timed or completely exclusive. However, I think it's fundamentally uninteresting and unproductive to make that statement alone, without specifics. That's declamation, not conversation; the forum is for the latter.
Everyone would be better served if people stopped trading subjective insults about established successes like Halo and subjective hopes about a vague better future. The more grounded the statements--trying to find ways forward for old ideas, or positing specific sources of new ones--the less likely that discussion will just spin in an endless, meaningless gyre.
And yes, people's predictions will probably be wrong (including my own, earlier). But that doesn't mean they're not of greater value than hand-waving oracles of "something, but who knows what".
I don't see how I'm shadowboxing, considering you've been responding directly to me, and points I've explicitly stated.
I ask "do you think people would have suggested Double Helix prior to KI?", you answered that with a "yes". I'm now stating that nobody in fact did suggest Double Helix during those times, and that it's actually verifiable thanks to the forum having search capabilities.
A shortlist that any of us attempt to create would only account for what would be the most likely and/or obvious potential partners. It's easy to consider Certain Affinity, because MS has already partnered with them and they've already worked on Halo. So they likely
would actually make a shortlist of potential studios for
us. A shortlist of potential studios for
Microsoft would be significantly longer, because they would have access to far more information that any of us would. Factually, there's likely very few potential partners at any time. If we take 10 random studios, then 8 or 9 of them are likely already working on something notable, whether revealed or not... but that's meaningless to any of us without those game actually being revealed, because otherwise any of the 10 can be the 1 project that we'd actually be looking for.
I'm not trying to suggest that it's very productive to simply state "they could be working with anyone" as though that automatically means that they are... however, it's a perfectly valid response to posts that try to frame the argument as though the lack of internal studios indicates a lack of potential first-party titles. Maybe
you should actually follow the conversation all the way back to the post that started it, asking
Who is going to make them? We know what almost all of their studios are up to. .
In hindsight it's easy to act like the partnerships have easily identifiable public metrics for their candidacy, but outside of historical links or a large studio going dark for an extremely uncharacteristic window of time, there's really not much to go on for people like us to draw up a shortlist of any kind. Before Forza Horizon, Playground Games weren't even a thing. Before No Man's Sky, Hello Games were just the Joe Danger guys. You make it sound as though "these guys did some AAA ports" makes a studio like Armature stand out as previously likely candidate, as though people would be suggesting Nixxes, Bluepoint, M2 and Backbone as likely to build the next Xbox exclusive. Basically what I'm saying is that your shortlist wouldn't actually be very short at all by the time you account for Double Helixs, Armatures, Creative Assemblys, Mistwalkers and the like.