With the anticipated Redfall proving a rather disappointing addition to the Xbox library, all hope now lies with Bethesda’s interstellar RPG Starfield to deliver the first-party blockbuster Microsoft seriously needs in 2023.It’s no secret that the current generation has gotten off to a pretty slow start on the Xbox side, and while the 2023 release schedule made it look like a banger of a year for Xbox fans, multiple delays and disappointments have been lumping more and more pressure on the biggest first-party launch of the year, Bethesda’s Starfield, to deliver the killer first-party exclusive that Xbox has been sorely lacking. Minecraft Legends didn’t really manage to climb out of its big brother’s shadow; Redfall ended up a bit of a disjointed disappointment from a team as capable as Arkane, as we noted in our Redfall review; Forza Motorsport still doesn’t even have a release date, despite originally being supposed to launch in the first half of this year; hyped-up Game Pass titles like The Last Case of Benedict Fox and Atomic Heart have been arriving in rough shape, each time damaging faith in these day-one additions in which Microsoft places so much stock. With every setback, expectations for Starfield to be The One naturally rise, and honestly, it’s getting close to the point that the pressure on the space-faring RPG might be too much for any game, no matter how good, to live up to.Can Starfield live up to the mounting pressure?Of course, Starfield won’t be the only big Xbox exclusive this year — as mentioned, Forza should still be on course, and we’ll likely get more news out of the Xbox Showcase event next month, hopefully with some planned drops for later this year. The problem with something like Forza is that it’s very much a known quantity. Turn 10 has a proven track record in delivering fantastic racing games, so it’s an expectation that this year’s reboot will also deliver, not a hope. A full-on sim like the Motorsport games also lacks a lot of the wider mainstream appeal of the much more playful Forza Horizon games, with the sims of the series naturally having a much more sterile feel for racing fans who want to keep it real rather than throwing supercars off volcanoes or round Hot Wheels loops. It’s much harder for a racer like this to be seen as a big-time exclusive to shout about — peer over the fence to the PlayStation side and you’ll see exactly that with the latest Gran Turismo game, by all accounts excellent yet it seldom gets name-dropped alongside heavy hitters like God of War, Horizon, and Spider-Man.This leaves Starfield as the only other big Xbox exclusive with a release date still to come in 2023, so fans have nowhere else to pin their hopes for a proper top-tier exclusive this year. Sure, Hellblade 2 could surprise us all and make it out for the end of the year, and Microsoft might be cooking up something else that will be ready in the next six months or so… the issue is that we don’t know. That’s been a big concern with the Xbox first-party lineup ever since MS used last year’s E3 presentation to focus on games planned for the coming 12 months, a window that two of the biggest titles are going to miss and a strategy that has meant fans are still in the dark about how far along other Xbox Game Studios titles might be. Just knowing that we had, say, Avowed or Fable to look forward to in early 2024 would be enough to somewhat ease the mounting pressure on Starfield, so we’re really going to need some news on where those other games are at from next month’s event. Even then, all eyes will still be on Starfield in its Developer Direct deep dive showcase after the main event — not only does Bethesda’s game need to impress, it also needs that extra context from the showcase in terms of what the surrounding gaming landscape might look like, just to loosen the valves a little and prevent it from feeling like Xbox’s ‘last hope’ for 2023 as it currently seems.One major worry about pinning all our hopes on something like Starfield is that looking back on previous Bethesda Game Studios titles, launching games without bugs, glitches, and issues isn’t exactly a speciality for the developer. Fallout 76 should need no introduction in this regard (though kudos to the team for turning it around), Fallout 4 was in rough shape at the start, and even good ol’ Skyrim had its fair share of problems. The studio’s focus on expansive open-ended worlds built to accommodate as much player freedom as possible leads to an unfathomable amount of permutations and possibilities, meaning testing can only ever be so thorough in a reasonable time frame — if Bethesda attempted to squash every single bug in the game prior to launch, Skyrim would probably still be in QA today. While we’ve almost come to expect and excuse some issues in these games, more and more major titles launching in rough shape has made players less forgiving of such things in recent times, with extended development times and rising game costs leaving players with the expectation of a quality product not eventually, but from launch. Bethesda Game Studios’ history (Fallout 76 aside) is enough to suggest Starfield will likely be good, perhaps great, but question marks still hang over just how much polish the team will be able to achieve in the extra ten months from its original proposed launch date. We might expect some slightly rough edges in something as vast as this — the question is to what extent we will be happy to accept them.Redfall’s role in this is also worth discussing, as Arkane’s game disappointing and coming in with its own array of bugs and issues will have both raised expectations — nay, the need — for Starfield to deliver for Xbox, but also tempered them to some extent. In Redfall, we have a Bethesda game much smaller in scope but still struggling with teething troubles; realistically, what hope is there of something on a far grander scale like Starfield landing in a better state? Microsoft really needs a win, and while Bethesda got off to a great start this year with the shadow-drop of quirky musical brawler Hi-Fi Rush, Tango’s fantastic game is still going to struggle to get a look-in when GOTY nominations roll around, especially with new mainline Zelda and Final Fantasy titles coming to other platforms in the next month. Redfall could have been a chance for Xbox to have something to show while Switch and PS5 players are eating well with Tears of the Kingdom and FF16, but its mediocre launch only serves to shine a light on the disparity between first-party output on Xbox and its rival platforms. Other systems are getting new releases in some of gaming’s most beloved franchises, while Team Xbox apparently can’t even get a relatively straightforward looter-shooter right. No wonder all hopes rest on Starfield — at this point, almost halfway through the year already, where else is there for them to go?Bethesda is promising something more than ‘Skyrim in space,’ and Starfield needs to be just that. Skyrim still holds up well, but it’s more than a decade old now, so a simple sci-fi reskin would show its age immediately. There’s also another hurdle to overcome here, as several previous attempts at interstellar adventures on this kind of scale haven’t exactly inspired a whole lot of confidence. Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky was light years away from what was expected from it at launch, and it took years of rebuilding and upgrading to get the endless procedural universe to a decent state. Meanwhile, Star Citizen is still only in the alpha stage despite having been in development for over a decade at this point, with fans and crowdfunders having been kept waiting for years for the ambitious space-faring title. Even Elite Dangerous jettisoning console support to continue its intergalactic mission exclusively on PC has soured many on space-flavoured games, loading up Starfield with even more baggage to handle when its cargo hold is already nearing maximum capacity with the weight of the expectations of an entire console generation.It’s too much. It has to be too much, right? It’s rare that an eagerly awaited game like Starfield truly delivers on absolutely everything it sets out to do — the kind of thing you only really see a few times in a generation — and that’s without all this extra pressure to be the intergalactic ambassador for Xbox and the killer exclusive Microsoft absolutely needs in a generation that still doesn’t feel like it has gotten off the starting blocks for Xbox, giving the competition more and more of a head start with each disappointment and delay. Will Starfield be a great game? Given the team’s pedigree, probably, yeah. Will it be the game it needs to be with so much riding on it now? Can it, even? It’s already one hell of an ask, but one thing’s for sure — if Starfield does manage to live up to these ever-growing expectations and give Xbox the GOTY contender it so desperately needs to stay in the running, we’re going to have something very, very special on our hands.What’s your take on the ever-mounting pressure on Starfield in the wake of disappointing first-party showings like Redfall? What hope do you think it has of living up to these expectations? Let us know below!
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