Starfield’s original release date has come and gone, but despite fans’ disappointment, Xbox chief Phil Spencer is confident that delaying Bethesda’s latest installment was the right move.
Talking to the edge (And I spotted it computer games), Spencer said that releasing a game so early is a mistake the company has made before, and especially since Starfield is Bethesda’s first game to be released exclusively on Xbox, he wanted the developers to feel supported by their new publisher.
“We have experience shipping toys very early,” said Spencer. “But in hindsight, when you look at a game like Starfield — which took a significant amount of time and investment in new IP from the team — the decision to give the team time to build the game they feel they should build is just the right thing to do.”
He continued, “Starfield and Redfall, which are our first big Xbox games [Bethesda owner] When ZeniMax joined the team, I just wanted to make sure those teams felt like they had the support they could get from Xbox. Maybe you feel some benefits of being part of a larger organization that has other sources of income and other things that can be beneficial.”
Starfield has been pushed back from its November 11th release date into a more uncertain “first half of 2023” along with Arkane’s open-world shooter Redfall in May, leaving many frustrated by the lack of first-party Xbox content, including That’s Spencer himself.
Bethesda is definitely aiming for the stars with its massive space RPG, which includes over 250,000 lines of dialogue, the largest city ever featured in one of its games, and a main mission longer than Skyrim’s and Fallout 4’s.
Ryan Dinsdale is a freelance translator for IGN. He’ll be talking about The Witcher all day.
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