“These decisions are hard on teams making the games and our fans,” Spencer said in a tweet (opens in new tab) sharing Bethesda’s delay announcement. “While I fully support giving teams time to release these great games when they are ready, we hear the feedback. Delivering quality and consistency is expected; we will continue to work to better meet those expectations.”

Regarding “quality and consistency,” Spencer appears to be skirting discussions around Xbox’s first-party lineup. Despite a massive and ongoing spending spree which has seen the company gobble up Bethesda and now Activision for tens of billions, Xbox is still light on big games and exclusives. 

Starfield was the tentpole Xbox title for 2022, and Redfall was also positioned as a major get with Arkane’s pedigree behind it. Losing both to 2023 has sapped quite a bit of wind from Xbox’s sails and, by extension, lowered the impact of its upcoming joint showcase with Bethesda. This has put the Xbox Series X in almost the exact situation it faced at launch following the big Halo Infinite delay.

There’s also something to be said for the ever-widening gulf between promised release dates and realistic ones, especially in the uncertain circumstances that the games industry is still grappling with. Xbox is far from the only company facing this challenge, but as “the feedback” Spencer mentions would indicate, it is acutely aware of it right now.

This news has come at a bad time for Xbox, as the company faced heavy criticism of its DRM policy after a recent outage left many players unable to launch any games for days. 

The post Phil Spencer: “We will continue to work to better meet expectations” after Starfield and Redfall delays appeared first on Game News.

While the original images posted to Imgur (opens in new tab) were swiftly deleted, few – if anything – gets past the internet these days, and the handful of less-than-stellar quality shots are already popping up elsewhere on social media. 

Here, have a peek:

pic.twitter.com/fcHR8766ckSeptember 11, 2021

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Though the images don’t give away much, we get to see some of the in-game environments – reportedly these shots were taken via a playtest – and some still feature placeholder graphics. Consequently, we shouldn’t take these as anything other than a lovely sneaky peek; they’re likely not representative of the final quality, and games change significantly during development, so all of the maps, characters, and weapons we see here are subject to change. 

That said, it’s certainly intriguing, not least because the screenshots show players from both a first- and third-person perspective, leading some to speculate that the game may give players the option.

ICYMI, Redfall has seemingly been in development for almost half a decade (opens in new tab), with some developers mentioning the game on their LinkedIn profiles as far back as August 2017, when the game was in early incubation. The news likely assured some fans who wondered how an entirely new IP could release as soon as next year, particularly as we’ve yet to see any gameplay footage.

Redfall is a new co-op vampire-slaying game from the developers of Deathloop, Dishonored, and Prey, and it’s headed to Xbox Series X (opens in new tab), Xbox Series S (opens in new tab), and PC in summer/Q3 2022. And yes, as one of Microsoft’s family of studios by way of the recent Bethesda acquisition, Redfall is indeed a day one addition to Xbox Game Pass as soon as it launches. 

For more, here’s everything we know so far about Redfall (opens in new tab), a new IP that sends players to the town of Redfall, which has been overrun by bloodsucking vampires. Players will gather together in squads of up to four – or solo – to take down the deadly vampires by any means necessary.

Here are our picks of the best Xbox Game Pass games (opens in new tab).

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