Starfield and Redfall delayed to first half of 2023

Gaming
1066

I see the comment quite often that a delay is only a good thing, often the Miyamoto quote is inserted. But then there are cases where the delays didn’t seem to have helped all that much. I’m talking about Cyberpunk. At launch it wasn’t exactly ideal, putting it mildly. We had some people who were extremely lucky and didn’t encounter much issues, but plenty of people where it was the opposite.

So I think there comes a point where I kinda wonder if the delays help at all. Not saying that counts for Starfield and Redfall, obviously they need more time but at the end of the day BGS titles have always been well…buggy. Morrowind I don’t know, but with Oblivion I definitely had crashes here and there and other bugs.

To this day Skyrim is far from bug free, Fallout 4 same story. New Vegas for me actually was hell at some point. Not BGS, but same engine. It’s hard to know for sure of course, but it sounds like if Starfield had been launched this year it wouldn’t have been in the state that Fallout 4 launched but if it’s in that state somewhere Q1 then I’d be more than okay with them launching it.

One thing comes into mind and that’s that last year according to job postings they had been on a hiring spree for QA. So that’s always a good thing.

1067

A delay is ultimately just more development time. You say it didn’t help Cyberpunk but you never saw the pre-delay product.

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1068

Yup, entirely possible. Plus everyone can eat Mexican food (Cinco de Mayo) while exploring the stars. So many great reasons for it to be that date :blush:

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1069

Exactly

Just because the delay wasn’t enough for Cyberpunk to deliver an all time great game doesn’t mean they shouldnt have delayed it

If it had released when it was originally supposed to come it clearly would have been an absolute disaster, or if Infinite originally released in 2020

4 Likes
1070

People in this forum are way to sensitive. Sorry as a gamepass subscriber I can’t voice my displeasure of lack of 1st party content.

1071

Just wanted to address a few things I keep seeing online…

Framing: Clearly this is an Xbox-specific problem!

We can check this claim. If it were only an Xbox issue, Nintendo would not be delaying their biggest games like BotW2 and Sony wouldn’t have delayed literally every single game they have published on PS5 beyond the launch day. It only feels like Sony has been putting out bangers because they just released a couple notable titles, but let’s be honest, HFW is already largely forgotten and GT7’s post launch reception is horrible. And those capped off a 9 month period without any Sony-published PS5 games landing at all. Every single publisher has delayed its tentpole games, many times more than once!

Framing: Xbox management needs to change!

If we consider Xbox broadly as the umbrella for Zenimax and XGS internal teams as well as Xbox Games Publishing, then it seems clear to me that those teams have been putting out great content of consistently high quality for a while now. Gears Tactics, Wasteland 3, Hivebusters DLC, Tell Me Why, Minecraft Dungeons and Ori 2 were all very well received. FlightSim, Psychonauts 2, AoE, Deathloop, Forza Horizon and Halo were all over GotY lists just LAST YEAR! DLC like the various SoT stuff, Minecraft stuff, ESO, F76, Doom etc have also been fairly well received I think. Ghostwire was kinda less glowing in its reception but that’s just 1 game out of many, many others. So if we are grading things based on how the teams are able to consistently put out great games I really can’t see any issues here.

If the framing is to consider only XGS internal games, we still can point to stuff noted above too. Nearly all of that stuff is from internal teams. I don’t really see any reason to arbitrarily dismiss the XGP stuff or Zenimax team stuff though. PLUS, if we are arbitrarily deciding to not count Zenimax’s stuff then how on Earth can it possibly be that a delay of two Zenimax titles somehow radically alters the evaluation of what XGS internal-only teams are doing?! Can’t have that both ways. Ya can’t blame Phil and Matt Booty for Starfield and Redfall’s delays but then not give them any credit for Deathloop or even Ghostwire for that matter.

Framing: Xbox shouldn’t have put all their eggs in the Starfield basket!

I agree with this BUT we dunno what those ‘eggs’ even are just yet. We have a summer showcase in a month where all the games for 2022 will be revealed with dates and a cadence will show itself. Until then, we really dunno what to expect in terms of anything fully concrete, but we can expect with some confidence to see As Dusk Falls, Scorn, Replaced, Somerville, Planet of Lana, Forza Motorsport and other titles.

Sure, none can fill the shoes of Starfield, but then again no game in the industry can either. This will likely result in MS spending tons of cash on more big ticket GP games for us while we wait. I’d advise we see where things actually stand in a month before fretting over this. We legit heard EXACTLY the same mantra a year ago when Halo was what all the eggs were being put in supposedly, only to find out all those other games were also great and worthy of GotY nods too. When we are this close to the showcase, best to just wait and see.

18 Likes
1072

Wow now, I will never deny that this year is fucked up and that’s putting it mildly. I thought I was over the bad news but the more I think about it the more I hate it. But…

Last year we had a pretty damn decent to good year with Psychonauts 2, FH5, MSFS and Halo Infinite, and I think PC had AOE? But OK that’s not Xbox, but still.

This year isn’t great, but signs are pointing for that to change a lot in 2023 and onwards.

1073

I saw that on Twitter, I thought I woud share :

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1074

Does that mean that the gane is even further away?

1075

No but the game is the biggest undertaking the studio has ever gone through and they need more time to make the game they want to.

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1076

Sounds promising. Really like to see what it all looks like, not long now.

Especially the animations too. Todd talked a few times about the brand new animation system. It’s long overdue and it’s very welcome. It’s clear that this time around a lot has changed and that clearly has had a bigger impact than they expected, Todd included.

1077

I dont pay enough attention to Nintendo games as pretty much nothing they ever release has interested me for the last 20 years but Playstation have released 2 major games this year that have both been largely forgotten about, if this is your idea of “killing them” then I cant say I agree

Especially when you consider last year which was you know, just a few months back that Xbox had like 5 or 6 first party games and had the best year in metacritic history

This year certainly hasn’t been xbox’s best and we will have to wait until the showcase to see what else we have this year but you do you I guess

8 Likes
1078

But it does not negate my point. If they were planning to release in November and months in advance they decided to delay…Are we looking at Halo Infinite situation here?

1079

We can’t possibly know because we don’t know the timeline of anything mentioned on there

1080

False equivalence

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1081

No? Games are delayed months before theyre set to release all the time.

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1082

This is pretty standard. They probably were expected to hit a major milestone missed it and then they re-evaulted and most likely the Xbox leadership team were aware of this was coming for a bit now, Basically Bethesda employees advise the manager what’s happen that’s sent to Bethesda senior leadership and moves up the chain from there.

Pretty common in software development tbh

1083

All indications are they only made the decision to delay literally in the last week or so at the get together in MAryland where the leadership came together to check the games’ progress out. If it were another Halo situation, we would not be seeing it shown off anytime soon. Yet, we are seeing both games having deep dives at the June showcase in under a month. So that isn’t the case.

They evaluated the game 6 months out from release and the dev team wanted more time, asked for it, and Matt/Phil graciously allowed them more time even though it is killer to their branding and platform plans for the year. That part is similar to Halo in the sense that management made the right call to do what is best for the game and dev team and fans even though it was blowing a hole in their holiday plans. And while it is super disappointing to get this delay, it will be forgotten a year from now when everyone is singing the praises of the latest Todd Howard masterpiece.

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1084

I am not sure how much of deep dive we can have if the game was delayed. I still stick to some trailer akin Halo last year.

1085

They literally told us in the delay announcement they had deep dives still on schedule to show off to us soon.

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