xbox This generation has been dependent on third-party publishers. That’s nothing to be ashamed of — in fact, the dominance of third-party products on Xbox Game Pass is the main reason I’ve made the Xbox Series X my primary console for the past few years. Last generation, you couldn’t get me off the PlayStation 4 because Destiny, Nioh, Persona 5, GTA, and all the other big games were vying for my attention.
But now, the Xbox gives me (almost) everything I love about the PS4. I’m not a huge fan of the modern PlayStation’s “Let’s Be Dads,” hide-in-the-grass, camera-over-the-shoulder movies. Sure, they’re nice, but a bit homogeneous to me. I still play them – they’re glossy, prestigious examples of what big-budget games can do! – but it’s the third-party giants that remind me why I love video games in 2023.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s why the Xbox has done so well this generation. Halo Infinite, Pentiment, and Forza Horizon 5 have had some notable releases (all of which are available on Xbox One, I might add), but for the most part, Xbox has been quiet on the exclusivity front .
But when you have titles in the zeitgeist like Powerwash Simulator, A Plague Tale: Requiem, Disney’s Dream Valley, Total War: Warhammer 3, Two Points School, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Revenge of the Shredder, and more With only 12 months to go on Xbox Game Pass – available on day one – it’s easy to forget about exclusive deals. We originally intended to include High on Life on this list, but now that its creator and major contributor has been accused of being an abuser, we’ve reconsidered.
Until you look at what the competition is doing, that’s it. Sony is crushing it with exclusives. Granted, as things stand, there isn’t much else to do with the PlayStation 5, but the exclusives making waves in the PlayStation ecosystem are too big to ignore. God of War: Ragnarok sold 5.1 million units in five days, for God’s sake. Xbox may be busy acquiring Activision and Blizzard, but when it comes to firmly locked, system-selling Series X must-haves, the slate is pretty bare. All the while, Horizon Forbidden West, God of War Ragnarok, Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart, The Last of Us Part 1, GT7, Demon’s Souls, and even Return all make a pretty hard-to-ignore case of buying a PlayStation 5 (if You can really put your hands on one if you want).
So Xbox needs to speed up. The only truly solid gold-plated exclusive we know of in the coming months is Starfield; the delayed new IP from Bethesda represents the developer’s biggest creative ploy in decades. All eyes will be on this star as it sets the scene for the rest of the generation, and now – it’s the first true AAA blockbuster Bethesda/Xbox exclusive since the takeover happened, and it will establish a baseline for what the future will what happened.
The game, which bills itself as an entertaining space adventure that “solves humanity’s greatest mysteries,” marks Bethesda’s first new IP in 25 years. From my understanding, it has everything a game needs to do well in 2023: it has mystery, scope, and style. Whether you’re drawn in by the promise of a narrative setting — “It’s like NASA meets Indiana Jones meets The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, a group of people who are still finding the answers” — or by the “moment to get out,” says Todd Howard throughout The games are all about what Starfield has been doing to us for years. For Bethesda and Microsoft, underdelivering now would be catastrophic.
As such, our attention is fully focused on a dedicated showcase event planned purely for Starfield sometime in the future. The power at Microsoft dictates that Starfield deserves its own show so that the publisher/developer duo can “dedicate the appropriate amount of time to delving into” the game. Hopefully this is when we see the dirt under the nails of an actual Starfield experience, we’ll see something that’s been bubbling up in the oven for almost 10 years.
To a lesser extent, the same pressure applies to Redfall. Arkane Austin’s quirky title is billed as an open-world co-op FPS, and sees you trapped with a handful of survivors and facing off against diabolical vampiric enemies who threaten to bleed. Clearly set in the same universe as Dishonored and Deathloop (I have my doubts), the game’s promised action is more in line with Far Cry than it is with The Dead. You can choose your hero from a diverse list of heroes and form the perfect team of vampire slayers with others. It’ll launch exclusively on Xbox Series X/S and PC sometime this year… after being back from its original summer 2022 window.
The game is a little more explicit: we know it’s coming at the Xbox/Bethesda Developer_Direct Livestream on January 25th, where Arkane Austin will show off “a few minutes of gameplay” from its upcoming FPS. The game will join content from Forza Motorsport, where Turn10 will showcase the “next generation” of driving gaming life.
That’s not much, but it’s a start: three big games that provide a strong foundation for the future of the Xbox brand. Do we need more – what about Fable, The Eternal Wild, or Perfect Dark? — but it wasn’t a bad start. Let’s just hope the seeds Microsoft planted at the start of this generation bear fruit soon enough, before gamers tire of waiting and move on to other platforms — or even other hobbies entirely.